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Comment by kaycebasques | Hacker News Reader

Interesting idea! Presumably you pay a lot of attention to who has written a comment and want to remove that bias? In my case I usually don't recognize the author for any given comment so I don't really have that problem.

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Sometimes I read a comment that I completely disagree with, but then I recognize the username and it's someone well respected on HN. So I enter a cycle of self doubts; "Am I out of touch? No, it's the HN elite that is out of touch."

It’s definitely the latter, on average. The number of times I am forced to care about a city I don’t live in that also happens to be in the Bay Area where people’s problems are eerily similar to mine except they make 20x more money and forgot that it’s not very classy to brag about such things…

Don’t get me started on all the Ivy League circle jerking that goes on here. Again, I didn’t have the privilege to go to an incredible school. And yet, I have now worked with many who did and found not much there, aside from wealthy friends and overconfidence.

I got in the habit of rarely looking at usernames unless there's some self reference.

Yes, that was precisely the motivation! (+ some interest in learning how to publish a Chrome extension).

Always interesting to hear how others do things. There are only a handful of usernames that I know, but when I look for them it's important because (for example) they are the author/creator of a tool. From just a couple minutes ago for example, reading the Elixir post[1] the comments from josevalim are from the creator of the language, and the author of TFA. Not knowing that I think would make the thread a lot different (IMHO in a bad way), but I can definitely see the appeal of anonymizing other times.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37122006

Maybe the extension should also randomize the ordering of comments. Because I can infer that the top comment is more likely to be from someone influential in the space.

Depends on the viewing platform, but HN usernames are usually small font and low contrast compared to comment text. I think most are unlikely to notice who said what.

I only recognize https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=todsacerdoti everywhere and always get reminded to hope they are not increasing Pipedream pricing again ;)

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