FilterHN

Ask HN: Please give us an option to hide our username in the upper right corner

3 points

1 hour ago

| 3 comments

I'm often around others (bus, work, standing in line on my phone) and I don't want people to know my HN username. Many sites display the username in the upper right corner and it seems it's a privacy issue. Can we have an option to turn it off or just remove it completely?

In general I wish it would become a trend to stop displaying usernames at the to of sites. Reddit for example does this and I wish they didn't.

▲

vunderba

45 minutes ago

[-]

Assuming you can run Tampermonkey, you can use my script which I've adapted to hide both the score and the username. It’s a script I personally use because I don’t like seeing my score since it just feels like a silly number, and I’d rather focus on the content than on whether my "number" goes up or down.

If you install this script in the Tampermonkey extension for Firefox/Chrome, it will automatically hide your username and your score on all HN pages.

https://gist.github.com/scpedicini/43f95d5e00af49110c41754ea...

▲

swingandamiss

42 minutes ago

[-]

Thanks. This is very useful. I'm surprised at push back I always get on this topic so it's nice to see I'm not the only one. I thought tech people were concerned about privacy, but I guess not? I know discord and a few other apps offer a "streamer mode" that hides the username so you don't broadcast it to your audience if you stream, I wish more apps and sites adopted that feature.

▲

d3Xt3r

57 minutes ago

[-]

Isn't it a bigger issue that they can even see your screen in the first place? Like what if you have to type a password or PIN into some app/website, or some other personal info?

So I'd recommend a different approach, like getting a privacy screen guard so the screen can only be viewed from a limited angle. Or get a pair of AR/XR glasses so only you can see the content and you can keep your device's screen off.

▲

swingandamiss

45 minutes ago

[-]

I rarely type my password or PIN. And if I did, I'd make sure to hide my screen. But I frequently casually read HN, reddit, and other sites casually and in public places. It would be nice if my username wasn't so visible to others.

▲

downbad_

1 hour ago

[-]

Then log out.

▲

swingandamiss

1 hour ago

[-]

Then I can't vote up/down, hide, or flag posts and logged out users will get cached pages.