I would cautiously endorse some of these things if they were very specifically opt IN.

It's useful to me to be a semirandom-appearing string of letters and numbers and nothing else. I'm perfectly okay with others populating their cosmology with whatever shape they judge me to be.

If someone wants to click on my page, fine. They'll see I have an embarrassing number of badges and a disturbing number of followers. I don't really want that to enter into the conversation, though. It shouldn't matter. Those are not things that I have done, they are not things I am proud of, they are external judgements of an inhuman system attempting to quantify me via an arbitrary metric that may or may not have the first thing to do with my life.

These things matter. Reddit recently rolled out a gauge by which you can see how much Reddit Gold a person has bought... and how much Reddit Gold has been bought for them. Mine is disgusting. Donations on my behalf have powered Reddit for about a week's worth (I think one gilded comment is good for six minutes). That's the kind of shit you get judged for - "why are you such an asshole when clearly someone bought you years and years worth of Reddit Gold?" Fuck you, I'm an asshole because I feel like being an asshole. Don't hold me to some imaginary standard that I had nothing to do with.

You can hide that one, though, which makes it moot. I don't have to deal with that one. The moderator one, though...

So when diemorz folded up the stattit tent, there was no real way to see who modded what, which fucked other mods over because they couldn't see who had any qualifications for modding. So now every user's page shows how many subreddits they mod - public and private. Result? A whole bunch of mods pruned a whole bunch of moderatorships all of a sudden because the rabble began to rouse.

If we're going to do avatars, floating stat boxes and all the rest, I want the opt-in. Not as in "I'll show you some cutesy icon avatar because this user hasn't uploaded a picture or tied their Facebook account to this terrible page" but DARKNESS. If I haven't uploaded an avatar, I want you to see nothing. If I haven't given the system permission to show my followers and following, I want you to see nothing. If I haven't given the system permission to show a pop-up window of any kind, I want you to sit there frustrated at the enigma of me.

By the bye, know what I hate? That hubski.com thinks I'm "interested in" anything. That's for me to fill in, not statistical modeling. I'm actually keenly interested in Tuvan throat singing but since that's not a tag we see much, we'll never know. Meanwhile, Hubski thinks I'm "interested in" Reddit when the fact of the matter is I see a lot of ignorance and feel duty bound to dispel it. I'm "interested in" Reddit the way a janitor is interested in spills.

You wanna tag me? Fine. Tag away. So long as nobody gets to see those tags but you and possibly me.

The act of dehumanization is the act of removing control. Right now I have control over the darkness that is my dossier. You start pressuring me into filling that up and we're dehumanizing like it's Krystallnacht.