alt Hacker News> I was getting some weird responses from people who went through a lot of effort to track me down
I'll just say that this is not new. Some decades ago I wrote a Letter to the Editor in my local paper about a local issue. As per their policy, it was published with my real name. I got several anonymous letters sent to my home about it, plain envelope, typed, no return address. None were out-and-out crazy but they all clearly were from people who had at least one or two loose screws and far too much time on their hands.
The physical vs. online privacy shift is interesting to me as someone who was growing up during the rise of the personal use of the internet. In those times we were warned never to post any personal information or names online. But our physical house addresses and phone numbers were all in the whitepages.
Now we post so much personal info online, but whitepages are no longer a thing (although some voter registration systems have that data publicly available, or other for-profit companies that sell our scraped data)