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.

12 hours agoby karmakaze

Privacy: Won't meaningfully impact privacy. HN like any forum is a bad place to post your secrets simply because the servers are not yours. Post history for each account is already visible, so if you have an agenda, it sticks out like a sore thumb there.

Moderation: Won't meaningfully impact moderation. HN can already see this info and they are the ones that take moderator action. It may hurt moderation/increase moderation costs because people may tend more to report content based on country instead of content.

Transparency: Outright influencer content (political or corporate) doesn't make it to the front page enough for it to matter, or if it does, I can't tell.

Anti-abuse: Same as moderation. Abuse reports should be processed based on content and not country of origin.

Meaningfully improves discussion quality: If a story is about something happening in a particular country, people who look like they are from that country might get asked more or different questions. This puts people from that country on the spot. They may get increased unsolicited communication or thread hijacks. Right now, if someone wants to be on that spot, they can voluntarily identify, either in the profile or in the post.

Possibly something useful would be a rule/requirement that claiming to be from a country different than the one you made an account from--seen either in a profile or post--requires verification for further posting, but if you never make such a contrary claim, the verification is not needed.

7 hours agoby RiverCrochet

The less HN behaves like a social media platform, the better.

11 hours agoby Peroni

Hahaha.... this is Hacker News. You do realize who run the geolocation systems? Originating from Antarctica, The Whitehouse or the Moon would become a status symbol.

32 minutes agoby stubish

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...

14 hours agoby dhx

Given Tor and VPN, and the fact that both are fully acceptable to connect to HN - as far as I know - this would add nothing of substance.

The reason why it works on Elon's kingdom is that - as far as I know - the Onion services died when Elon took over (because the people who cared about those simply left) and over at X - as far as I understand - they really, really try and discourage you from connecting and posting from Tor and VPN.

Also, when people turn discussions into absolute flame wars or decide to post stuff which could turn nasty in the comment section there's always dang. And believe me when I say that even when community moderation fails for whatever reason the rules (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) will get enforced when needed.

10 hours agoby mindcrash

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.

14 hours agoby TimedToasts

What value could you possibly derive from this? Whether someone is from a particular country or not has nothing to do with (or very little to do with) whether they are qualified to have an opinion.

Folks are allowed to be knowledgeable about things that are not directly relevant in their “county of origin” in the same way they are allowed to be ignorant about things that are relevant.

9 hours agoby d1sxeyes

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.

14 hours agoby Bender

If people will look down on me because I'm not from North America or Europe, then no thanks.

But if people don't care, then cool.

9 hours agoby tabs_or_spaces

I would consider this a form of doxing -- to retroactively share information that was nonpublic upon joining would be a serious breach of trust.

Keep in mind things aren't always what they seem -- I remember a heatmap going up of where "MAGA" accounts were operated. Unsurprisingly, there was a big chunk in places like St. Petersburg, but there were also hotspots in several middle eastern countries with have large US troop presence.

Keep in mind the guidelines state:

>Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.

Frankly, due to the strict guidlines here I suspect most state sponsored trolls would stick to places like Reddit where it's easier to disrupt things with contentious posts.

11 hours agoby firefax

I think knowing an account is fresh is enough.

11 hours agoby igleria

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.

12 hours agoby d--b

It would only be effective if HN blocked the majority of known ways to spoof someone's location (eg blocking connections made through Tor and the largest VPN providers, at the very least).

I'd only support displaying country flags if that block was implemented. Otherwise hard no.

6 hours agoby dabockster

I don't think it'd benefit HN at all at this time, as the country of origin just isnt relevant most of the time, and would just invite flamewars. I believe that flagging/downvoting is a good enough tool to deal with stuff, as the HN mod team puts in the work.

Maybe once the site gets 10x as big and the mod team gets overwhelmed, it could serve a purpose, but I doubt that to ever be the case.

10 hours agoby Akronymus

The HN community is tech savvy. If they really wanted to abuse it, they would just use a VPN.

14 hours agoby billy99k

There needs to be triplet threads on every topical debate.

One where the users are completely anonymous and comments have no history attached to them.

One where the users have profiles and comment history but are not linked back to real life.

One where your real user profile / brand is at stake.

And have public analytical metrics to see what people are saying or what bot farms have been hired to say and who hires them

7 hours agoby whattheheckheck

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.

14 hours agoby sunscream89

It would only be beneficial to combat pedantry we get around “well, where I live this isn’t a thing. How dare you make an assumption about how others are living on a website dedicated to a Silicon Valley incubator.”

Always some European or flyover state resident wanting to not feel left out of discussions related to SV.

Otherwise, the call is coming from inside the house when it comes to all kinds of traitorous behaviors. Plus, many people who are on here are immigrants. So, they’re living in Silicon Valley but they’re from China/India/Israel/etc.

10 hours agoby bradlys