7 ms·

Deleting comments, ugh, please don't do this :( If you must, make a throwaway account instead. It sucks to find a thread that promises to solve a problem you ha

Deleting comments, ugh, please don't do this :( If you must, make a throwaway account instead. It sucks to find a thread that promises to solve a problem you have, but when you go there critical context is missing due to deleted comments.

notfed 3y ago
Looking at you, Reddit...
whimsicalism 3y ago
stylometry is far too strong
- caminante 3y ago
  Deleting protects you against stylometry (and further identity detection)? Ha! Wishful thinking with all of the auto-archivers. If you post on reddit, it's likely already crawled and archived somewhere.
  - whimsicalism 3y ago
    It is not great, but it is better (if you wish to not be identified) to keep it in fewer perhaps non-public or poorly indexed archives. The internet does forget, sometimes.
    - nickstinemates 3y ago
      That the internet never forgets is a myth. It forgets surprisingly quickly and I think will only accelerate. Sure, someone may have a copy of something somewhere, but discovering it via any search engine is impossible. Personally I put a lot of PHP and VB code out ~20 years ago that I could find easily until I couldn't. There's Myspace profiles I've tried to pull up, images posted by friends 15 years ago in random places. Early video. All gone.
      - ghaff 3y ago
        I generally agree. It depends how Internet famous you were, how hard a person looks, how common your name is, whether there's something specific you're looking for about a person. But, yeah, I'm willing to bet that a lot of random casual searches wouldn't turn up some Internet scandal/controversy around a non-famous person unless you really knew what to look for.
      - nativeit 3y ago
        I agree, although trends for whether this is becoming more or less the default is not quite as clear in my mind. On one hand, the sheer mass of content being generated every day has become exponentially larger (I wonder if this has begun leveling off at all?), so there’s more to index and presumably more noise with which to conceal a signal. On the other hand, data science has progressed, storage media is cheaper, and everything is much more accessible; As a result creepy services like LexisNexis, Palantir, and TLOxp have all become vastly more sophisticated in their ability to retain and analyze data that they can pretty effectively associate with specific people/organizations. I’m not sure which factor is more influential—the ability for data to persist, or the ability for it to then be found and interpreted. Would it matter if the content was still available in some forgotten corner of the internet if there weren’t effective tools available for finding it and connecting it back to its author? It’s actually sort of entertaining to test the limits of this on yourself. I tried to find original media and references from a band I played with circa 2002. We were being ambitious with our publicity efforts, and consistently pumping audio, video, and images onto whatever nascent services were available at the time (from memory I can recall CD Baby, LastFM, Craigslist, miscellaneous forums, and towards the end, MySpace). I had already been designing websites for several years by that point, so we had a website, one that wasn’t just a Geocities/Anglefire template. That said, I am pretty sure that was at the height of my career with Macromedia’s Flash and ActionScript, so no real surprise that it didn’t get Archived in any functional form. One strategy that my own experience has found quite effective is to avoid using unique or unusual identifiers. If you’re named something like Arthur Dent it is going to be considerably more difficult to find and associate information than if you’re name is Zaphod Beeblebrox. That’s obvious, but it extends to everything else, from usernames to product brand preferences—if you stick to the middle of every given bell curve then your needle will necessarily reside in a much larger haystack. The few things that tend to be unique, at least when correlated with things like timelines or location—things like telephone numbers, email addresses, usernames, account numbers, etc.