Show HN: Anonymize HN – a Chrome extension to anonymize Hacker News users

Interesting idea! Presumably you pay a lot of attention to who has written a comment and want to remove that bias? In my case I usually don't recognize the author for any given comment so I don't really have that problem.

It would be vrry interesting to clone and repurpose this extension to show tags next to known users from a centralized database. Example's of the tags would be "mod", "{name of tool/library/language} author", "expert in {area}", "CEO of {comapny name}", etc.

I like the idea, but honestly I very rarely pay attention to usernames here.

Do people recognise usernames on HN? I would be surprised if anyone remembered or recognised my username on HN and added any association to my comments.

Tangentially, I always found the discussion flow on image boards interesting because of the &quot;anonymous chorus&quot; of replies.<p>It creates special patterns: cryptic references to spot non-initiates, people role-playing a straw man and replying to themselves, shunning people using confirmed user names, etc. There is jargon for all of this but it is too offensive for this venue.

Two amusing related things:<p>- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;roshan&#x2F;hnncnn">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;roshan&#x2F;hnncnn</a> (no comments and usernames on the front page)<p>- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stylometry.net&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stylometry.net&#x2F;</a> (no longer works, but stylometry for various HN users - it was pretty good!)

Might be interesting to combine with:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=30668137">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=30668137</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;greasyfork.org&#x2F;en&#x2F;scripts&#x2F;441566-hn-avatars-in-396-bytes" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;greasyfork.org&#x2F;en&#x2F;scripts&#x2F;441566-hn-avatars-in-396-b...</a><p>Description:<p><i>The concept is to use HN usernames as the seed into a deterministic avatar generator. This generator is built from the famously simple xorshift32 PRNG, which both provides a random variable for the image generator steps, and &quot;pseudo-hashes&quot; the seed string to provide the initial PRNG state using a non-linear step (adding each codepoint - which is likely not very robust against collisions compared to proper hashing algorithms, but is simple and good enough).</i><p>And do away with the username, but still keep an avatar based on their username to make it easier to follow the flow of a thread.

Like others I rarely pay attention to the username, except all the &quot;famous&quot; people on HN you just can&#x27;t miss when they are posting. But I think you mean psuedonimyze? Because you can easily tell who is posting using stylometry or just human brain pattern recognition.

Nice. Another suggestion is to randomize message order (so removes top voted bias) and to perhaps un-gray downvoted messages.

I stopped at &quot;a chrome extension&quot;, if you are using chrome, you shouldn&#x27;t care about anonymity

For some reason, on this site usernames rarely matter to me. I know only 1 or 2 people by username.

Is this also for Firefox?

I try my best to treat every forum like &#x2F;b&#x2F;. All people are is what they just said. I&#x27;m not having a conversation with an individual, I&#x27;m having a conversation with a venue. I&#x27;m grabbing the floor and addressing the chair.<p>I bet if HN went forced anon, it wouldn&#x27;t make much of a difference in posting and upvoting patterns.