It does if you can't determine the accounts are the same. Right now HN does nothing to address these concerns. It is ridiculous anyone finds this acceptable.
Really good point. You could estimate if a [deleted] comment might be from [account X], but you'd only have that one comment to compare. The rest might be from other accounts.
So yea, you'd probably end up with a pile of comments that are more likely linked to [account X], but many of them wouldn't actually be. It would add a ton of noise into the system.
You would get some hints. There have been situations where someone said "like AnimalMuppet said upthread..." or something like that. But they weren't very common. Maybe 1% of my comments could be definitely identified like that.
Is that enough to define a "style" to determine the rest of my comments? Is it enough to doxx me from the comments where someone else names my nick?