Feature Suggestion: one way anonymity

This strategy didn't work well for Scott Alexander, and will fail for you in a similar situation -- if someone decides to publish an article containing your name (so it will appear in search results for your name), linking the semi-anonymous article (where people coming from their article will be able to verify that it is you).

The name that would appear on such posts is "anonymous" but the name would be a link to the author's user profile. 

If your username is your real name, then the link to your profile contains your real name, and therefore the HTML code of the semi-anonymous article also contains your real name. Not sure if this is enough for search engines to show the article when people search for your name.

Trivial Inconveniences [? · GW] seems relevant. As has been mentioned, this doesn't provide anything close to perfect anonymity, and it isn't intended to. What it does is it adds a trivial inconvenience for people looking to internet-stalk you, which we know can be very powerful. Actually, I think the inconvenience is a lot more than trivial.

I really like things like this. I think it's possible we could do a "decent enough" job, though it's impossible to have a solution without risk.

One thing I've been thinking about is a browser extention. People would keep a list of things, like, "User XYZ is Greg Hitchenson", and then when it sees XYZ, it adds annotation". 

Lots of people are semi-anonymous already. They have psuedonyms that most people don't know, but "those in the know" do. This sort of works, but isn't formalized, and can be a pain. (Lots of asking around: "Who is X?")

Have you considered creating a separate account and the dropping a link to your main account in the second account's bio? I know at least one person on LW who does something analogous to this.

Why not go one step further and allow using throwaway accounts or not publicly link to the poster's profile? The association would still be visible to the administrators/moderators in case some action needs to be taken.

On the forum I run, we have 2 million+ registered users without real names but with emails and I'm sure that there are also users here who would like to post some things semi-anonymously. Whether this option actually gets used would depend a ton on the defaults and how this choice is presented visually.

This is associated with a risk of anonymity breaking at some point because of a bug. Measures that guard against this risk in the source code and tests can be taken, but the claim that they won't bitrot and get replaced with something less reliable can't be made legible.

The only way to achieve that would be to prevent outside search engines from indexing posts. Otherwise people can always use Google search (or whatever) to find what you've written. And that's probably the first way that a lot of people search.