
Tell HN: Flesh out your profiles please - jacquesm
There's an old internet joke, that on the internet, nobody knows you're a dog.<p>The way to let people know that you're not a dog, is to establish an identity, maybe a short blurb about yourself and a way to contact you out-of-band.<p>Lots of HN profiles are blank, and the nicknames used are anonymous. Of course, the theory is that since we are all judging your writings by their merits it is just as good to get that information you just wrote from an anonymous source as it would be to get it from a source that has an identity.<p>To me that would matter, for one when someone is attaching their name - and by extension their reputation - to their words they automatically have something to lose by saying it.<p>Second, it helps to verify that they are real people with relevant experience, instead of posers.<p>Anonymity on the net has its uses, for instance for whistleblowers and to ask embarrassing questions.<p>But for the most part it is used as a shield for cowardly attacks, sockpuppets and to create a persona with a reputation that is larger than the one the person is really entitled to and so on.<p>Being yourself is more than enough. So, to all those that are for whatever reason anonymous here, step out of the shadows and tie your HN identity in with your real-life persona.<p>Anonymous cowards belong to that other site :)
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madair
I think it's worth mentioning the other block of people you left out: those
who risk corporate jobs or contracts simply by having opinions that an
employer doesn't agree with.

Some (many?) of us have kids or other responsibilities and don't have a nest
egg, relatives or soft landings.

Until our peonage is less feudal I think it's going to be this way.

~~~
jacquesm
That's one I hadn't thought of, indeed. I've been 'unemployed' (that's a
different word for self employed) long enough that it never even crossed my
mind, sorry.

On the other hand, it's a shame that it should come to the point that people
are hiding who they are for fear of retribution from their employers.

~~~
madair
:)

Yes it is a shame. For me it's a few more years to get some teenagers through
HS (it's not like that's without rewards) and then I can get back to wanton
risk-taking.

I spent my risk allowance for 10 years: founding a couple of lousy startups
(not Silicon Valley, and it was my own damn fault that they were crapiola),
and then an employer that suffered death by VC (that one wasn't my fault), so
yeah, it's not like corporate is the only way in my case, it's just the
recessionary cookie crumble.

------
mbenjaminsmith
Jacquesm, what exactly would constitute a poseur around here? Are members
expected to be a level n programmer or startup founder? What behavior have you
witnessed that would be thwarted by calling someone a poseur after the fact?
Doesn't that lead to more personal attacks?

Personally I don't know who you are and I really don't care. I care if what
you write is insightful and helpful to me (and hopefully I do the same for
some other people).

I'm sure I've been attacked a few times by people that might be run out of
town under the no cowards policy, but I'd rather deal with ankle biters than
have this place turn into a cult of personality for a handful of celebrity
posters.

Btw if anyone downvotes this without a bio I'm calling you out. That's ironic
humor if you're wondering. Am I qualified? Yes, I'm a startup founder with a
degree in literature.

~~~
jacquesm
Armchair founders and lawyers would be one group, cowardly attacks are a
problem but less so, I've so far had exactly two directed at me, one through
mail and one here on the site. I've seen a few others and for the most part
the attackers find themselves at -4 or banned pretty swiftly.

The only real 'celebrity posters' I can think of are PG, patio11, cperciva,
tptacek and jgrahamc and their reputations are well established and deserved
in the fields they write most about, for the most part their votes seem to
reflect the quality of what they write on a case-by-case basis.

For example, it's rare to see PG downvoted because most of the time what he
writes makes very good sense (and I've been on the receiving end of a couple
of 'you disagreed with PG downvotes' but it does happen, and that, as far as
I'm concerned proves that the problem if it exists is not that large.

So inspite of the research referenced above and personal experience, even if
it does happen we don't have a cult of celebrity worship here as far as I can
see, but at the same time we're talking about a bunch of counters in a disk
file somewhere, so assuming that we do it _still_ isn't a problem. Maybe ask
the posters I mentioned above if they feel 'worshipped' in any way?

> Btw if anyone downvotes this without a bio I'm calling you out.

Hehe, that was funny :)

And I'm just a startup founder with a typing diploma and a driving license.

~~~
mbenjaminsmith
You've got me coming around a bit on that. But I haven't yet seen a comment
where I felt I was getting bad legal advice or an insincere 'fail early,
often' or anything similar. I could see it useful in say a discussion of
operating a site at massive scale when the poster's sys admin skills were
limited to a WP blog.

But usually in those cases people qualify what they're saying with, 'I worked
on x and we did y'. I think you have to qualify what you're saying in that
way. It's presumptuous to assume people know who you are. My background is
marketing and PR (as an entrepreneur) so I usually qualify PR-related advice
with a note of my experience. If people don't I usually assume they're
regurgitating what someone else told them.

Anyway it's moot for me because I never check people's bios.

