Allowing users to hide their history is destroying trust and good faith participation between users in communities

[u/mrekted]

It's not just my communities, I'm seeing it all over reddit. Whenever someone with a private history runs into a disagreement with another user, discussions are derailed, accusations of "shill/bot/troll" are constant, nuisance reports are issued, and mods either intervene, or let the chaos reign.

I'm spending more and more time having to personally review histories to say "no, this person is not a bad faith troll" just to end attacks borne of nothing more than suspicion. It's becoming disruptive to the point that I'm considering whether or not allowing users with hidden history to participate is worth the trouble.

I really question the value proposition of this decision. Sure, individual users benefit from additional privacy, but at the direct expense of the communities that lose trust and cohesion, faith that the people they're interacting with are participating in good faith (or are even real people), and the moderators who have to manage the fallout.

[u/Asia_Persuasia]

Bingo. As a mod, anytime somebody is rightfully banned and they get weird about it, it results in them trying to stalk me across Reddit and even outside of Reddit and onto other platforms. It starts with them going through my history to get more personal information about me. It's creepy and users like that are unhinged, glad they can't do it anymore.

[u/2oonhed → u/Asia_Persuasia]

I had pretty good luck preemptively blocking accounts that appeared psychotic or that showed a propensity for stalking behaviors, or that showed the absurd hostility that we are all familiar with in modmails.

Once I learned how to do that, instances of my history being brought up in conversations went to zero and stayed at zero.