For those you haven't seen it, from 2 weeks ago:

Show HN: Using stylometry to find HN users with alternate accounts [1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33755016

Basic opsec principles always say that if you want to stay anonymous you have to switch the way you are writing (by adopting a differnet personality, running it through translation apps etc.).

If someone would want to stay anonymous the unmasking % would probably be lower. The threat-model of the chess players doesn't include that they have to stay anonymous and need to switch up their way of playing.

I’m fond of occasionally throwing in some ou s and references to cities other than Ontario to throw folks off, but it’s hard to pull off long term

Just realized the fact I type like an American online (I'm British) would confuse someone for a little bit if they tried to de-anonymize me... (although they probably wouldn't struggle anyway)

>>switch the way you are writing

I'd be very surprised if that actually works. Stuff like vocabulary can't exactly be turned off at will

It probably got a lot easier with ChatGPT now.

I'm not convinced that, for 99.9% of use cases, anonymity is a feature. I think it's far more likely that the easy anonymity that has been the default for much of the existence of the Internet has harmed society.

I get downvoted whenever I say this, but anonymous speech is only allowed by recent technology and has never been a part of our ancestral environment.

I’m not downvoting, but I think the concept of anonymous speech goes way way back to the origins of writing, doesn’t it? The change in recent years is that it’s extra hard to stay anonymous, what with the surveillance economy?

Perhaps. But if you consider:

1. The cost of printing/transcribing something 2. Literacy rates 3. Constraints tied to physical distribution

...the reach of that potentially "anonymous speech" was the tiniest fraction of what we experience today. And even then it wasn't necessarily anonymous, unless you just left books lying around?

I think it was pretty doable: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_anonymously_published_...

I won't argue that it wasn't possible. But that link shows 20-40 books, and covers 3000 years of human culture. That's about one anonymous book per century. I think we need more anonymity than that. But I think the amount of anonymity we have now is disastrous to civil society.

Appreciate the link though. Thanks for engaging.

Well, with a rumor, the original source is obscured. So in a sense they are getting their info out there anonymously (to all but the first-hand confidantes).

What are you calling recent? The printing press? Spartacus?

The reason you get down votes is its a relatively dangerous line of thought in itself that plays into the hands of authoritarians that would love to track every bit of information to an individual.

Freedom of speech is also a recent invention.

Perhaps anonymous social media (like 4chan, with its lack of usernames) will become more popular.

Or less popular, because there is now a greater risk of your 4chan comments being associated with your other online identities.

There may be some additional safety in conforming to the local "memespeak" dialect, and not using that dialect elsewhere.

Seems quite easy to solve this though. An AI could easily anonymise your text by rephasing sentences.