This may not be obvious to the normal grad student, but after a decade in a community of 1K-10K people, most of them working in groups, it becomes clear. The end result is that the last several top-tier conferences I reviewed for, I basically guessed the authors of all the papers I reviewed, and knew at least one of them personally on each paper. All of that, despite being a "young" member of the community.
Having reviewed papers in the 'bloated' graphics field at SIGGRAPH, yes, you can usually guess who wrote a particular paper.
> This may not be obvious to the normal grad student, but after a decade in a community of 1K-10K people
The communities are smaller than that. Within sub-fields in graphics, you usually have perhaps five or six research groups to guess from.
I just remember how my university, who had some standard and fairly comprehensive subscriptions to electronic IEEE and ACM journals, didn't get conference proceedings for some damn reason. From the critically-thinking student's point of view, conferences and journals look like two different ways of getting students to part with money with no recourse if the product happens to suck, as academic material so often does.
I can't speak to journals, but as someone who's been on both sides of IEEE conferences, that it absolutely true. I've seen conferences where almost none of the researchers showed up to talk about their work---the students had to get published to graduate, so they submitted, got accepted, paid their registration fees (literally, the most important step), and, badaboom, they were officially published.
My personal favorite was ICDCS '98[1], where early student conference registration included a copy of the proceedings, until you got to the conference, where you were informed that, of course students couldn't get free copies of the proceedings. What were you thinking?
[1] The conference had a serious hiccup, committee-wise, and had to change venues at the last moment, so....
Conferences with double-blind review require papers to be anonymized, avoiding any mentions of author names or affiliations in the PDF submitted for review, as well as other obvious elements that would reveal the identity of the authors (e.g. "As we showed in a previous paper [4], ...")
Technically, it means that the authors would have to do some minor text analysis to find out who the reviewers are; the only difficulty is that the comments can be a bit thin, but you've got plenty of known samples to measure against.
A pity that in my country (Spain) the bureaucratic requirements for funding, tenure, etc. are one-size-fits-all and basically conferences count almost nothing and journals are everything, even if in my particular subfield no one cares about journals. So I end up playing a double game: publishing some papers where I know I should to find the right audience, and others where I am forced to to survive.