Ask HN: Should account creation/origin country be displayed on HN profiles?
Would it be beneficial for a platform to display the country of account origin on each user’s profile? I’m curious how the HN community thinks about this from angles like privacy, moderation, transparency, anti-abuse, and whether it meaningfully improves discussion quality. Are there strong reasons for or against showing this kind of metadata publicly?
No. I prefer HN to be about the content, not its hominem. If country/etc is relevant for discussion it can be voluntarily mentioned.
It might have a minor beneficial impact to tourism in Saint Barthelemy and Norfolk Island from geeks wanting a trendy new account registered in a territory with fewer than 1000 IPv4 addresses allocated.[1]
A more useful addition would be a contributions calendar similar to GitHub's [2] but focused on which time zones the user is active within, and importantly, the latency of the user's replies. It's trivial to fake geographic location observed through source IP addresses (or even RTT multilateration) but much harder to fake time zones a user is active within, particularly if monitoring latency of replies.
edit: To further clarify, I don't think a contributions calendar would be beneficial to HN either. I've never cared to think about the country a commenter resides in, and don't care about username/real name either unless the commenter is appealing to their own authority (e.g. "I am the author of this software"). Even then, the usefulness of an appeal to own authority is often limited to the ability to reverse lookup the user's personal website (which itself is proven to be notable from other sources) for a link back to their HN profile.
[1] https://impliedchaos.github.io/ip-alloc/
[2] https://docs.github.com/en/account-and-profile/concepts/cont...
I think for this to be useful and assuming people wanted this then dang may have to first block VPN's and then country would have to be learned after 99%+ of VPN's are gone as many accounts could have been created using a VPN.
If not blocking VPN's, then display "Possible VPN".
Perhaps to get some adoption, make it opt-in and also let users enable flag-display at the risk of giving off 4chan vibes.
4chan's system is pretty good. You can display your country or you can pick from a 'meme flag' (Pirate, Gadsen, etc)
Make it optional that you don't need to display it but you cannot misrepresent your country.
I used to post on a forum that did this, as well as showing the OS and browser you were posting from. Some users would be funny and modified their user agent so that it said they posted from a Wii.
What's the upside?
The only thing this is going to produce is people fighting because of where they're from.
There is plenty to disagree in the tech world as it is to introduce other axes of divergence.
The HN community is tech savvy. If they really wanted to abuse it, they would just use a VPN.
Here we find the split hair.
Privacy first or conscientious exposition of the meta.
I have been advocating that privacy isn’t anyone’s right, it is anyone’s responsibility. Only for the self obsessed to pike my karma and rail their venomous hatred of platforms they use not respecting their identities by ignoring them properly.
I would love to see what you’ve described, though the caveats include those of increased awareness grappling with a whole lot more going on than just the loose strings it has become most popular to pull upon.
And as soon as you shine a light, any creeping critters will scurry, innovating faster to compensate than the mob of yourselves are capable of realizing. The cycle of anonymity and wtf continues to churn. An ouroboros.