—can usually be effectively obscured one way or a another. The things that can’t (government ID numbers) then become crucial to keep private. Except, at least one of those creepy services (TLOxp) was built by one of the three main credit rating agencies and so almost definitely has your social security number already, and has been attaching it to all manner of data for several years, all while also selling it off to anyone with a budget (not to mention losing it outright to hackers), so any concerted efforts to conceal oneself seems almost certainly doomed. It’d be an ideal problem for national governments to address using consumer protection laws and privacy regulations if it wasn’t also in our best interests to protect ourselves from said governments. Sorry for the essay, this line of thought evidently yanked a pretty intertwined thread for me.
    - caminante 3y ago
      I agree with your critique that stylometry overrides throwaway accounts. The issue is "deleting." AFAIK, nobody's disagreeing that the internet can forget and deleting is "better" for privacy. The question is "how much" better. Here we're talking about the false sense of privacy through erasure when archivers should be assumed to be running everywhere and at all times. The latter weighs in favor of the parent's critique that deleting is not constructive.
- lelandfe 3y ago
  launder your style through ChatGPT I wonder if one could hook up a browser extension to do this
  - npongratz 3y ago
    Launder it by freely giving it to a large-scale data vacuuming/surveillance operation?
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - nickthegreek 3y ago
      Using a local LLM could work just as well if all you are doing is asking it slightly change existing text. The concept itself paired with a throwaway account(s) seems to be better than other alternatives like just deleting everything.
  - tivert 3y ago
    >> stylometry is far too strong > launder your style through ChatGPT > I wonder if one could hook up a browser extension to do this It seems totally feasible. Though I think it would be far more interesting to make a purpose built anti-stylometry tool, that explicitly tries to analyze for and mute the signals stylometry uses. Edit: what I'm talking about is apparently called "adversarial stylometry": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stylometry#Adversarial_stylometry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stylometry#Adversarial_stylome... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adversarial_stylometry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adversarial_stylometry
    - lelandfe 3y ago
      > All adversarial stylometry shares the core idea of faithfully paraphrasing the source text so that the meaning is unchanged but the stylistic signals are obscured Having an LLM rewrite a comment would do this entirely, no? Are you just interested from an academic perspective how one might build something more surgical, that only changes some words in a comment?
- remram 3y ago
  Stylometry can link long-lived identities, but can't do much if every throwaway only posts a couple of comments. There needs to be enough content to analyze. Especially if the overall community is large, like Reddit.
  - whimsicalism 3y ago
    assuming that you don't accidentally use a totally unique idiosyncrasy of yours in one of those comments
- matheusmoreira 3y ago
  Is there no automated way to defeat stylometry? Software that rewords and restructures writing so that it becomes unattributable? AI should be able to do it.
eur0pa 3y ago
[deleted]
- psychlops 3y ago
  I can't overstate how much this reflects my thoughts. Perhaps a bit wordy in your response, but the points are spot on. The internet stops here!
  - guilhas 3y ago
    One of the best internet's comment and I can't read it, because it has been deleted
- nativeit 3y ago
  [deleted while explicitly holding all other thread participants with perpetual contempt]
izzydata 3y ago
