Ask HN: Should account creation/origin country be displayed on HN profiles?
Would it be beneficial for a platform to display the country of account origin on each user’s profile?
I’m curious how the HN community thinks about this from angles like privacy, moderation, transparency, anti-abuse, and whether it meaningfully improves discussion quality.
Are there strong reasons for or against showing this kind of metadata publicly?
Privacy: Won't meaningfully impact privacy. HN like any forum is a bad place to post your secrets simply because the servers are not yours. Post history for each account is already visible, so if you have an agenda, it sticks out like a sore thumb there.
Moderation: Won't meaningfully impact moderation. HN can already see this info and they are the ones that take moderator action. It may hurt moderation/increase moderation costs because people may tend more to report content based on country instead of content.
Transparency: Outright influencer content (political or corporate) doesn't make it to the front page enough for it to matter, or if it does, I can't tell.
Anti-abuse: Same as moderation. Abuse reports should be processed based on content and not country of origin.
Meaningfully improves discussion quality: If a story is about something happening in a particular country, people who look like they are from that country might get asked more or different questions. This puts people from that country on the spot. They may get increased unsolicited communication or thread hijacks. Right now, if someone wants to be on that spot, they can voluntarily identify, either in the profile or in the post.
Possibly something useful would be a rule/requirement that claiming to be from a country different than the one you made an account from--seen either in a profile or post--requires verification for further posting, but if you never make such a contrary claim, the verification is not needed.
If you're looking to Hacker News comments for political insight like you hint at, you're expectations of the site are misaligned with what it's been established to be and what it's guidelines aim for. Seemingly, it's the same kind of misalignment that makes people loudly complain when political threads get flagged and killed.
This site is specifically a salon where a bunch of pseudonymous "too smart" nerds opine about topics that stimulate their curiosity, following guidelines on best-intent and good-faith that are essentially debate rules. Sometimes, amidst those discussions, you'll witness seemingly personal anecdotes or seemingly insider insights, which you should always be taking as a grain of salt, used only to drive (or repel) your own curiosity and desire for more discussion and debate.
It's not a great place for earnest politics, activism, or anything so serious and existential. And because it doesn't aim to be, it doesn't beg for disclosures like location. As long as you can "talk the talk" here, and follow the guidelines, you're welcome to participate in the discussion how you'd like, without being measured by your person, its history, or its geography. Its great to have a place like that online.
I've thought about making a forum where people can comment on threads from Reddit, HN, 4chan, etc... but I would have to reverse the moderation meaning a post is not visible until it has been reviewed and editing it would put it back into review state and nobody would like that.
The reason would be to have long running discussions which is the opposite of HN. Events evolve and so do discussions and details around them. Short lived threads also make it easier to memory-hole a topic.
>I understand your point, but sometimes the voluntary details are lies.
So?
Hacker News isn't a court of law, we're not under oath, nor are we here to adjudicate truth. People can lie here, and many probably do about numerous things.
Besides, the guidelines say you're always supposed to assume good faith anyway.
It might have a minor beneficial impact to tourism in Saint Barthelemy and Norfolk Island from geeks wanting a trendy new account registered in a territory with fewer than 1000 IPv4 addresses allocated.[1]
A more useful addition would be a contributions calendar similar to GitHub's [2] but focused on which time zones the user is active within, and importantly, the latency of the user's replies. It's trivial to fake geographic location observed through source IP addresses (or even RTT multilateration) but much harder to fake time zones a user is active within, particularly if monitoring latency of replies.
edit: To further clarify, I don't think a contributions calendar would be beneficial to HN either. I've never cared to think about the country a commenter resides in, and don't care about username/real name either unless the commenter is appealing to their own authority (e.g. "I am the author of this software"). Even then, the usefulness of an appeal to own authority is often limited to the ability to reverse lookup the user's personal website (which itself is proven to be notable from other sources) for a link back to their HN profile.
Given Tor and VPN, and the fact that both are fully acceptable to connect to HN - as far as I know - this would add nothing of substance.
The reason why it works on Elon's kingdom is that - as far as I know - the Onion services died when Elon took over (because the people who cared about those simply left) and over at X - as far as I understand - they really, really try and discourage you from connecting and posting from Tor and VPN.