I don't know who any of those people are other than pg. I'm ok with that
because again I'm really only interested in what they have to say. If Mr Z is
on his 11th startup and is worth 23 gazillion dollars I would expect that will
come through in his perspective on the industry. I hope it would at least.

Don't worry, if I could do it over again I would skip college. I wish I would
have raised 1/5 of the money I had to for college and started a business. I
would have learned more, faster and would probably be retired already.

~~~
jacquesm
> But I haven't yet seen a comment where I felt I was getting bad legal advice
> or an insincere 'fail early, often' or anything similar.

I've seen more than a few, but truth be told they were usually identified as
such.

> Don't worry, if I could do it over again I would skip college. I wish I
> would have raised 1/5 of the money I had to for college and started a
> business. I would have learned more, faster and would probably be retired
> already.

I still have contact with a few of the people from 'the old days', and I
wouldn't trade with them for any amount of money, but every now and then I
wished I'd gotten the benefits of at least high school calculus.

I tend to spend too much time approaching mathematical problems in a way that
I can fudge my basic knowledge, in stead of for instance a direct approach
using an analytical method I might code up a brute force search or a hill
climbing algorithm (and pray I'm not stuck on a local maximum :) ).

The network would have come in handy as well in the beginning, but I've long
ago made up for lack of that.

~~~
mbenjaminsmith
I think I take that back - I would do college again to get a CS degree. I
really enjoy programming, but it's only a fraction of my time even now that
I'm doing tech. I wish I would have done CS so I would have had more time on
the intellectual side of programming - both so I could program better (I fudge
my way through it as well) and for the enjoyment of it.

------
ryandvm
Meh. There's enough celebrity worship around here as it is. Now you're
suggesting we fill out our profiles so our posts can be voted up based on who
they're authored by instead of what they contain? No thanks.

~~~
jacquesm
> Now you're suggesting we fill out our profiles so our posts can be voted up
> based on who they're authored by instead of what they contain?

Where did you read that ? The word vote isn't even in there, and that was not
a suggestion I had in mind.

~~~
sraybell
It's kind of implied, however.

~~~
jacquesm
Why? Because you'd vote differently if you knew that I was me? But you already
know, and I take it that it makes no difference in how you vote. So why would
that be different for you?

~~~
corruption
There are many papers in psychology dealing with the influence of prestige on
statement credibility. It does have a large effect and is replicated across
many studies.

Whether or not you want your prestige to influence your statement credibility
is entirely personal. I'd rather have it not effect it to keep myself honest.

~~~
Zev
If this was that big of a deal for an online site in which you say whether you
like something or not, I'd have thought that sites would hide the username
from everyone until you voted on a comment/story/etc. However, in practice,
its not that big of a deal. pg hasn't even experimented with it on HN afaik -
and on some level, I generally think of HN as his personal experiment sandbox
(either for how people behave, UI/UX or for Arc).

~~~
corruption
I propose an experiment rather than making an assumption that it's not
important.

Randomly change the username on new posts from users that have a low average
points per post (ppp)to a top 20 user in terms of ppp.

If there is no effect of username on ppp, then the difference between the
users true average ppp and the randomly assigned one will be large, if there
is an effect it will be approximately zero. We could test this statistically
easily enough.

What say you pg?

~~~
jacquesm
That's a really clever idea.

------
codexon
I don't think this will help.

As you may have noticed, the Facebook privacy stories are rated very highly
here.

For those of us in startups, we are either too busy to comment, too afraid to
alienate potential customers with our opinions, or currently in stealth mode.

I'd venture to guess that most of the people here are not concerned with
winning arguments on the internet by prestige, as you've described as the main
reason to lose anonymity.

~~~
ggchappell
> As you may have noticed, the Facebook privacy stories are rated very highly
> here.

I think there may be a misunderstanding here. Facebook's problem is not that
they make information about their users available, but that they do so after
having been specifically directed not to. One can have no problem with the
former, while being very much against the latter.

As this article (posted last week on HN)

    
    
       http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2010/05/14/facebook-and-radical-transparency-a-rant.html
    

said:

> The battle that is underway is not a battle over the future of privacy and
> publicity. It’s a battle over choice and informed consent.

------
sraybell
Or not. See, that's the beauty of this, I have no interest in sharing anything
on any particular site. That said, simply doing searches on my username will
yield results both by myself and my father.

I have no interest in taking it further. This isn't Facebook.

------
grandalf
It's not that, it's just that some of us prefer to be anonymous just from
things like google searches, etc.

------
prodigal_erik
> when someone is attaching their name - and by extension their reputation -
> to their words they automatically have something to lose by saying it.

Why is why I never say anything even slightly controversial for the record
under my True Name. I don't know about you but I rely on getting food and
shelter by negotiating with other members of a nosy, judgmental, sometimes
irrational species.

<http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html>

~~~
jacquesm
So do I, but I'm not at all worried about saying controversial stuff.

Essentially you are saying that you are self-censoring.