Users should own their comments and should be able to delete them as they see fit. Sites like Reddit should not be used as a permanent or reliable source of information.
- ihattendorf 3y ago
  The person you're replying to didn't say they aren't allowed to, they asked them to please not because the comment might be useful to others.
  - izzydata 3y ago
    I'm making a tangential statement only somewhat related to the comment above it. Personally I don't like that sites like Reddit claim ownership of and make profit from user generated content. I think people should delete their comments and move to a more open and free platform.
    - guilhas 3y ago
      The user should be free to move and delete anything The problem is while the user is moving the comments are not, only deleted Which will probably damage another user more than hurt reddit Besides the user might delete things that would be interest read years later
    - forgotpwd16 3y ago
      >Reddit claim ownership Should be mentioned the rights are retained by the user. Reddit only gets license to reproduce that content and allow others to do the same. Although also being perpetual, irrevocable, it's similar to ownership cannot say they're the same thing.
  - j45 3y ago
    Still up to the writer
  - r00fus 3y ago
    Useful to others because they search reddit is fine (even though I disagree with Reddit's app policy). Useful to OpenAI to train ChatGPT and dispense as wisdom people pay for? I can totally respect someone trimming all their online footprint to avoid that.
leptons 3y ago
I delete my comments on reddit because it's such a toxic place. Trolls will read through past comments and twist them to harass even more. I purge all my comments that have low upvotes and leave the ones other people find useful. But a lot of the time downvotes don't mean you are wrong or said something mean, it's the just stupidity of the masses or other people being mean. It's a love/hate relationship with that site.
- biogene 3y ago
  Somehow, I can't imagine how HN is any better. Reasonable comments are mass-downvoted when people disagree with you on seemingly hot button topics - blm, vaccines, musk, trump, immigration, lgbtq etc. I know many people who had to create new accounts because of this.
  - spondylosaurus 3y ago
    Merely being downvoted isn't a form of harassment. The worst people on Reddit will DM you vile shit/threats and stalk you across various subreddits if they think you're a person worth targeting (particularly if you belong to one of those so-called "hot button" marginalized groups). Meanwhile HN doesn't even have a DM feature.
    - biogene 3y ago
      If you express a reasonable opinion that is even mildly positive, or even ambivalent about musk or trump you get mass downvoted, and people assume you completely lack integrity. I have seen this exact behaviour on HN for years, and the mods do nothing, and the bad-actors are often the long-term users with tons of karma. I'm not into conspiracies so I won't speculate as to the reasons. Anyway, that in and of itself doesn't bother me - The parent was trying to present a "holier than thou" attitude towards Reddit. I merely pointed out that HN is not all that great when it comes to that.
      - spondylosaurus 3y ago
        I assume people downvote you about Musk and Trump because they disagree with your takes and think you're not contributing anything interesting to the discussion. People are allowed to downvote. What would you propose mods do in that situation?
tayo42 3y ago
In alot of reddit you're can't post with a throwaway
- yomlica8 3y ago
  Really? Only thing I've noticed is you appear to be auto-shadow banned when using a VPN.
  - polygamous_bat 3y ago
    There are subreddits with karma requirements (for good reasons, sometimes, like preventing brigrading or trolls.)
randomdata 3y ago
The valuable lifetime of a comment to me is short. If someone else sees value in it, then surely they would pay me to keep it around longer?
catchupwifurs11 3y ago
sounds like your note-taking & web-clipping need an update. spend some time figuring it out.
- pdlozano 3y ago
  I'm sorry but those things will not help when you discover a thread after the person deleted it

