A more useful addition would be a contributions calendar similar to GitHub's [2] but focused on which time zones the user is active within, and importantly, the latency of the user's replies. It's trivial to fake geographic location observed through source IP addresses (or even RTT multilateration) but much harder to fake time zones a user is active within, particularly if monitoring latency of replies.

edit: To further clarify, I don't think a contributions calendar would be beneficial to HN either. I've never cared to think about the country a commenter resides in, and don't care about username/real name either unless the commenter is appealing to their own authority (e.g. "I am the author of this software"). Even then, the usefulness of an appeal to own authority is often limited to the ability to reverse lookup the user's personal website (which itself is proven to be notable from other sources) for a link back to their HN profile.

[1] https://impliedchaos.github.io/ip-alloc/

[2] https://docs.github.com/en/account-and-profile/concepts/cont...

Moderation: Won't meaningfully impact moderation. HN can already see this info and they are the ones that take moderator action. It may hurt moderation/increase moderation costs because people may tend more to report content based on country instead of content.

Transparency: Outright influencer content (political or corporate) doesn't make it to the front page enough for it to matter, or if it does, I can't tell.

Anti-abuse: Same as moderation. Abuse reports should be processed based on content and not country of origin.

Meaningfully improves discussion quality: If a story is about something happening in a particular country, people who look like they are from that country might get asked more or different questions. This puts people from that country on the spot. They may get increased unsolicited communication or thread hijacks. Right now, if someone wants to be on that spot, they can voluntarily identify, either in the profile or in the post.

Possibly something useful would be a rule/requirement that claiming to be from a country different than the one you made an account from--seen either in a profile or post--requires verification for further posting, but if you never make such a contrary claim, the verification is not needed.

The reason why it works on Elon's kingdom is that - as far as I know - the Onion services died when Elon took over (because the people who cared about those simply left) and over at X - as far as I understand - they really, really try and discourage you from connecting and posting from Tor and VPN.

Also, when people turn discussions into absolute flame wars or decide to post stuff which could turn nasty in the comment section there's always dang. And believe me when I say that even when community moderation fails for whatever reason the rules (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) will get enforced when needed.

Make it optional that you don't need to display it but you cannot misrepresent your country.

Folks are allowed to be knowledgeable about things that are not directly relevant in their “county of origin” in the same way they are allowed to be ignorant about things that are relevant.

If not blocking VPN's, then display "Possible VPN".

Perhaps to get some adoption, make it opt-in and also let users enable flag-display at the risk of giving off 4chan vibes.

But if people don't care, then cool.