It's a bit funny since alias was meant to hide who you were or at least make ire less formal than a person's full name. Then I go and use my name for an alias!

Decades later and it's still my main account and I often need to either switch accounts to the one with my real name or embarassingly ask people to invite my nickname account to various shared documents, calendars, etc. No way to migrate my YouTube channel either…

Having a disconnected online entity means less-than-pleasant jackasses can't pull something from years or even decades ago, put it out of context, and proceed to troll your life.

Not putting your real life identity on public display for the world to see means you maintain tighter control over how, when, and where your information gets out. Do you really need your real name, face, place of employment, telephone number, email address (with your name in it), and maybe even your home address publicized? More than likely you don't.

Having online identities disconnected from real life means you can use them to safeguard your actually really-fucking-important real life things. Your bank account? Use an email that uses a nickname instead of your real name so any would be hackers have to second guess your email too.

Worst comes to shove and shit hits the fan, you can throw away an online identity and make another one. You can't throw away your real name and face.

There are nothing but benefits by keeping your online and real life identities separate, and if you ask me it's one of the first steps to being truly internet literate.

Presumably, a Reddit leak means even more opportunity to unmask (dox) users who have responded truthfully to threads that say things like "what's the worst thing you ever did". Lots of blackmail opportunities.

All outbound clicks from the site are redirected via out.reddit.com which ties click activity to an individual (username / IP / device fingerprint based). This can only be blocked with aggressive old.reddit script blocking which breaks portions of the site.

The outbound click data is used for profiling and interest based advertising, but the data can be much worse than simply linking comments to identity.

They also tie IP/identity to individuals to serve relevant ads and this is the push to get people installing reddit on phones, where deviceIDs is an easy UUID for ads.

https://github.com/moby/moby/blob/master/pkg/namesgenerator/...

Some subs have a minimum amount age or karma requirement to post. This is ostensibly to combat bots.

These days I don't even log into reddit. After wide spread banning from subreddits for random reasons it's not worthwhile. I'll keep browsing old.red as long as it exists but if it goes away I'll DNS block all reddit at the router.

I don't need to know who you actually are, but over time interacting with other people here I've started to get a feel for several hundred accounts. This makes HN more pleasant because I have some sense of what sort of person they are to talk with, and what is likely to go well or poorly. When there have been subreddits I was really into, I would start to get a sense for the more prolific commenters there too.

If I regularly attended some sort of social club and it was common for people to replace their faces I would find it frustrating as well.

Personally I value the web as a knowledge store that persists.

Use a non-logged chat service if you want a transient medium.

I wonder how many people have that reflex. I personally don’t.

If people find a visit to Reddit to be unpalatable, may I suggest this highly spooky website link? https://cryptome.org/2012/07/gent-forum-spies.htm

I wonder if the reason why people find hacker news to be so pleasant, is the subconsciously edgy non conformist website name, like its something to brag about at middle class dinner soiree's or a person in the street like a passive aggressive superiority boast, where its predominantly focused on science and technology subjects, in which to fuel the Ego driven quest for knowledge.

Would that be fair?

And yes I've been ruining the deceitful magic of Father Xmas not being real since I was 5 years old.

My kingdom for an ignore-list.

Nowhere else can you have in-depth technical discussions about the implications of Humean Projectivism on p2p network architecture, with a cybernetic dragonfly, a flying squirrel, and with distracting interjections by a literal fantasy troll. A bit of personal QA/QC, and individual filtering options, are all you need. Anything else is just censorious control of the narrative.

You wanna talk about how humans work - strangers in real life also don't just walk up to you and start talking about Reddit account security out of the blue! We also don't trust a talking head on TV or on the radio just because they're human. Relationships are built over time & higher trust has to be earned. Even if you're referring to the fact that most of us probably live in a relatively high trust society, that doesn't mean we trust our neighbors' opinions on strong passwords (or whatever) just because we trust them as our neighbor!

Ideas do not exist without context. Arguably the context is more essential than individual ideas. Judging ideas without context is not a useful exercise. It's easy to fall into a local minimum that's actually quite bad. Eugenics is a common example. Eliminating genetic disease sounds great as long as you don't have the context of genocide or humanism.

When it comes to political discussions or any kind of politically biased graphic, particularly if it is something I disagree with, I assume it is astroturf/agitprop. When misinformation and propaganda are mainstream, why can I trust some random account on the internet for facts?

Tech is certainly different.

I know that there's a difference between spinning up a new account every few months, and for every reply. But long-term relationships in communities matter.

Secondly, it's easy to farm up these internet points and sell the account to somebody else who's keen on exploiting the tendency of people like you to think that the internet points confer trustworthiness.

We need some way of verifying that a real human is on the other end, but we don't necessarily need to know who that person is.

I attempted to change the password, got an error saying something went wrong. I figured I'd try again later. so I also didn't save the newly generated password.

Got logged out, and couldn't log back in with the old password.

And there's no way that I know of to contact anyone at reddit to try and get help.

Fun fact: Reddit for the longest time didn't require an email address to create accounts.

<Reddit hacked>

"Huh, I guess I better change my password."

<Recommends TFA>

"Hmm, give reddit my phone number .... no."

I used to think so until I decided to reroll my old account into a new one, and it was such a pain re-subscribing to all my subreddits again.

I reroll every time I am banned from a sub I like because that sub notices I play in other subs - that whole “thing” is horseshit to me. So I just reroll to get around that autoban bot.

It gives you a chance to re-evaluate what is actually giving you value. It’s like spring cleaning.

It’s the same reason I enjoy setting up a new or freshly reformatted phone or laptop. Feels good to clean out the cobwebs.

works for me everywhere except HN, because of the silly requirement of 500 karma to be able to downvote.

SMS is no longer recommended as a means of 2FA, as it's very vulnerable. Some sites still rely on it, unfortunately. However, it appears Reddit does support TOTP.

I (used to, i guess) do the same. I must have 40 accounts in total over the years. Funny enough i didn't even make a strong password - a stupidly bad one, unique for each account, actually. I had almost hoped it was hacked because it would be interesting to be hacked and not care.

Just reminded me of my first "wtf." A journalist for our local university wrote a review for the movie "Hustlers" where they justified sexually assaulting and robbing men in New York because "men in New York were responsible for the 2008 financial crisis." All without missing a beat. Can't believe what passes these days.

Reddit's own phrasing is much better:

Since we’re talking about security and safety, this is a good time to remind you how to protect your Reddit account. The most important (and simple) measure you can take is to set up 2FA (two-factor authentication) which adds an extra layer of security when you access your Reddit account. Learn how to enable 2FA in Reddit Help. And if you want to take it a step further, it’s always a good idea to update your password every couple of months – just make sure it’s strong and unique for greater protection.

Also: use a password manager! Besides providing great complicated passwords, they provide an extra layer of security by warning you before you use your password on a phishing site… because the domains won’t match!

-- https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/10y427y/we_had_a_se...