Adding the ability to hide your post history is an awful feature.
Made spotting trolls a lot harder
this post was submitted on 15 Mar 2026
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Meh. It's a required feature at this point. Someone has stalked me on lemmy too.
At some point people started taking the internet beyond seriously. As if every random thing that's mashed into the keyboard is tantamount to sworn affidavit than must be held up to scientific peer review.
It creates far more issues than it benefits. Hiding enables bad actors much more so than not hiding does, as it allows them to more easily disguise their history of bad faith arguing.
I find most hidden profiles on redit have been religious fundies or libertarians.
There's a lot brigading state subreddits to influence elections right now :/
Yeah I've been stalked and death threatened myself, but only here. Hurray for .ml users, alienating the world one worker at a time!
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Reddit is a shitty forum. American BS policies. The moderators can ban anyone they like on their own terms, being negligent or asocial. I had an account with tons of karma and I was critisising racism. I.was.critisising.racism. The moderater did not read careful, just thought I was racist and banned me. No response to any of my rightful appeal. Shitty forum.
I got banned for making fun of a nonexistent race, and I was doing it to mock the concept of racism itself.
Once had a guy join a discord I was in, acted normally for a few minutes, interacted with the crowd, the whole jig. Then, out of nowhere, they start pinging me and posting my reddit history from like 7 years ago. Really weird. They got banned pretty quickly for doxxing.
The funniest part was that they were trying to shame me or something by posting comments I'd made on various NSFW subs and posts. Told them to keep digging, I was sure there was some good stuff in there. They got very upset over that lmao.
I had a guy suddenly start stalking me, following me around and posting rude comments in response to every post I made -- his username was even a slight modification of mine. I was starting to get pissed until he posted "Mom always did like me better" and I realized it was my brother who had discovered my username while hanging out in my room.
And thats why I keep accounts separate. I don't link anything to anything, I have different usernames on different services and whatnot. Even if someone somehow figures out my (now deleted) Discord and reddit usernames and starts spamming them to someone, I can just say "well thats not me lol" In that hypothetical scenario, I'd hope they people I spent time chatting with, would believe me and not the weirdo who started spamming someones reddit history.
But also, I don't care. I try to be myself all the time, so at worst, the creeps will just be spamming stuff that I normally do/say.
The second someone wastes their time in your post history you've already won
A significant amount of the time it helps me realize "no, I'm not misunderstanding, dude is just a racist asshole."
Sometimes you see a wild political take on Lemmy and you open their profile and see them praising Russia and China.
You don't even need to open their history – you just look at their instance. I love Lemmy.
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I don't know if I'd go that far. It's one of the easiest ways to identify troll behavior. Sure going through and analyzing every post is insane, but being able to click on someone's history and see that oh they say stupid stuff for reactions regularly is pretty helpful. I'd also argue that it's helpful when people are making intellectually dishonest arguments when they have ulterior motives. Racist dog whistles for instance, when someone makes an argument that's a pretty obvious dog whistle and then claims they're just asking questions the Post history can sometimes help cut through that nonsense.
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Nah bro, I remember that post where some guy was criticizing OP's cooking, so OP checks that dude's post history and finds how he drinks his own piss.
I'm pretty sure OP won that argument by just mentioning that
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I would argue that the second you get into an argument online with strangers you've already lost
Wait....
Fuck.
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I get the need for privacy given how many people have a habit of stalking or digging through post history for malicious purposes, but it also removes a lot of accountability. Accountability is equally as important, given that people turn into monsters without it.
They did this to hide the bots in AI. It's BS.
makes it ripe for scams and disinformation
You can search the username and their history will come up though.
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I had mine hidden because you say one controversial thing in the wrong community and they're digging for dirt in comments from years ago.
But if I hide my history, I will not have the satisfaction of wasting the time of a belligerent no-lifer...
I don't understand how that's supposed to work, you'd have to have posted some bad takes, and even if you did, "hey I made the wrong call based off what I believed at the time, I now understand where I was misled" isn't going to turn anyone against you.
It really only affects people who don't stand behind their words.
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I feel like most of those accounts with hidden history are bots
Bots or nazis. It's real convenient that we can't see the posts they make on /r/GenZFourthReich or whatever
Yes. It’s not good for reddit’s business if you can easily tell bot accounts, so they introduced this new feature
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I had one guy who was a real fucking creep go through my post history. So I honestly understand wanting it to be private.
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I never hid mine, I only deleted comments when I made a glaringly obvious mistake, such as commenting in the wrong post, or completely misreading the original post.
Comment, be honest, and let the chips fall where they may, is the rule I follow. If someone wants to call me out as a hypocrite, feel free. We're all hypocrites.
This is an anti feature to hide bots and trolls
Hiding post history is a gift to fascists, like so many other decisions reddit made. One of those funny coincidences that keeps happening.
Clicking someone's username was like dogs sniffing butts. You want to know: what kind of asshole am I dealing with? But dipshits trapped in tribalist worldviews only knew that people would slap them down for hypocrisy, so wah wah wah admins come save me, if blocking to force the last word wasn't enough. I had so many idiots sneer about /r/LinkIsCute posts, like I'm supposed to be shamed about liking a popular character in a clearly intended fashion. It's just the desperate grasping modern version of some child with a quivering upper lip countering 'yeah, well... nice hair!'
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