Until there are no bad actors, anonymous platforms will be both (A) needed (if you have a reason to fear retribution for expressing an opinion—from the state, another citizen or some entity), and (B) abused (if you want to dishonestly manipulate public opinion, you can do so without risking your reputation, create masses of duplicate accounts, etc.)—it really looks like a catch-22. Platforms will keep trying to navigate A vs. B, but it’s a losing game.

In a perfect world without mentally unhealthy/malicious people and corrupt states, anonymous platforms will be useless.

Your reply (and many others) assumed that I was advocating censorship, but I did not and I am not. All I am advocating is that whatever your idea is should be reflected on your reputation.

I do find it interesting that there is such a strong revulsion to this concept (“ideas I utter are tied to my reputation”) but anonymous speech is an evolutionarily recent development. Humans have done quite well for tens of thousands of years with a complete absence of it. Somehow our current culture can look at the wasteland of human lives and endeavour brought about by unfettered anonymous speech and somehow still still see it as an unalloyed good. Curious.

> All I am advocating is that whatever your idea is should be reflected on your reputation.

I think the difference is when society figured out the internet enabled mobs and mobs can snap reputations like twigs on a whim. There are folks who deny this occurs but there are high profile cases that exemplify it, and if you keep your ears open you'll see it happen to laypeople people too. Brendan Eich is one such person, as frustrating as he can be at times, and as much as he and I may disagree at times, being cancelled from being Mozilla's CEO was a direct harm to both Mozilla and himself. A harm which was led by a mob that had fuel poured on it by OKCupid.

People didn't just invent a need for anti-censorship, it was always prevalent within our society, but mostly locked to a local level until the internet gave it a global voice.

That's the american-centric view. The global populace is still dealing with authoritarian regimes that want to control all speech, which these tools would aid in fighting against. We had political forces in the form of "think of the children" and "terrorism" which could rise to the level of an authoritarian state in the US, but we're probably a ways off from that. It would be nice if these tools existed (and were updated) by the time that arrives, if it does.

Thanks for your reply. I think you're touching on a different issue as well: "Everything I say is knowable by everyone, forever." For most of human history the words and ideas that came out of most people's mouths were not recorded and were almost immediately forgotten. This tends to winnow out many bad ideas, as only something truly remarkable would bear the effort of writing it down or of remembering it to speak to someone else later.

Our current social media world does not allow people to make mistakes or to learn, explore and develop. That is one of the many reasons I stay off it completely (forestalling any 'HN is social media' comments, I post only here (and that carefully) and from my Reddit porn account (whose reputation has been so thoroughly destroyed, I do not even try to bring good from it.)) It is very liberating. And later, when I take over the world, there will not be 20 years of public posts where I learned who and what I was about to drag me down.

Anyway, thanks for your thoughts.

Sorry if I frustrated you. If you frustrate me, I'll try to overlook it. Nevertheless, we are now in a different era, where enough people (a majority or a plurality) can move to cancel someone, and mostly get their way for a time. What to do about it? Pick user-first software that isn't beholden to coordinated cancel mobs. I'm not touting just Brave here, there are many such options now.

Under this idea, most likely the U. S. would have never existed [1].

[1] https://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/cs201/projects/anony...

The world is complex and nuanced, and any "best possible world" will therefore be complex and nuanced. I did not advocate for the complete removal of all anonymity, which might have prevented important historical events. I advocated for "whatever your idea is should be reflected on your reputation".

In a "best possible world" there is a time and place for anonymous speech. But "I can create troll accounts faster than you can ban them" (which is what we have now) is not on the road to that world.

> I did not advocate for the complete removal of all anonymity

You claimed that there was a time of "complete absence of anonymous speech" and that this time was "quite well".

> Humans have done quite well for tens of thousands of years with a complete absence of it. Somehow our current culture can look at the wasteland of human lives and endeavour brought about by unfettered anonymous speech and somehow still still see it as an unalloyed good.

By what standard are you calling the tens of thousands of years of 'a complete absence of anonymous speech' "quite well" and the present "a wasteland of human lives"?