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Ask HN: Should account creation/origin country be displayed on HN profiles?

• billy99k 10mo ago
  The HN community is tech savvy. If they really wanted to abuse it, they would just use a VPN.
  • al_borland 10mo ago
    From what I read, on Twitter it will say it can’t reliable provide a location if someone is using a VPN.
• TimedToasts 10mo ago
  4chan's system is pretty good. You can display your country or you can pick from a 'meme flag' (Pirate, Gadsen, etc) Make it optional that you don't need to display it but you cannot misrepresent your country.
  • hakkoru 10mo ago
    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.
• Bender 10mo ago
  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.
• sunscream89 10mo ago
  Here we find the split hair. 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.
• dhx 10mo ago
  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. [1] https://impliedchaos.github.io/ip-alloc/ https://impliedchaos.github.io/ip-alloc/ [2] https://docs.github.com/en/account-and-profile/concepts/contributions-on-your-profile#contributions-calendar https://docs.github.com/en/account-and-profile/concepts/cont...
• d--b 10mo ago
  What's the upside? 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.
• karmakaze 10mo ago
  No. I prefer HN to be about the content, not its hominem. If country/etc is relevant for discussion it can be voluntarily mentioned.
  • xhkkffbf 10mo ago
    [flagged]
    • krapp 10mo ago
      >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.
    • swatcoder 10mo ago
      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.
      • chistev 10mo ago
        Someone should create a Hacker news for politics. Moderation would be hell though.
• igleria 10mo ago
  I think knowing an account is fresh is enough.
• Peroni 10mo ago
  The less HN behaves like a social media platform, the better.
  • 0xCE0 10mo ago
    This.
  • deleted 10mo ago
    [deleted]
• deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
• firefax 10mo ago
  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.
• mindcrash 10mo ago
  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 https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) will get enforced when needed.
  • raw_anon_1111 10mo ago
    It didn’t exactly work at all.
• Akronymus 10mo ago
  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.
• bradlys 10mo ago
  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.
  • raw_anon_1111 10mo ago
    No it’s just the opposite. The world, the US and not even YC companies revolve around Silicon Valley and neither do most developers who frequent HN.
• tabs_or_spaces 10mo ago
  If people will look down on me because I'm not from North America or Europe, then no thanks. But if people don't care, then cool.
• d1sxeyes 10mo ago
  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.
• whattheheckheck 10mo ago
  There needs to be triplet threads on every topical debate. 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
• RiverCrochet 10mo ago
  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.
• deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
• dabockster 10mo ago
  It would only be effective if HN blocked the majority of known ways to spoof someone's location (eg blocking connections made through Tor and the largest VPN providers, at the very least). I'd only support displaying country flags if that block was implemented. Otherwise hard no.
• stubish 10mo ago
  Hahaha.... this is Hacker News. You do realize who run the geolocation systems? Originating from Antarctica, The Whitehouse or the Moon would become a status symbol.
• raw_anon_1111 10mo ago
  The country of origin is easy to fake with a VPN. Twitter just had a whole big thing about that
• andyjohnson0 10mo ago
  I can't think of any good reason for this. If people want to disclose their location then they can put it in the about box.
• nrhrjrjrjtntbt 10mo ago
  No. But favourite programming language would be good. Also add the user's birthday to the settings page - should be able to get it done this quarter :)
• gethly 10mo ago
  I have no issue with that, as it helps americans understand that the world exists beyond their borders, except that it should be optional and configurable by the user. This feature caused a lot of noise on twitter due to people using VPNs.
• SamDc73 10mo ago
  I mean for tech originated form; country of origin doesn't matter and should never matter For twitter/X I'm in favor of it because it might help navigate all the political propaganda on that platform.
• chalcolithic 10mo ago
  It is a very good thing for political discussions. I don't see how it would benefit HN.