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Comment by AndrewDucker | Hacker News Reader

It's about my ability to have a single ID if I want one.

I feel that my online ID is andrewducker.livejournal.com - it's been the centre of my online social life since 2001, it's where I keep in contact with my distributed friends, where I post things I think about. In a very real way, it's my defining online identity.

And now, thanks to OpenID, I can carry that identity with me to other sites. If I post on Stack Overflow I'm posting as _me_ - not just as whatever user id I happened to get in the gold rush.

That matters to me. If it doesn't matter to you then that's fine. But it's important to me.

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In this world, perhaps the less that's directly attributed to you the better off you are.

Your identity is also tied to livejournal. I have no such place that I would want my identity tied to. I could run my own OpenID server or some such thing but that's even more of pain in the ass.

In this world, perhaps the less that's directly attributed to you the better off you are.

Only if you're ashamed of what you say, or are stuck in a place where your views are constantly held against you. Neither of those are true of me, for which I am duly grateful.

You could use a dedicated OpenID provider, like MyOpenID. If you have a simple website or blog where you can edit meta tags in the HTML, then you can delegate. For example, I use my blog as my OpenID, but I don't want to run a server myself, so I delegate to MyOpenID. They handle the heavy lifting, security (I use a private SSL key), and I still get to control my identifier.

See I could do that, yes. But exactly how many steps, how much technology, and how many organizations are between me and the site I'm logging into. It just doesn't seem worth the effort. What's the payoff?

I have no such place that I would want my identity tied to. I could run my own OpenID server but that's even more of pain

You don't need to run your one server. Just get an openId from myopenid.com. Get several. then your ... deniable posts won't be "directly attributed" to the one that's in your real name.

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