The scary thing is that once you have this data, finding HN matches for individual targeted users on other sites becomes trivial, even if those sites are harder to scrape. I bet most people here have an anonymous Reddit account, for example. If you wanted to know who was behind a particular Reddit account, you could feed it into something like this and compare the results with HN, where accounts are less likely to be…
Thus proving the only actually anonymous community in practice is 4chan, and that’s why it’s so toxic.
If you define “toxic” as “people disagreeing with you”, sure. That was what the entire internet was like until maybe 2005.