If not blocking VPN's, then display "Possible VPN".

Perhaps to get some adoption, make it opt-in and also let users enable flag-display at the risk of giving off 4chan vibes.

Privacy first or conscientious exposition of the meta.

I have been advocating that privacy isn’t anyone’s right, it is anyone’s responsibility. Only for the self obsessed to pike my karma and rail their venomous hatred of platforms they use not respecting their identities by ignoring them properly.

I would love to see what you’ve described, though the caveats include those of increased awareness grappling with a whole lot more going on than just the loose strings it has become most popular to pull upon.

And as soon as you shine a light, any creeping critters will scurry, innovating faster to compensate than the mob of yourselves are capable of realizing. The cycle of anonymity and wtf continues to churn. An ouroboros.

Make it optional that you don't need to display it but you cannot misrepresent your country.

A more useful addition would be a contributions calendar similar to GitHub's [2] but focused on which time zones the user is active within, and importantly, the latency of the user's replies. It's trivial to fake geographic location observed through source IP addresses (or even RTT multilateration) but much harder to fake time zones a user is active within, particularly if monitoring latency of replies.

edit: To further clarify, I don't think a contributions calendar would be beneficial to HN either. I've never cared to think about the country a commenter resides in, and don't care about username/real name either unless the commenter is appealing to their own authority (e.g. "I am the author of this software"). Even then, the usefulness of an appeal to own authority is often limited to the ability to reverse lookup the user's personal website (which itself is proven to be notable from other sources) for a link back to their HN profile.

[1] https://impliedchaos.github.io/ip-alloc/

[2] https://docs.github.com/en/account-and-profile/concepts/cont...