There are pros and cons. Simply pointing out pros is not enough to win the day.
Communities without abuse problems never even float the idea of banning anonymity. One reason being it’s extremely expensive to do that if not effectively impossible.
The medium is the message. One of the messages of the Internet, as a medium, is abuse.
Now, whether the take-away is "we should try to regulate it to stop that", or "people should stop using it to post details and thoughts, alongside PII and all tied to one traceable identity, that they wouldn't ever post to the public-use notice board at the local grocery store, because it's fucking insane (as Zuck might put it, they're 'dumb fucks') to post like that on the Internet and expect it to go well", or something else, is a matter for consideration.
This implies that many communities with anonymity don't face abuse problems, so anonymity is not the root of the problem. Maybe the problem lies in the subject matter that the community handles and the sort of people that attracts.
Of course if you attract only polite people you don’t have abuse problems regardless of anonymity.
Being attacked and/or killed is almost never voluntary. Viewing anonymous posts on the internet is almost always voluntary. Whatever damage is caused is emergent from the framework of interpretations of the individual. This is closer kin to victimless crime as opposed to real crime than it is conditional rules of engagement. I'm under the impression you're engaging in sophistry though, "This is troubling logic if we expand it to other areas." You're correct, a square peg does not fit in the round hole. And you've also failed to negate the myriad arguments favoring continued anonymity with any salient cons, but have instead erected a strawman.
No it isn't. Social media is a near required part of modern life for a lot of people, especially those in the public sphere. For example, it is near impossible to be a freelance journalist without a social media account. Once you have that account, people are free to push their anonymous posts to you.
>This is closer kin to victimless crime as opposed to real crime than it is conditional rules of engagement.
This is just a baffling comment and shows you are out of touch with the type of abuse we are talking about. I can't imagine you have seen any of this first hand if you think this is "close kin to victimless crime". There are very much victims on the end of this abuse.
And I mean, there was that one time that some dude, in person at a press conference threw a shoe at George W. Bush, the President of the United States of America, he wasn't anonymous, and what level of force could've been deployed as recourse ran up to death, evidently not adequate disincentive.
I can make a victim out of myself by a few alterations in my personal narrative. I choose not to.
It is vastly harder to exclude people spreading harmful lies when they can do it under 27 trivially created and then discarded identities across 12 platform.
It's trivial to argue that people agree to engage with online communities as they agree to engage in in person communities but what is the realistic alternative? Both huddle in your basement AND don't engage online either?
It is unrealistic when your online life is a large part of people's gateway to communication and culture. People deserve to be able to engage in such without also expecting harm.
Furthermore people's online hate touches people's lives with or without their opting for engagement when the festering hate nurtured online gives birth to real world violence, mass murder, coup, collapse of civil society.
It seems trivially true that anonymity enables hate and I support both people's right to voice unpopular but not harmful ideas and consequences for those who call for hate and violence.
You may note my username is simply a plain old name and it's my real name. I cannot any longer support anonymity save for cases where safety demand it.
Please ask yourself how you would feel if this site did that -- or even, in fact, if HN didn't actually make anon accounts (without even requiring an email confirmation) so easy that it's an incredibly common occurrence.
One of the things I like about HN is that while anonymity is certainly possible having an identity which is known to the community (whether that be one's actual identity, or in my case a pseudonymous one), allows us to build (and/or repudiate/destroy, as we choose) credibility and engage in discussions over time.
I will say that 'nobody9999' is not the name on my passport, nor is it the name I use with my bank or (when I actually used such things) social media accounts.
However, a search through HN's archives will, nonetheless, provide a history of my comments and submissions.
Should I turn into a raving asshole, the admins/moderators can sanction/ban me without ever knowing my 'legal' name.
That makes a lot more sense than forcing folks to tie their legal identities to everything they do online.
Do they? To me it seems that people demand credentials in most cases to merit trust from an unknown. I certainly don't hop on 4chan and assume literal factual information is being doled out in every post. Nor on Twitter, nor Fecebook. I might backtest whatever they're proposing, but remain skeptical until I've seen it with my own eyes. And in any case if we look into the annals of history, this is blatantly false, there are reams of examples of people lying in plain sight. Tyrants and demagogues, kings and courts, basically every politician, corporations, and just regular people. Of course we've always had the issue of "determination of truth", history to the victor and such.
>It is vastly harder to exclude people spreading harmful lies when they can do it under 27 trivially created and then discarded identities across 12 platform.
Let's assume we've actually objectively determined the truth: what happens when the liars are let free? They're running around screaming 1+1=3, how is it that they're going to intuited by everyone else? I suspect, as idiots. Naive interventionism in this case turns them into a divided minority instead of an integrated (and stupid) extremity. Upon being separated they go off and get more and more wild, 1+1=5, 10, 0... Their bonds grow in strength because they're made a separate minority, and far less likely to cease their stupidity.
>It's trivial to argue that people agree to engage with online communities as they agree to engage in in person communities but what is the realistic alternative? Both huddle in your basement AND don't engage online either?
