That’s why I always use throwaway :) everywhere. Reddit. HN. Twitter. Everywhere. I’ll spam every site with my throwaways.
Long live throwaways.
Show HN: Using stylometry to find HN users with alternate accounts
211–220 of 562 posts
Re: Show HN: Using stylometry to find HN users with alternate accounts
#212Earlier quoted context omitted.
The precision of the bolded results looks like maybe 30% to me. Significantly better than the non-bolded, but nowhere near perfect precision.
False positives become an increasingly difficult problem the more and more potential authors you introduce. If I had wrote a fancier model it probably wouldn't be as much of a problem but what can you do.
Yes, this wasn't a criticism of the tool. It is crazy good.
But I don't think people should be making the assumption that bolded results are definite alts, which sillysaurus' comment reads like.
Re: Show HN: Using stylometry to find HN users with alternate accounts
#213Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I'm old enough to remember when 4chan was self identifying as the Internet's hate machine, before xkcd referenced it as such: https://xkcd.com/591/
Sometimes people insist that's all role-play and irony; others insist that if it ever was, it certainly isn't now.
But regardless, I remember pre-2005, and it wasn't all like what I saw the two times I looked at 4chan. Bits were. Bits were much worse. But mostly, mostly, people were kinder… at least, unless political tribalism came up.
Re: Show HN: Using stylometry to find HN users with alternate accounts
#214I like the way some usernames are only 0.9999999 correlated with themselves.
Perhaps 6 or 7 digits is enough?
Re: Show HN: Using stylometry to find HN users with alternate accounts
#215Earlier quoted context omitted.
> but the cat’s out of the boot It's my first time hearing that variant. Usually its, "the cat's out of the bag" where I'm from. Do you mean boot in the UK sense, what Americans would call the trunk of a car? Or do you mean a sturdy piece of footwear? Obligatory xkcd https://xkcd.com/2390/
It’s a little writing trick I leaned from (I think) Orwell. Any time you’re about to use a common metaphor, try to tweak it. You’ll catch readers off guard, which piques their curiosity. It’s a fun game, too. I wish I’d used “the cat’s out of the hat,” but I didn’t think of it till later.
What you are describing is also known as an eggcorn.
Re: Show HN: Using stylometry to find HN users with alternate accounts
#216The method used, i.e. to calculate the cosine of the two authors' word vectors, is poorly suited for stylometric analysis because it is based on a poster's lexicon and the word frequencies of each word, but ignoring stylistically relevant factors like word order.
Also, the cosine of the vectors of word frequencies conflates author-specific vocabulary and topics; in other words, my account is grouped (with >51% similarity, according to the demo) with someone probably because we wrote about similar things. A strong stylometric matcher ought to be robust against topic shifts (our personal writing style is what stays constant when we move from writing about one topic to writing about another topic, just like our personality is what stays constant about our behavior over time - of course styles do change, but the premise then has to be that such changes happen very slowly).
Stylometrics/authorship identification is interesting and has led to some surprising findings, e.g. in forensic linguistics (Malcolm Coulthard wrote several good books about the topic).
This paper lists some other features that could be used and compares a bunch of techniques: https://research.ijcaonline.org/volume86/number12/pxc3893384...
Re: Show HN: Using stylometry to find HN users with alternate accounts
#217Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Based on some of the feedback I'm getting here I don't know if I should open source this even though it really wasn't that hard to make. I'd say you should. I'd rather see this as being publicly and freely available to everyone rather than some shady "Big Tech" analytics company. If the "weapons" exist, I would feel more comfortable knowing everyone can access them, not just an elite that can use it for their own (…
I am genuinely torn, because my initial reaction was almost the exact opposite, but the comparison to a weapon does ring true. And there is indeed an argument to be made for level playing field. At the very least, maybe counter-measures can be developed.
People don't usually understand privacy risks till their own curtains fall down.
Re: Show HN: Using stylometry to find HN users with alternate accounts
#218On one hand, thank you for showing us all how easy it is to make something like this. No doubt organizations with more resources already have more sophisticated systems in the same vein.
On the other hand, can we agree that this product is unethical?
In many cases, when a person uses an alt, it is a direct and strong signal that they do not wish their other posts to be associated.
So this product is circumventing the explicit will of the person, and making it available to anyone with zero effort i.e. there is no barrier to getting this info.
I met someone about 10 years ago who said they built this at a university. And their argument also was "actually this enhances privacy because it lets you know something something something". And yet their research grants were coming from one source only.
It can be used for good, but most often it won't.
Re: Show HN: Using stylometry to find HN users with alternate accounts
#219After a few tries on boring accounts, I thought to try the account of somebody who was notorious for an incident outside of HN, and had a (deservedly) bad time at HN for a couple of years before the account went dark. And yeah, there's a bunch of high confidence (.6-.8) hits for that account, and from a quick browse of the comments of the recently active ones, they look really likely to be alts. Like, all three that…
I keep no alternate accounts, but this tool reports best matches for me that appear to be Slavic or just Russian - and I am Russian. Best match score in my list is just above 0.5. There are some clearly alternate accounts on the list, their match scores with this tool are well above 0.7. It is probable that persons of same cultural origin will have similar writing style and vocabulary. It is also probable that person…
There're 19 other accounts this tool finds similar to me. Those are not my accounts. 0.46 - 0.56 are numbers.
Re: Show HN: Using stylometry to find HN users with alternate accounts
#220Well the only solution is too have too many alts so that nobody can believe you can possibly have that many