This was not intentional on the part of GW or saturn2, it’s simply that GW has always cached the user ID & name (because why wouldn’t it) and whoever implemented the ‘anonymous’ feature apparently didn’t think through the user ID part of it.
I did think of it! But having documents without ownership sure requires a substantial rewrite of a lot of LW code in a way that didn’t seem worth the effort. And any hope for real anonymity for historical comments was already lost with lots of people scraping the site. If we ever had any official “post anonymously” features, I would definitely care to fix these issues, but this is a deleted account, and posting from a deleted account is itself more like a bug and not an officially supported feature (we allow deleted accounts to still login so they can recover any content from things like PMs, and I guess we left open the ability to leave comments).
I would strongly advise closing the commenting loophole then, if that was never intended to be possible. The only thing worse than not having security/anonymity is having the illusion of security/anonymity.
While I agree that total privacy/anonymity is almost impossible, “pretty good” privacy in practice can be achieved through obscurity. For example, you could find my full name by following two links, but most people won’t bother. (If you do, please don’t post it here.)
Absolutely. But you know you are relying on obscurity and relatively modest cost there, and you keep that in mind when you comment. Which is fine. Whereas if you thought that it was secure and breaking it came at a high cost (though it was in fact ~5 seconds of effort away), you might make comments you would not otherwise. Which is less fine.
I did think of it! But having documents without ownership sure requires a substantial rewrite of a lot of LW code in a way that didn’t seem worth the effort. And any hope for real anonymity for historical comments was already lost with lots of people scraping the site. If we ever had any official “post anonymously” features, I would definitely care to fix these issues, but this is a deleted account, and posting from a deleted account is itself more like a bug and not an officially supported feature (we allow deleted accounts to still login so they can recover any content from things like PMs, and I guess we left open the ability to leave comments).
I would strongly advise closing the commenting loophole then, if that was never intended to be possible. The only thing worse than not having security/anonymity is having the illusion of security/anonymity.
While I agree that total privacy/anonymity is almost impossible, “pretty good” privacy in practice can be achieved through obscurity. For example, you could find my full name by following two links, but most people won’t bother. (If you do, please don’t post it here.)
Absolutely. But you know you are relying on obscurity and relatively modest cost there, and you keep that in mind when you comment. Which is fine. Whereas if you thought that it was secure and breaking it came at a high cost (though it was in fact ~5 seconds of effort away), you might make comments you would not otherwise. Which is less fine.
Yeah, that seems reasonable. Just made a PR for it.