For one, I'm not saying that everything everywhere had ought to have the facilities of anonymity, but that instituting a mode of state coercion blanketing every site on the internet is plainly a hazard. But this line is non-sequitur anyways, we're talking about anonymity in social media not in-person interaction.
>It is unrealistic when your online life is a large part of people's gateway to communication and culture. People deserve to be able to engage in such without also expecting harm.
How do you define harm? Here's a salient conundrum: a guy asks a girl out, she tells him she's not interested. Or the obverse, however you like it. In either case they're very likely emotionally wounded. Then what? What do we take from this?
>Furthermore people's online hate touches people's lives with or without their opting for engagement when the festering hate nurtured online gives birth to real world violence, mass murder, coup, collapse of civil society.
The Nazis did this, the Khmer Rogue did this, the Bolsheviks did this all in plain sight. Millions dead in their wake. Violence was often a means to a better end - depending on perspective. The Hellenic empire was established through warfare, Alexander has been intuited as a great unifier, bringing together a vast and highly integrated culture made of many diverse cultures. The French revolution was a supermassive turning point, and largely lead us to be where we are today, but it was extremely violent. The USA was founded after a revolutionary war. The concern is wanton violence, which in any case is rare, and I suspect anonymity on the internet has little to contribute to it overall, despite the narratives espoused by many.
Civil society is free discourse, but we've long been eroding it.
>It seems trivially true that anonymity enables hate and I support both people's right to voice unpopular but not harmful ideas and consequences for those who call for hate and violence.
If we adopt the relativistic standpoint, every opinion is harmful to someone. Utilitarianism is flawed, not everyone can be happy, even negative utilitarianism is flawed.
It seems like we would never have gotten this far if it wasn't for the kind of interactions you are defending and yet you are entangled in a debate with someone who likely grew up in a society where this approach to interaction was championed throughout their life who is simultaneously insisting that it's more harm than good.
More unsettling is the fact that when I read the sentence:
>How do you define harm? Here's a salient conundrum: a guy asks a girl out, she tells him she's not interested. Or the obverse, however you like it. In either case they're very likely emotionally wounded. Then what? What do we take from this?
I began to wonder whether if I said that in public I would end up in a lot of trouble and possibly fired for daring to suggest that being rejected could hurt the feelings of the person being rejected in an equally valid way as it may make the person being asked out feel uneasy.
I eagerly await the day when I do not constantly feel terrorized by the threat of becoming socially outcast for saying something which should be entirely benign but which has become taboo.
It's enough to convince vulnerable people who are calling out the misdeeds of the powerful.
It might not be enough to sway the powerful who compulsively deploy (Gov/Corp/LEO) revenge on people who call them out.
Vulnerable people like the trans community that is often the victim in this type of anonymous social media abuse? Are they allowed to call out the powerful and disproportionately white straight cis men who control social media companies and allow this abuse to continue?
I just find it funny that you are using an argument that is identical to the one used by some of the people you are arguing against.
50% /s
I'm 100% against it tbh. There are people that would be dead without it(just in case anyone missed the sarcasm)
There are also people who are dead because of the abuse they took on social media. Once again, the same argument from both sides.
There is nothing other than anonymity than can provide the pro put forth by the OP. On the other hand, the "cons," you are making non-specific reference towards are achievable by any number of strategies and are a common facet of everyday life.
Instead of banning anonymity (which is a ridiculous thing to do), platforms can provide better tools to allow users to curate content or join discussion rooms.
If you want some type of troll blocker to prevent spam accounts, you can use an anonymous crypto in junction with sign-up for a small fee that is inconsequential to a single user but painful at scale for users that generate many accounts.
An excellent (sarcasm registered and understood, BTW) point.
I am a practitioner of BDSM[0], which is, in some circles, quite controversial.
Despite the fact that my activities are always consensual and never cause harm to anyone, if my employer, clients or others with whom I have unrelated interactions with had negative ideas about such things, I could suffer serious repercussions.
I generally don't discuss such things online (or offline, if those I'm around aren't trusted), but if I did (as I am now), forcing me to link those discussions with my "legal" identity, could inflict real damage on my life -- even though nothing that I do is illegal or harmful.
As such, Vangelis is 100% correct. My private activities, unrelated to my work, are none of my employer's (or anyone else's) business, nor is it a danger/threat to anyone. If I didn't have the veil of pseudonymity here, I would never even hint at it.
And that's the problem with de-anonymization.
Will I remember "lionkor" among thousands of other HN posters and think about your previous posts? No. But I can click and see your other posts, if the site lets me have that feature. And more importantly, your REPUTATION tells me how many people have upvoted your content that you produce. That's what's relevant. I could also maybe see how strongly you support certain positions (tags/badges) in your profile. It's the latter (reputations and badges) which can serve as a filter for people to set up if they want to ignore trolls and sybil accounts: https://xkcd.com/810/
Similarly we don't need human-readable URLs, we could do perfectly fine with hashes and no politics about domain names. The domain name system is just a glorified search engine, and URLs are only useful for landing on the homepage of a site ... anything longer becomes increasingly hard to verbally communicate, and if we're doing it non-verbally then we may as well send a non-readable URL (e.g. via a link or QR code or a javascript variable).