~~~
Vivtek
Yes, that is exactly what he's saying, and moreover he seems to think he has
reason to do so.

~~~
prodigal_erik
Just for example, if a potential employer running a PHP/MySQL shop could
easily look up my opinion of their chosen tools, most would only hire me as a
last resort if at all. Those tools are still popular enough that I would never
bet my career on being able to avoid them indefinitely. (I'm more candid with
my current manager now that we trust each other, in fact his views are
stronger than mine.)

And that's without even getting into political views like IP law, or whatever
the hell future landlords or neighbors might object to....

------
brm
Judge a user not by the depth of their profile but by the quality of their
previous comments and contributions.

------
marcusbooster
Since we're appointing ourselves sheriff of hn now, how about we knock it off
with the meta-posts.

------
RevRal
I spent about half an hour working on mine.

I have trust issues with random people on the internet.

~~~
jacquesm
That's gorgeous.

------
ryanelkins
I think people are capable of building a reputation based on the quality of
their contributions. For many of us that don't have any kind of reputation
that would be meaningful from our real identities we rely on building it on
here.

That said, I would like it if people added things like a way to contact them.
There have been times when I would like to contact people and there isn't
really a good way to do it. I've been contacted from having my email address
in my profile and made some good contacts through it as well.

------
wwortiz
The only time I really look at profiles is if I see people over and over again
commenting on a large portion of the same things I comment on or like and it
is just to see if they have a website or something like that.

So you really don't need to expose your full fledged identity but if you have
a blog and like a bit of extra relevant traffic put it up on your profile page
and it might get more visits.

One thing I would like to see more of is people responding when they downvote
something because I always like to see the other side of the argument (other
than those comments that have no merit whatsoever and should probably be
flagged rather than, or perhaps in addition to, being downvoted.

Other than that my profile is blank because I don't really have anything to
put there.

------
unavailable
>> step out of the shadows and tie your HN identity in with your real-life
persona.

Has HN been acquired by the government for an undisclosed sum lately?

~~~
jacquesm
Yes, but your profile was blank so we couldn't mail you the memo...

------
Unseelie
Wow. We have profiles?

~~~
jacquesm
Click your username.

~~~
kordless
Then click on my username!

------
corruption
I would rather have bias against my ideas because I am anonymous compared to
bias for my ideas because of my accomplishments.

It depends if you want to let other accomplishments add weight to your
argument, or let your argument stand on it's own. I prefer the latter.

------
epochwolf
> There's an old internet joke, that on the internet, nobody knows you're a
> dog.

woof!

> So, to all those that are for whatever reason anonymous here, step out of
> the shadows and tie your HN identity in with your real-life persona.

No thanks, I'm happy being another dog on the internet.

~~~
jacquesm
I think I can see why ;) :

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1364225>

~~~
epochwolf
Nah, it's for stuff like this:
<http://twitter.com/epochwolf/status/14430334843>

~~~
jacquesm
It would be a great loss to the world if you would no longer post stuff like
that because you have your name out front.

~~~
epochwolf
I know you're being sarcastic but the problem is if I can't say stuff like
that, what can I safely share under my real name? The internet is a safe place
for me to share what I'm thinking. I don't have that freedom in real life.

~~~
jacquesm
That's pretty split to me. There isn't a thing that I'm thinking that I would
speak out loud that I would not dare to commit in writing, and there isn't
anybody of authority that I would look up to them with automatic respect so as
to be deferential.

That got me in to a lot of trouble in my school days by the way, especially
with religious teachers ;)

------
Zev
Kind of agreed, but for other reasons. It isn't important to me who you (the
commenter) are in particular. However, a way to message you (the commenter)
would be nice, short of having to post "Hey, mind emailing me? I'd like to
talk to you about something."

How the method works is an irrelevant implementation detail (as long as its
not an anonymous PO box, that is..). Really, an anonymous gmail thats checked
once every few weeks would be fine most of the time.

Of course, I can just as easily understand why someone _wouldn't_ want to be
contacted. So, shrug.

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mgcross
As much as I completely understand remaining somewhat anonymous for privacy
issues (my facespace acct is so overpopulated that I feel awfully muzzled), I
often click through to a poster's profile not so much to check out their name
or reputation, but because I'm interested in reading more of their thoughts or
checking out their projects.

I filled my profile out a little more, but I'm honestly pretty boring to
everyone I know with the exception of my dog!

------
pook
I just added a bit more to mine.

I've been spouting my beliefs on the interwebs long enough that am unelectable
to any political office.

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kimfuh
I haven't achieved anything of relevance yet. But I don't think that makes my
opinion irrelevant.

------
starkfist
The majority of the users on the leaderboard do have identifying information
in their profiles.

~~~
jacquesm
That's an interesting observation.

------
avk
Thanks for the encouragement. I just updated mine. Feedback appreciated :)

------
nfnaaron
My profile is blank.

So is my life.