Also, when people turn discussions into absolute flame wars or decide to post stuff which could turn nasty in the comment section there's always dang. And believe me when I say that even when community moderation fails for whatever reason the rules (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) will get enforced when needed.
What value could you possibly derive from this? Whether someone is from a particular country or not has nothing to do with (or very little to do with) whether they are qualified to have an opinion.
Folks are allowed to be knowledgeable about things that are not directly relevant in their “county of origin” in the same way they are allowed to be ignorant about things that are relevant.
I think for this to be useful and assuming people wanted this then dang may have to first block VPN's and then country would have to be learned after 99%+ of VPN's are gone as many accounts could have been created using a VPN.
If not blocking VPN's, then display "Possible VPN".
Perhaps to get some adoption, make it opt-in and also let users enable flag-display at the risk of giving off 4chan vibes.
I would consider this a form of doxing -- to retroactively share information that was nonpublic upon joining would be a serious breach of trust.
Keep in mind things aren't always what they seem -- I remember a heatmap going up of where "MAGA" accounts were operated. Unsurprisingly, there was a big chunk in places like St. Petersburg, but there were also hotspots in several middle eastern countries with have large US troop presence.
Keep in mind the guidelines state:
>Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.
Frankly, due to the strict guidlines here I suspect most state sponsored trolls would stick to places like Reddit where it's easier to disrupt things with contentious posts.
I used to post on a forum that did this, as well as showing the OS and browser you were posting from. Some users would be funny and modified their user agent so that it said they posted from a Wii.
I don't think it'd benefit HN at all at this time, as the country of origin just isnt relevant most of the time, and would just invite flamewars. I believe that flagging/downvoting is a good enough tool to deal with stuff, as the HN mod team puts in the work.
Maybe once the site gets 10x as big and the mod team gets overwhelmed, it could serve a purpose, but I doubt that to ever be the case.
Privacy first or conscientious exposition of the meta.
I have been advocating that privacy isn’t anyone’s right, it is anyone’s responsibility. Only for the self obsessed to pike my karma and rail their venomous hatred of platforms they use not respecting their identities by ignoring them properly.
I would love to see what you’ve described, though the caveats include those of increased awareness grappling with a whole lot more going on than just the loose strings it has become most popular to pull upon.
And as soon as you shine a light, any creeping critters will scurry, innovating faster to compensate than the mob of yourselves are capable of realizing. The cycle of anonymity and wtf continues to churn. An ouroboros.
It would only be beneficial to combat pedantry we get around “well, where I live this isn’t a thing. How dare you make an assumption about how others are living on a website dedicated to a Silicon Valley incubator.”
Always some European or flyover state resident wanting to not feel left out of discussions related to SV.
Otherwise, the call is coming from inside the house when it comes to all kinds of traitorous behaviors. Plus, many people who are on here are immigrants. So, they’re living in Silicon Valley but they’re from China/India/Israel/etc.
Moderation: Won't meaningfully impact moderation. HN can already see this info and they are the ones that take moderator action. It may hurt moderation/increase moderation costs because people may tend more to report content based on country instead of content.
Transparency: Outright influencer content (political or corporate) doesn't make it to the front page enough for it to matter, or if it does, I can't tell.
Anti-abuse: Same as moderation. Abuse reports should be processed based on content and not country of origin.
Meaningfully improves discussion quality: If a story is about something happening in a particular country, people who look like they are from that country might get asked more or different questions. This puts people from that country on the spot. They may get increased unsolicited communication or thread hijacks. Right now, if someone wants to be on that spot, they can voluntarily identify, either in the profile or in the post.
Possibly something useful would be a rule/requirement that claiming to be from a country different than the one you made an account from--seen either in a profile or post--requires verification for further posting, but if you never make such a contrary claim, the verification is not needed.
Green accounts come to mind :^)
This site is specifically a salon where a bunch of pseudonymous "too smart" nerds opine about topics that stimulate their curiosity, following guidelines on best-intent and good-faith that are essentially debate rules. Sometimes, amidst those discussions, you'll witness seemingly personal anecdotes or seemingly insider insights, which you should always be taking as a grain of salt, used only to drive (or repel) your own curiosity and desire for more discussion and debate.
