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Show HN: Using stylometry to find HN users with alternate accounts

stylometry.net

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Re: Show HN: Using stylometry to find HN users with alternate accounts

#221

Earlier 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.

“People disagreeing with you” describes almost none of the conversation on 4chan

Re: Show HN: Using stylometry to find HN users with alternate accounts

#223

pretty cool- i think there should be a term for two accounts that have each other as the top most similar account. kinda sad i dont have one :(

We’re pretty close me and you — closer than my actual alts

hello friend! but... id never use an m dash

Re: Show HN: Using stylometry to find HN users with alternate accounts

#224
This is interesting.

I'm 0.566 correlated with logfromblammo -- and while we are definitely not the same person, I could easily imagine writing a sentence such as:

"For some bizarre reason, management has not yet assigned a task to their programmer underlings to automated themselves out of existence. I can't imagine why."

which is theirs, not mine, from about a year ago. I like that.

On the other hand, I'm nearly as correlated with peterwwillis: 0.5485 -- who has no comments and no submissions.

Re: Show HN: Using stylometry to find HN users with alternate accounts

#227

On 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…

It does create a high level of discomfort, because it illustrates well what privacy advocates try talking about to the population at large, but all that said.. how is it any different from regular scraping and analyzing it any other way?

This is a real question.

Re: Show HN: Using stylometry to find HN users with alternate accounts

#230
post #177

Well now I'm self conscious about my closest match being an 0.34 when so many other people are reporting much closer matches with accounts that aren't alts. Do I write weirdly?

Same for me, the closest match is 0.36. But I expected that because I don't speak english very well so the pool of candidates is small.
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