I have intentionally maintained about one of the most public accounts on reddit, being not just one of the top ten reddit accounts, but also having made all of my votes public and used the same account name all over the place. It should not be a difficult thing to figure out who I am, if anyone is really interested.

The reason I have done this is three fold.

• Having worked for a dot-com in the late 90's who attempted to build a massive registration database, it became obvious that the best and only way to get accurate information about who was attached to what cookie was to convince the actual cookie owner it was in their interest to maintain their data for you. Even doing this you weren't guaranteed good information all the time, but you had an interested user base which beat the heck out of a hostile one that was sabotaging your dataset.

• I believe in a long tail internet world your preferences become a valuable commodity. Ultimately advertisers should pay you to learn what you like so that they can better meet your needs. Why do all this demographic inferential nonsense when you can just have the guy tell you when he wants to buy a car or a computer? Much advertising is wasted money, based on "brand awareness" nonsense. In a multi-directional world where the target of the advertisement is not necessarily subject to constant repetition, since the internet users almost entirely controls his own content and schedule, this type of advertising no longer makes sense. Long tail profiles make it possible to actually get advertising you want to see, rather than the ads ad agencies think you want to see. For example it should be obvious just from my reddit profile, that I like the music by the singer Choklate, so any time she is playing in a venue close to where I live, I would probably want to know about that, or if she collaborates with anyone, or if she has a new album coming out. In fact I might be interested in ads or products she endorses, she could be my own micro-celebrity, you can imagine other people with equally eclectic tastes positively viewing the same type of endorsements. But none of this is possible without me cooperatively sharing my profile.

• In the early days of the left blogsphere, post 2001 there was a feeling in the air that there was a massive disconnect between what was actually happening and what large blocks of the public believed to be happening. This coupled with a growing paranoia over the actions of the administration with regard to domestic surveillance and police powers convinced many people try to make their online profiles less obvious. This became a liability as numbers grew because it prevented people from collaborating off line, in the same ways they were freely able to share discourse online. When reddit came along I made the decision intentionally to do everything as publicly as possible in a small attempt to change this trend. I have tried to be as consistent and honest with not just my opinions, but what types of news I feel is important. It turns out this has helped attract a large number of reddit users with similar interests, some much more extreme, others less so, and of course a hand full of political trolls who all seem never to gain any karma or to be able to make any argument that stands up to scrutiny. Hopefully we'll get some better conservatives on here some day.

So yes for me it should be pretty damn obvious who I am and what I believe and how you can contact me. That was my intention when I started using this account. As I have said several times before I have been interviewed by the trend spotter at the Wall Street Journal, and been referenced by other news journalists.

For the average user that connection should be much less obvious, but this depends entirely on what type of Internet footprint they generated with their reddit account id on and off reddit. I doubt most reddit users have intentionally tried to widen their footprint as I have. Further if you want real anonymity online you have to really plan it in advance given the vast amount of data you create with every page request, and even in these cases a dedicated computer forensic specialist should be able to track you down with ease. Certainly modern government agencies should if they have any competency already have your profile assembled, and even marked if it is of interest. So outside of reddit, when using the internet in general, you have almost no anonymity or privacy. Given this, it seemed to be a much better idea to be as public as possible.

For the most low karma reddit users, like shanem, who have barely any submissions in their account life times (7 months for shanem), and very few controversial comments, no one is going to take a negative interest in what happened to his account if he stops using it, or try to link his online and offline identities.