I’m mostly worried about people stumbling upon LW e.g. from the title text of that comic, starting browsing the site, reading my comments, and recognizing my username from elsewhere. Granted, someone motivated to doxx me enough to overcome trivial inconveniences could still do so, but I don’t think that’s likely to happen enough for me to worry about it.
At a guess, I’d say that the chances of there being:
someone you know
who read that particular XKCD
and was led to LW for the first time as a consequence of it
and continued to read enough of the site to stumble on your username
and was motivated to dox you for whatever reason
...is too low to motivate precipitous action. XKCD’s pretty popular, but it’s not so popular that I’d expect this to lead to a very big spike in long-term readership; at most you might want to remove your location tag (which I see you’ve already done) and maybe lurk for a while.
You might be underestimating P(X read that particular XKCD | I know X), as I am a physicist, and know a fair number of engineers and computer scientists and a few mathematicians;
you might be underestimating P(X continued to read enough of the site to stumble on my username | X was led to LW for the first time) -- I’ve commented a lot, including on many of the posts linked to on the about page and the welcome threads;
it’s not motivated doxxing (which I know is very very unlikely) that I’m worried about—comments which I would mind someone I know in meatspace reading comprise a sizeable minority of all my comments (not just for the consequences to myself—I’d dislike, as a terminal value, certain people to hear certain things I’ve said about certain topics, especially other people).
Keep in mind that you can delete posts from LW, but you can’t delete things from internet archives.
I’m mostly worried about people stumbling upon LW e.g. from the title text of that comic, starting browsing the site, reading my comments, and recognizing my username from elsewhere. Granted, someone motivated to doxx me enough to overcome trivial inconveniences could still do so, but I don’t think that’s likely to happen enough for me to worry about it.
At a guess, I’d say that the chances of there being:
someone you know
who read that particular XKCD
and was led to LW for the first time as a consequence of it
and continued to read enough of the site to stumble on your username
and was motivated to dox you for whatever reason
...is too low to motivate precipitous action. XKCD’s pretty popular, but it’s not so popular that I’d expect this to lead to a very big spike in long-term readership; at most you might want to remove your location tag (which I see you’ve already done) and maybe lurk for a while.
You might be underestimating P(X read that particular XKCD | I know X), as I am a physicist, and know a fair number of engineers and computer scientists and a few mathematicians;
you might be underestimating P(X continued to read enough of the site to stumble on my username | X was led to LW for the first time) -- I’ve commented a lot, including on many of the posts linked to on the about page and the welcome threads;
it’s not motivated doxxing (which I know is very very unlikely) that I’m worried about—comments which I would mind someone I know in meatspace reading comprise a sizeable minority of all my comments (not just for the consequences to myself—I’d dislike, as a terminal value, certain people to hear certain things I’ve said about certain topics, especially other people).