That's not really an apt metaphor. It would be more accurate to say "why put locks on your door if everybody has the key?"

Well, if the site gets big enough, there will be services like SnoopSnoo, and they will scrape the site if hidden histories are a thing. The average person will not see a difference should they decide to use such a service.

There was also the idea of marking posts/comments as "anonymous" before posting, which is basically just a built-in throwaway creator. This actually makes the information inaccessible.

The other point that was brought up was that other sites might be created for the explicit purpose of maintaining user comment history. That would be problematic if it happened, and if users feel like comment history is a feature they want to see then such a site will certainly appear given time. It's better to just maintain the history on tildes.

bringing back something I said last year to use in our current conversation

I like the idea of hiding comments, or at least making it an option to do so, mostly for this reason. On reddit and other sites, a tactic in arguments that I see used way too often is to go searching through someone's older comments and drag up some old point to use against them. I think that ~ should probably avoid allowing such tactics to become commonplace, and, though the comment tagging system or moderation could be used to this effect, it almost seems like a better idea just to remove the possibility to begin with.

I'm not asking for this to hide from my statements

You sort of are though... because you’re asking each of your comments to be judged in a vacuum, in total isolation from the rest of your history, which makes identifying patterns of behavior impossible. Sentences communicated through text are often hard enough to judge the intent behind but without a history is impossible. This makes determining good and bad faith impossible.

Another issue is it renders determining context impossible. E.g. A joke made at someone’s expense when viewed in total isolation could be seen as bad-faith in every single case... but with a user history available the context of that joke could be determined, perhaps coming to realize the users know each other.

I have said impossible a lot because that’s what total privacy does in regards to accountability, renders it impossible. And if you want to see what total privacy, zero accountability and 0 ability to determine context does to community culture... just take a look at 4chan.

I had written up a few paragraphs to respond to this and right as I was proof reading it my power went out, so I'm just going to go with the highlights of the points I wanted to make. (And now ironically I seem to have rewritten them although maybe not as nuanced)

For your first example, if someone decides to denounce your opinion because of where you post, that is something actionable by the community and yourself inside of the discussion. They can be called out on their logical fallacies and if they continue to do it people can look at their history and realize that this person may not be arguing in good-faith.

Having a post history attached to your identity helps give that identity credibility which you can either build or destroy over time, backed up by evidence instead of hearsay. Not having that post history presents issues with this credibility, and does nothing to prevent people from not making assumptions about your beliefs and the accusations. You solve "Oh you post in X sub" by discussing it and hopefully having a good-faith community that calls it out.

As for not wanting information you state publicly to be found... well, you cant expect privacy of information when you say it on what is effectively the new public square for discussion. You are responsible for what information people can glean from you in your public statements and nothing can change that, especially when you cant demand other people forget what they read when your comments ARE public and not hidden.

Perhaps some compromise between the two of you would be ideal?

If there was an option that was hiding all but the last month or two of someones post history, it would allow people to check if someone was a troll or should be ignored for some other obvious reason without giving an easily accessible source of all the information that has ever been posted to the account.

"Oh, you post in X sub so your argument is invalid" ...?

I feel like that refrain would simply be a one way ticket to getting your posts moderated here.

This kind of behaviour should be stopped through good moderation.

If you've reevaluated your opinion, you could explain that up to the person who is trying to use your former opinion like a cudgel. Keep the conversation going and everyone can learn from the experience. I think this would be a good thing.

Don't get me wrong, I do understand the concerns of the privacy-minded. But I've never understood the assumption of (or uh, desired entitlement to?) the privacy of one's comments on a public site. Maybe I'm just old-fashioned, but I grew up on an internet where you only posted things if you were committed to them being copied and shared among strangers forever. The level of tracking that modern sites do is obviously several degrees beyond that, but I still maintain that if you are uncomfortable with your comments being seen, then perhaps you should reconsider posting them at all.

You mentioned the admins alone. Do you think moderators/high-trust users should be disallowed access to these hypothetical privacy-minded users' comment histories? How then would they be able to effectively moderate their communities?

Once ~ gets bigger, especially once the hierarchy niches gets fleshed out more that is an unreasonable expectations for admins to be the only ones capable of holding people accountable. Imagine if all of Usenet had only a handful of people able to monitor for abuse, harassment, historic bad behavior, etc.

My issue in general with full focus on absolute privacy and privacy alone is that ~ is going to built on trust and empowering trusted users with powerful tools to help manage their communities. A completely blank slate user history renders most of those tools pointless since with that, each group will be in complete and total isolation in terms of ability to judge whether someone is acting in good faith or not.

Privacy and security is important... but so is accountability for actions. Finding the balance between the three is the key, IMO. Which is why I have suggested limiting user history to 3-6 months, a long enough period someone’s actions won’t be judged in total isolation, but not long enough for a complete deep dive on someone in order to dox them. I have even suggested perhaps setting the minimum history to 3-6 months and then allowing users to opt-in to allowing more to be kept/revealed. E.g. I like having access to my entire user history stretching back forever and would prefer if ~ gives me the option to revisit my own comments and posts no matter how old they are.