People are kicked out of bars for being assholes and it’s because they have been drinking their inhibitions are lowered and judgement of consequences is disrupted. Similarity to anonymous assholes on the Internet - their inhibitions are lowered because there’s no consequence.
I don’t think we should require names use or prohibit anonymous contributions. But the culture of the internet is pretty bad in this regard today when millions of anonymous people spend millions of hours getting riled up at shit posts from anonymous people.
Pseudonyms that are not trivially created and discarded can build reputation and will generally behave themselves (see Urbit’s approach to this problem).
Anonymous accounts incentivize awful behavior (see 4chan).
Real life is different because you’re not truly anonymous in person - you’re recognizable most of the time and identifiable. There are also more in person norms and social constraints.
The exception to this in real life might be mobs, where the chaos and confusion can provide some anonymity and well - people in mobs don’t behave that well either.
I think a lot of it comes down to social norms. From what I remember, 4chan was almost boringly pleasant outside /b/. Because the norm and moderation were towards thoughtful posting.
On the other hand pseudonymous reddits with the norm of knee jerk responses and political twitter are awful. Because that’s the encouraged norm.
Personally, I think the important factors for maintaining a civil community is a focus on civility, some overt selection of topics (vs. having a group that's about everything), and a lot of moderation work in the background that prevents the decay of standards. Social norms, unfortunately, don't maintain themselves.
HN also has great moderation (thanks DanG) and a strict set of rules which helps.
If HN was truly anonymous (everyone posted under anon accounts) I think it would decay and I’m not sure DanG would be able to save it.
I do think Urbit’s approach to this (low cost to creating an ID) is a really good one for handling this problem and the general problem of spam decentralized, and at scale.
Huh? People get "censored" all the time on this site due to incivility.
Edit: I misread the parent comment, sorry :)
There are no real-world consequences for being an anonymous jerk online, so you are comparing apples and oranges.
> On the other hand, you have to show government ID to walk into a bar and yet people are kicked out for bad behavior all the time.
That's because under the influence of alcohol, one stops caring as much about real world consequences.
Being anon online is (somewhat) like being a drunk in a bar (for some people).
Your examples here have proven the opposite of what you were trying to say.
And my reputation does not follow between groups either. I can even have completely distinct friend groups for different activities. Nobody at boxing class knows anybody I work with and the people that hang out with me at a bar can be a completely new set all over. I could even use different names in all these groups! :O
Yet we're all perfectly civil.
The same works online. I choose to use `swizec` everywhere, but is `ralston3` the same as `@r_ralston3` on twitter? Who knows. Does it matter? Not in the least. Look at us being perfectly fine fellows to each other.
On the other hand, you have to show government ID to walk into a bar and yet people are kicked out for bad behavior all the time.