Also Yelp, like certain other evil tech companies (like Google and FB) probably tries to brainwash its employees into thinking that they're not evil, and this feature will help with that: "see! we're policing racism against BIPOCs! we are on the right side of history."
You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...