notfed 3y ago

Looking at you, Reddit...

whimsicalism 3y ago

stylometry is far too strong

caminante 3y ago
Deleting protects you against stylometry (and further identity detection)? Ha! Wishful thinking with all of the auto-archivers. If you post on reddit, it's likely already crawled and archived somewhere.
- whimsicalism 3y ago
  It is not great, but it is better (if you wish to not be identified) to keep it in fewer perhaps non-public or poorly indexed archives. The internet does forget, sometimes.
  - nickstinemates 3y ago
    That the internet never forgets is a myth. It forgets surprisingly quickly and I think will only accelerate. Sure, someone may have a copy of something somewhere, but discovering it via any search engine is impossible. Personally I put a lot of PHP and VB code out ~20 years ago that I could find easily until I couldn't. There's Myspace profiles I've tried to pull up, images posted by friends 15 years ago in random places. Early video. All gone.
    - ghaff 3y ago
      I generally agree. It depends how Internet famous you were, how hard a person looks, how common your name is, whether there's something specific you're looking for about a person. But, yeah, I'm willing to bet that a lot of random casual searches wouldn't turn up some Internet scandal/controversy around a non-famous person unless you really knew what to look for.
    - nativeit 3y ago
      I agree, although trends for whether this is becoming more or less the default is not quite as clear in my mind. On one hand, the sheer mass of content being generated every day has become exponentially larger (I wonder if this has begun leveling off at all?), so there’s more to index and presumably more noise with which to conceal a signal. On the other hand, data science has progressed, storage media is cheaper, and everything is much more accessible; As a result creepy services like LexisNexis, Palantir, and TLOxp have all become vastly more sophisticated in their ability to retain and analyze data that they can pretty effectively associate with specific people/organizations. I’m not sure which factor is more influential—the ability for data to persist, or the ability for it to then be found and interpreted. Would it matter if the content was still available in some forgotten corner of the internet if there weren’t effective tools available for finding it and connecting it back to its author? It’s actually sort of entertaining to test the limits of this on yourself. I tried to find original media and references from a band I played with circa 2002. We were being ambitious with our publicity efforts, and consistently pumping audio, video, and images onto whatever nascent services were available at the time (from memory I can recall CD Baby, LastFM, Craigslist, miscellaneous forums, and towards the end, MySpace). I had already been designing websites for several years by that point, so we had a website, one that wasn’t just a Geocities/Anglefire template. That said, I am pretty sure that was at the height of my career with Macromedia’s Flash and ActionScript, so no real surprise that it didn’t get Archived in any functional form. One strategy that my own experience has found quite effective is to avoid using unique or unusual identifiers. If you’re named something like Arthur Dent it is going to be considerably more difficult to find and associate information than if you’re name is Zaphod Beeblebrox. That’s obvious, but it extends to everything else, from usernames to product brand preferences—if you stick to the middle of every given bell curve then your needle will necessarily reside in a much larger haystack. The few things that tend to be unique, at least when correlated with things like timelines or location—things like telephone numbers, email addresses, usernames, account numbers, etc.—can usually be effectively obscured one way or a another. The things that can’t (government ID numbers) then become crucial to keep private. Except, at least one of those creepy services (TLOxp) was built by one of the three main credit rating agencies and so almost definitely has your social security number already, and has been attaching it to all manner of data for several years, all while also selling it off to anyone with a budget (not to mention losing it outright to hackers), so any concerted efforts to conceal oneself seems almost certainly doomed. It’d be an ideal problem for national governments to address using consumer protection laws and privacy regulations if it wasn’t also in our best interests to protect ourselves from said governments. Sorry for the essay, this line of thought evidently yanked a pretty intertwined thread for me.
  - caminante 3y ago
    I agree with your critique that stylometry overrides throwaway accounts. The issue is "deleting." AFAIK, nobody's disagreeing that the internet can forget and deleting is "better" for privacy. The question is "how much" better. Here we're talking about the false sense of privacy through erasure when archivers should be assumed to be running everywhere and at all times. The latter weighs in favor of the parent's critique that deleting is not constructive.
lelandfe 3y ago
launder your style through ChatGPT I wonder if one could hook up a browser extension to do this
- npongratz 3y ago
  Launder it by freely giving it to a large-scale data vacuuming/surveillance operation?
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - nickthegreek 3y ago
    Using a local LLM could work just as well if all you are doing is asking it slightly change existing text. The concept itself paired with a throwaway account(s) seems to be better than other alternatives like just deleting everything.
- tivert 3y ago
  >> stylometry is far too strong > launder your style through ChatGPT > I wonder if one could hook up a browser extension to do this It seems totally feasible. Though I think it would be far more interesting to make a purpose built anti-stylometry tool, that explicitly tries to analyze for and mute the signals stylometry uses. Edit: what I'm talking about is apparently called "adversarial stylometry": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stylometry#Adversarial_stylometry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stylometry#Adversarial_stylome... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adversarial_stylometry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adversarial_stylometry
  - lelandfe 3y ago
    > All adversarial stylometry shares the core idea of faithfully paraphrasing the source text so that the meaning is unchanged but the stylistic signals are obscured Having an LLM rewrite a comment would do this entirely, no? Are you just interested from an academic perspective how one might build something more surgical, that only changes some words in a comment?
remram 3y ago
Stylometry can link long-lived identities, but can't do much if every throwaway only posts a couple of comments. There needs to be enough content to analyze. Especially if the overall community is large, like Reddit.
- whimsicalism 3y ago
  assuming that you don't accidentally use a totally unique idiosyncrasy of yours in one of those comments
matheusmoreira 3y ago
Is there no automated way to defeat stylometry? Software that rewords and restructures writing so that it becomes unattributable? AI should be able to do it.