It's not a great place for earnest politics, activism, or anything so serious and existential. And because it doesn't aim to be, it doesn't beg for disclosures like location. As long as you can "talk the talk" here, and follow the guidelines, you're welcome to participate in the discussion how you'd like, without being measured by your person, its history, or its geography. Its great to have a place like that online.
The reason would be to have long running discussions which is the opposite of HN. Events evolve and so do discussions and details around them. Short lived threads also make it easier to memory-hole a topic.
So?
Hacker News isn't a court of law, we're not under oath, nor are we here to adjudicate truth. People can lie here, and many probably do about numerous things.
Besides, the guidelines say you're always supposed to assume good faith anyway.
A more useful addition would be a contributions calendar similar to GitHub's [2] but focused on which time zones the user is active within, and importantly, the latency of the user's replies. It's trivial to fake geographic location observed through source IP addresses (or even RTT multilateration) but much harder to fake time zones a user is active within, particularly if monitoring latency of replies.
edit: To further clarify, I don't think a contributions calendar would be beneficial to HN either. I've never cared to think about the country a commenter resides in, and don't care about username/real name either unless the commenter is appealing to their own authority (e.g. "I am the author of this software"). Even then, the usefulness of an appeal to own authority is often limited to the ability to reverse lookup the user's personal website (which itself is proven to be notable from other sources) for a link back to their HN profile.
[1] https://impliedchaos.github.io/ip-alloc/
[2] https://docs.github.com/en/account-and-profile/concepts/cont...
The reason why it works on Elon's kingdom is that - as far as I know - the Onion services died when Elon took over (because the people who cared about those simply left) and over at X - as far as I understand - they really, really try and discourage you from connecting and posting from Tor and VPN.
Also, when people turn discussions into absolute flame wars or decide to post stuff which could turn nasty in the comment section there's always dang. And believe me when I say that even when community moderation fails for whatever reason the rules (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) will get enforced when needed.
But if people don't care, then cool.
Folks are allowed to be knowledgeable about things that are not directly relevant in their “county of origin” in the same way they are allowed to be ignorant about things that are relevant.
If not blocking VPN's, then display "Possible VPN".
Perhaps to get some adoption, make it opt-in and also let users enable flag-display at the risk of giving off 4chan vibes.
One where the users are completely anonymous and comments have no history attached to them.
One where the users have profiles and comment history but are not linked back to real life.
One where your real user profile / brand is at stake.
And have public analytical metrics to see what people are saying or what bot farms have been hired to say and who hires them
Keep in mind things aren't always what they seem -- I remember a heatmap going up of where "MAGA" accounts were operated. Unsurprisingly, there was a big chunk in places like St. Petersburg, but there were also hotspots in several middle eastern countries with have large US troop presence.
Keep in mind the guidelines state:
>Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.
Frankly, due to the strict guidlines here I suspect most state sponsored trolls would stick to places like Reddit where it's easier to disrupt things with contentious posts.
Make it optional that you don't need to display it but you cannot misrepresent your country.
The only thing this is going to produce is people fighting because of where they're from.
There is plenty to disagree in the tech world as it is to introduce other axes of divergence.
Maybe once the site gets 10x as big and the mod team gets overwhelmed, it could serve a purpose, but I doubt that to ever be the case.
Privacy first or conscientious exposition of the meta.
I have been advocating that privacy isn’t anyone’s right, it is anyone’s responsibility. Only for the self obsessed to pike my karma and rail their venomous hatred of platforms they use not respecting their identities by ignoring them properly.
I would love to see what you’ve described, though the caveats include those of increased awareness grappling with a whole lot more going on than just the loose strings it has become most popular to pull upon.
And as soon as you shine a light, any creeping critters will scurry, innovating faster to compensate than the mob of yourselves are capable of realizing. The cycle of anonymity and wtf continues to churn. An ouroboros.
Always some European or flyover state resident wanting to not feel left out of discussions related to SV.
Otherwise, the call is coming from inside the house when it comes to all kinds of traitorous behaviors. Plus, many people who are on here are immigrants. So, they’re living in Silicon Valley but they’re from China/India/Israel/etc.