If you're a woman online trying to hide your gender from bigots/sexists/perverts, you have to make sure you don't say anything that'll give you away. You can't talk about being pregnant or morning sickness or any kind of events in your life that are female exclusive... or near exclusive. And online videogames that have realtime audio/visual with other players? Those features are pretty much off limit since your appearance/voice will most likely reveal your gender... most of the time.

If you're a minority online trying to hide your identity from bigots/racists, you have to avoid talking too much about your family history or parts of your childhood growing up because usually those contain events that'll give strong hints to your nationality. For example, if I wanted to hide the fact that my family is from Nigeria... I can't talk about my trips to visit my family in Nigeria. I can't talk about the fact that my wedding was in Nigeria since I know what most people would assume and/or ask once they learned that fact. I can't tell you how/where I first saw my wife. I probably can't tell you some of my favorite meals. Sure, on some sites like HN that's mostly tech focused I can probably go a pretty long time without anyone figuring out I'm black. But sites that aren't tech focused, sites that are more... i dunno... human focused, with topics all about life in general, not bringing up my background will be harder if I want to partake in conversation.

Historically discriminated-against sectors of our society shouldn't have to double-think every statement they make online or offline to keep some part of their identity a secret. If we go that route, then the those sectors are on constant defense and the bigots are on constant offense... and eventually, bigots win because their biases will only grow. This is equiv to the military's "Don't-ask-don't-tell" position on Homosexuality. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don't_ask,_don't_tell ...at best, it's a temporary "solution"(BIG quotes here) but it did not solve the problem at all.

Ironically, the kind of Internet you push for is flawed because it will make everyone self-censor and "doublethink; which is dangerous. We must protect unabridged free speech, even if it is ugly, lest we fall into the trap of an Internet where a lot of people are speaking but are not really saying anything.

As an increasingly global conversation on the internet is taking place with people in places and groups that didn't have a place or a voice before we're muddying the waters of stereotypes and accurate attempts of guessing someone's background.

Anecdote 1: I have a friend I met online. I've known him for about 6 years. We never talked about our families, shared pictures of each-other, shared real names, or shared anything personally identifiable apart for similar interests and vague references. After about two years of talking to this friend every day, I knew a few things: his family wasn't rich, he lived in a crime filled area Richmond, he smoked weed every day, he loves hip-hop, and he's not a fan of school. Now, most people with their biases and stereotypes would say "oh he's probably a young black male" and they'd have a good chance of being right. Around this time we all started talking about our personal lives. I then find out that this guy is a 25y/o white male studying a masters degree in physics who sports and amazing beard. My initial image of him is gone completely.

By anonymizing interests, beliefs, and political standings we can then apply them to anyone of any race of any gender because we don't know the truth. Our guesses could be wrong, and often are, and the ability to stereotype breaks down. Comments could suddenly be from anyone and we are forced to pay attention to the argument and not who's arguing.

You replied with an anecdote that illustrates how you got someone else's race wrong, but telling the parent poster that you disagree with his personal experience and coping mechanisms? That doesn't sit right with me.

I don't think you meant it to sound like "you're wrong about how you've learned to deal with bigots"--which would be a pretty awful thing to tell him!--but it did sound that way.

I wonder if there's a way to rephrase your rebuttal with more empathy and understanding.

Yes true. However his race didn't ultimately affect how I viewed our friendship or how I interact with him. It's an example that anonymity can break the stereotypes that we put on activities and people by removing identity. If I was wrong in my assumption about him then I may be wrong in my assumption about smtddr after learning things about his life.

>I don't think you meant it to sound like "you're wrong about how you've learned to deal with bigots"--which would be a pretty awful thing to tell him!--but it did sound that way.

You're correct here. I did not intend that. I'm going to read over both posts again and see why you think that and how I can better phrase my arguments in the future.

>That doesn't sit right with me.

Well thank you for expressing it without resorting to personal attacks and anger.

e.g. a conversation about bra quality; one can talk about how sexy they look, and if someone brings up "but lacy bras can often be overpriced and underfunctional" they more or less out themselves as a person who may know much about bras. Similarly if someone wanted to talk about mythologies, if someone goes "actually nowadays people utilize this in their traditions; I was visiting family in P region where they still practice this and they just use B now" clearly outs them.

Anonymity also tends to just have everyone assumed to be default, which is white/male and breaking out of that is assumed to be "breaking anonymity" when in reality it's merely... not being the default.

("We will never ship a product without bugs, there will always be bugs somewhere." OK, so which bugs are we going to fix? Well thats a judgement about how serious the bugs are. And people affected by different bugs will give different judegments there.)