I’ve always thought I was pretty good at reading a piece of text and knowing who wrote it. Obviously it doesn’t apply to everything I’ve ever read (I can’t pick up a book blindly and think, “Ahh, vintage Chaucer!”). But for people I know well, or people’s writing I read often, I can often tell who it is without seeing them named. We all have our own little idiosyncrasies that make our writing a little different from others. On the main page here, I can often tell whose post I’m reading before I get to their name.

I used to use “n1zyy” as my username everywhere, but eventually got creeped out by the fact that Googling it turned up basically everything I’ve ever done. Not that I have anything to hide, but it was a little creepy. I now have a handful of names (short and predictable, but I’m not nursing any major secrets online) that I use, which were deliberately chosen to be devoid of any real meaning and common enough to blend in.

Kyle eventually joined Metafilter after catching my obsession with Ask MetaFilter. I believe he knew my username, though there was never any great outing ceremony of my true identity. One day he was reading an answer and asked if the user that posted it was me. It was.

Metafilter’s a site composed largely of people who write well. I think good writing helps ‘hide’ people, as there are fewer “quirks” in the way people write. Still, Kyle had read enough of my writing to pick up on subtle cues and figure out who I was. (Even though I still maintain he already knew!) Really bad writing does the same—wen u right like dis its hard bcz evry1 duz it now.

I’m now posting a bit on a forum where a lot of people (including me) post anonymously, but there are some obvious trolls. I was talking with another member tonight about the suspected identities of a few of them, and he said he had reason to believe that two users were the same person. After about 60 seconds of reading the writing style in the two posts, I was convinced. The user(s) had a fairly peculiar writing style.

For fun once, I tried taking on an alternative identity somewhere I was fairly well-known as a member. The hardest part for me was the simple act of writing, because I worried that my use of a different IP and username linked to a different e-mail would all be undone when people noticed that I wrote the same way. So I spent an indordinate amount of time working on writing differently, which is somewhat like trying to walk differently. The inclination is to do it weirdly, which is the only easy “different” we can do. It was actually a pretty challenging exercise.