After a few tries on boring accounts, I thought to try the account of somebody who was notorious for an incident outside of HN, and had a (deservedly) bad time at HN for a couple of years before the account went dark.
And yeah, there's a bunch of high confidence (.6-.8) hits for that account, and from a quick browse of the comments of the recently active ones, they look really likely to be alts. Like, all three that I looked at had comments that made it very clear it was this person writing pseudonymously. (E.g. writing on their signature issue, and saying they couldn't go into more detail due to fear of self-doxxing; or somebody literally saying that the alt's claims reminded them of the public writings of the notorious guy years ago).
Obviously I'm not naming the account, but this functionality turned out way creepier than I thought the moment I tried it on the account of somebody who has a reason to disassociate from an existing public persona, but still wants to participate here.
And yeah, there's a bunch of high confidence (.6-.8) hits for that account, and from a quick browse of the comments of the recently active ones, they look really likely to be alts. Like, all three that I looked at had comments that made it very clear it was this person writing pseudonymously. (E.g. writing on their signature issue, and saying they couldn't go into more detail due to fear of self-doxxing; or somebody literally saying that the alt's claims reminded them of the public writings of the notorious guy years ago).
Obviously I'm not naming the account, but this functionality turned out way creepier than I thought the moment I tried it on the account of somebody who has a reason to disassociate from an existing public persona, but still wants to participate here.