(At least Facebook is not quite as bad as Pinterest.)
There is a very vocal group of people in every society that wants to abolish anonymity on the internet. It's scary.
> Not being able to participate anonymously is a bad thing for society. It’s like we’ve all forgotten the necessity of anonymous publishing for maintaining a free society.
To an extent, I'm okay with it being a bit harder to publish anonymously than otherwise
I'm not okay with how difficult it has become to READ anonymously. That's REALLY double-plus-ungood. Consider the simple transaction of buying a copy of 2600 at a local newsstand. For a while, online advertising worked as a revenue stream for publications like that since ads were bought on a pay-per-impression, or even pay-per-click basis, without all the tracking infra surrounding it, but now, monetization only works to the extent that readers allow themselves to be identified and tracked.
The other way to monetize is using subscriptions and paywalls, which is even more explicitly identifying and tracking readers and subscribers. The same goes for practically every way of getting money from readers to publishers and writer's. Nothing comes close to the anonymity of paying cash for a book, newspaper, or magazine. Practically everything we read is tracked, and most means we have of preventing that tracking also circumvent the flow of money to publishers and writers.
It's a good thing that the costs and barriers of publishing and distribution have dropped, but the cost of writing hasn't.
Not being able to participate anonymously is a bad thing for society. It’s like we’ve all forgotten the necessity of anonymous publishing for maintaining a free society.