eur0pa 3y ago

[deleted]

psychlops 3y ago
I can't overstate how much this reflects my thoughts. Perhaps a bit wordy in your response, but the points are spot on. The internet stops here!
- guilhas 3y ago
  One of the best internet's comment and I can't read it, because it has been deleted
nativeit 3y ago
[deleted while explicitly holding all other thread participants with perpetual contempt]

izzydata 3y ago

Users should own their comments and should be able to delete them as they see fit. Sites like Reddit should not be used as a permanent or reliable source of information.

ihattendorf 3y ago
The person you're replying to didn't say they aren't allowed to, they asked them to please not because the comment might be useful to others.
- izzydata 3y ago
  I'm making a tangential statement only somewhat related to the comment above it. Personally I don't like that sites like Reddit claim ownership of and make profit from user generated content. I think people should delete their comments and move to a more open and free platform.
  - guilhas 3y ago
    The user should be free to move and delete anything The problem is while the user is moving the comments are not, only deleted Which will probably damage another user more than hurt reddit Besides the user might delete things that would be interest read years later
  - forgotpwd16 3y ago
    >Reddit claim ownership Should be mentioned the rights are retained by the user. Reddit only gets license to reproduce that content and allow others to do the same. Although also being perpetual, irrevocable, it's similar to ownership cannot say they're the same thing.
- j45 3y ago
  Still up to the writer
- r00fus 3y ago
  Useful to others because they search reddit is fine (even though I disagree with Reddit's app policy). Useful to OpenAI to train ChatGPT and dispense as wisdom people pay for? I can totally respect someone trimming all their online footprint to avoid that.

leptons 3y ago

I delete my comments on reddit because it's such a toxic place. Trolls will read through past comments and twist them to harass even more. I purge all my comments that have low upvotes and leave the ones other people find useful. But a lot of the time downvotes don't mean you are wrong or said something mean, it's the just stupidity of the masses or other people being mean. It's a love/hate relationship with that site.

biogene 3y ago
Somehow, I can't imagine how HN is any better. Reasonable comments are mass-downvoted when people disagree with you on seemingly hot button topics - blm, vaccines, musk, trump, immigration, lgbtq etc. I know many people who had to create new accounts because of this.
- spondylosaurus 3y ago
  Merely being downvoted isn't a form of harassment. The worst people on Reddit will DM you vile shit/threats and stalk you across various subreddits if they think you're a person worth targeting (particularly if you belong to one of those so-called "hot button" marginalized groups). Meanwhile HN doesn't even have a DM feature.
  - biogene 3y ago
    If you express a reasonable opinion that is even mildly positive, or even ambivalent about musk or trump you get mass downvoted, and people assume you completely lack integrity. I have seen this exact behaviour on HN for years, and the mods do nothing, and the bad-actors are often the long-term users with tons of karma. I'm not into conspiracies so I won't speculate as to the reasons. Anyway, that in and of itself doesn't bother me - The parent was trying to present a "holier than thou" attitude towards Reddit. I merely pointed out that HN is not all that great when it comes to that.
    - spondylosaurus 3y ago
      I assume people downvote you about Musk and Trump because they disagree with your takes and think you're not contributing anything interesting to the discussion. People are allowed to downvote. What would you propose mods do in that situation?

tayo42 3y ago

In alot of reddit you're can't post with a throwaway

yomlica8 3y ago
Really? Only thing I've noticed is you appear to be auto-shadow banned when using a VPN.
- polygamous_bat 3y ago
  There are subreddits with karma requirements (for good reasons, sometimes, like preventing brigrading or trolls.)

randomdata 3y ago

The valuable lifetime of a comment to me is short. If someone else sees value in it, then surely they would pay me to keep it around longer?

catchupwifurs11 3y ago

sounds like your note-taking & web-clipping need an update. spend some time figuring it out.

pdlozano 3y ago
I'm sorry but those things will not help when you discover a thread after the person deleted it