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

2•swingandamiss•1h ago

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.

Comments

downbad_•1h ago

Then log out.

swingandamiss•44m ago

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

d3Xt3r•30m 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•18m 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.

vunderba•18m 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•15m 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.

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