It's interesting to keep track of some known people. Sometimes you get to see (for example) a thread with cperciva, tptacek and animats - and I think it makes it more fun to read when you know...

I’ll often looks at the username if I find a comment either particularly insightful, or particularly stupid. It tends to be the same small collection of users, so I guess I’m agreeing/disagreeing with people quite consistently.

There is one person here that is like my Polish doppelganger. I'll go to post in a thread and I'll find they already posted the gist of what I was going to say.

But but ... they're known to you because you read the user names ...

There's also https://hnrss.github.io where you can "subscribe" to a user's comments.

If I see a thread with too many comments from high volume posters, I assume it's low signal. Most of them are very good at commenting in a style that is convincing sounding and popular here, but when they stray into topics that I know well, I often find them to be confident, plausible, and wrong. (And also upvoted above people with correct information who don't have the same name recognition.)

>I often find them to be confident, plausible, and wrong. (And also upvoted above people with correct information who don't have the same name recognition.)

This is basically 99% of hacker news comments in a nutshell.

You pass the confidence, plausibility, and accuracy challenge with flying colours!

I'm sure that happens with me (I've noted for awhile that banal comments I write here get upvoted, presumably from a combination name recognition and people who engage with HN by following specific people --- which is how I do it too). What I'll say is if you see this happening with me, call me out on it! Refer back to this comment, if you like, when you do.

Apart from sheer volume (I have been a message board nerd since FIDONet when I was a teenager, it's second nature for me) I attribute what success I've had here to engaging principally on security topics, which is where I've spent my whole career. But I also just like to shoot the shit about stuff! I'm wrong all the time! (Including about security stuff).

One username that always stands out is “1970-01-01”. Every time I do a double-take, thinking a timestamp has gone wrong.

the same, I get weirded out sometimes when I read a remark from someone who evidently has decided to keep track of who I am on the site. Seems like a lot of wasted mental effort for little reward.

A couple of weeks ago someone made a whole anonymous Mastodon account just to ask me a vague question about a comment I made here on HN like six years ago. It kinda creeped me out.

A fan? A stalker? Just a rando with too much time on their hands?

I do look at the commenter's name (same as for an article's author) as I know quite a few commenters personally (some are former colleagues) so our replies sometimes refer specifically to something the other person knows or did.

Obviously this applies to a negligible percentage of total commenters, but as I only comment on certain topics I’m more likely to encounter friends with the same interests/experiences.