Also .us domains don't have who is privacy.

Please don't keep us in suspense ... who is privacy?

They probably meant "whois privacy"[1] (without the space). Whois is basically a way to get information about a domain name (and many other stuff). Whois privacy just ensures that your address, name and other stuff is not public.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_privacy

They were probably joking when they asked that question.

Your reply doesn't seem sarcastic, so I take it you genuinely r/whoosh'ed (that's a reference to a subreddit about situations where someone is acting clueless).

I know ;) Some people still value an explanation though.

Realistically, I don't think HN is the place for those kinds of jokes, which are best kept for reddit/twitter.

Yeah I'm increasingly seeing these reddit-style low effort jokes on here, hopefully it's transient as folks acclimatize to the culture and customs here.

Yeah I found that out when I stupidly used my real contact info, and ended up getting spammed all to hell.

WHOIS privacy isn't a registry-level service. It's a registrar-level service.

It’s both. Some domains do not allow WHOIS privacy (.us is one of them), some have it built-in, while most don’t care and registrars can fill in with fake data.