Hacker News Reader

Comment by filoleg | Hacker News Reader

> admin real names seem like quite a reasonable thing to include in such a regex (unless they're so common it's likely to be an accidental collision or publicly known) which is consistent with Reddit's explanation

The "publicly known" part is the key here. She is a public figure who held prominent political positions. She has her own wikipedia page. There were plenty of news articles featuring her name since forever ago.

>The allegation is that the name was only mentioned in the body of a linked (paywalled) article though

This is imo just a cherry on top.

View on HN

Also, from the user[0] that posted the original Spectator article:

> Automation tends not to take five minutes, edit people's comments to remove publicly available information on public figures(in this case a passing one sentence mention that did not even mention reddit or admins), make typos on that edit, re-edit them again later to fix the typos and then permanently suspend posters with still no reply on their appeal after almost a day.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/ukpolitics/comments/mbytxw/daily_me...

The point was that the list of admins that could be 'doxxed' wouldn't include Alexis Ohanian or any admin that actually posts under their real name.

Of course in this instance it appears the opposite happened and nobody knew Challenor (a pretty obscure figure whose political career probably deserves the past tense) was involved with Reddit at all until the modding Streisanded it.

>The point was that the list of admins that could be 'doxxed' wouldn't include Alexis Ohanian or any admin that actually posts under their real name.

What? Alexis Ohanian doesn't post under his real name, he posts under u/kn0thing. And it isn't a recent thing, that has been his username from the very beginning.

That's why I said Alexis Ohanian or any admin that actually posts under their real name, yes. You can't dox the real life identity of a founder whose username is public knowledge, or somebody who posts under their real name and will be addressed with their real name in replies. You could dox a lot of the others.

(All of which is moot anyway if the interventions were manual. Their PR would have been probably been a lot better blaming an anonymous human admin and reinstating the post too...)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com