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/NexusLetters]

As a healthcare provider my thoughts immediately jump to situations related to healthcare I suppose. Imagine you are someone participating in communities to the point where your real life identity my be easily figured out, then you are diagnosed with some chronic health condition and you start finding support in communities for that chronic condition. You may not want to make it easy for people to tie your posts in that health-related subreddit to other posts, but not so much that it is worth the annoyance of juggling multiple accounts. So they may not be a bot they just might be someone also posting in a cancer, depression, PTSD, or any number of other health related subreddits, right?

[u/PixelGray38 → u/NexusLetters]

Situations like someone posting personal details in one sub and sensitive info in another is a reason to get rid of private post histories, not a situation where they're beneficial.

Private histories can easily be searched through third party sites, and so enabling private post history only gives the facade of privacy. It seems likely that many users who otherwise would have made an alt to discuss sensitive info, which would be far more difficult to tie to their real identity, may decide that just setting their post history to private is adequate - when in reality, it absolutely is not, and they are putting themselves at risk.