This is what I wish I said! It's about what you say, not who you are, everything else will just be used for bias and "cancelling".
I hang out on IRCs a fair bit, and those are almost perfect for this. Maybe if instead of usernames it would just be numbers, that'd be perfect.
Simple and effective exchange of ideas, without any bias as to "who is this", "what do they look like", etc.
If, OTOH, you find out that that other person is a black guy (assuming you're white), you go through one of two reactions: If you're opinion of blacks is low, then you're really impressed. If you don't particularly like blacks (read: racist), then you're disappointed, and slightly pissed off - that that other guy knows more than you do, or know so much about a very technical topic, when he belongs to a group that you've been told are not very bright.
Humans are interesting creatures in this regards. That's why the right to remain anonymous online should be a given.
That's a very limited perspective.
I do believe there was some racism to GP's remarks, that this hypothetical white guy can only make prejudice assumptions.
Many of us may be programmers but we should still be able to grok things with more nuance than this.
Why do you think this? Their spelling and grammar show few obvious mistakes to me, and after reading your comment I looked at their history and they seem to be an American for at least twenty years.
What nonsense is that? I've never noticed any correlation between gender and technical skills. I mean, I've noticed that there are fewer women in the technical space, but not that their skills are lower.
You then seem to go on to assume all white people are racist against black people. Because both of your examples are racist.
In my head, this is an example of a problem moderation or lack of anonymity won't fix. People have to learn to see this kind of comment for the dud that it is on their own.
Too bad that seems impossible to effectively implement at scale.
There are technical solutions to this. The old one was called hashcash, which a predecessor to cryptocurrency.
To get an account you would have to do something like $5 in electricity worth of computation one time, which you can do without giving anyone your name. But then if you do something foolish and get banned, it'll cost you another $5 (or however much is necessary to provide a sufficient deterrent) to get a new account.
Obviously now you could just have them pay (or mine for you) a small amount of cryptocurrency, which would then go to offset the cost of banning the spammers who still try their luck.
It's $5, not $500. Anybody using an account long-term will experience more cost from having it deleted than from paying that amount for a new one.
The reason it works is that a poor person gets to amortize that $5 over the life of the account, typically ten years or more, which makes it a negligible amount even for someone making minimum wage. Whereas the spammer gets banned and needs a new account every 90 seconds.
And if the problem is that your mods are imposing censorship on disadvantaged people, you don't want something that makes that sort of "moderation" effective. But that's a different problem. Maybe try not having such a small number of large platforms so it's easier for people to abandon the ones doing such things.
That is the problem. It's an unsolvable problem for the near+ future - unless we shift so much power from the public to the powerful that they can silence the public on a whim.
Second all of these arguments seem to suggest just letting the government know you identity as some sort of compromise, but what about when it is the government I am trying to avoid, sure someone can dox me, or can tell my employer to fire me, but only the government can arrest me and execute me if they determine I've done something to upset someone powerful enough within the government. Sure the government can eventually track me down with their resources, but anything that makes it harder is better.
Unfortunately often we do rely on the other person’s reputation, giving us information as to their possible biases and an initial estimate of their level of competence on the subject matter, in order to assign the appropriate weight to their opinions - especially when it comes to topics outside our scope of expertise.
With anonymity we often put everyone on the same level thus won’t be able to properly weigh varying opinions and filter out opinions that are the least likely to be of value.
With total anonymity you end up with trolls or people who are just seriously misinformed arguing vigorously.
You can spend the time and present arguments to possibly convince an actual reasonable person. It gets tiresome over time posting the same basic information. Most of the boards on there end up with a good baseline of information for their topics over years, but for anyone slightly knowledgeable it is tiresome to move topics to that eventual baseline and especially to move them past it. That same information can usually be collected from less toxic sources in a few months as opposed to years that the collective takes.
Every once in a while you'll get a fresh expert that hasn't gotten tired of posting the same information, but I stopped years ago bothering to share any information I had. It's always an up hill battle and the posts will be gone in a few hours or, at best, days
But trolls end up dominating. If you waste your time writing informed sourced posts about anything (slavery is bad, the Holocaust happened, Earth isn't flat, etc) all that will happen is the person will eventually just criticize basic grammar mistakes, insult you, and post the same garbage in a new thread.
If you make the mistake of arguing with organized trolls, you'll get link bombed with shit sources and barely tangentially related long sources that suck up your time before you realize that they don't present any facts that are actually relevant to the discussion.
Even 4chan knows this. The business board has measures in place to inform readers when a poster is the same person.
Real names are not needed online to have good discussion. But it's absolutely needed for posters to have repercussions for past posts. True anonymity leads to shallow discussion and trolls.
Compare 4chan to HN, which is also open to anybody like 4chan, allows anonymous (or rather pseudonymous) posting, and has a somewhat sizeable community of people posting and many more "lurkers" just reading.
Unlike 4chan however, HN does a reasonable job - in my opinion - of being clear what is allowed and what is not, enforces these community standards quite vigorously most of the time, through moderation not just by moderators but the community (flagging), and generally stops outright abuse and harassment, and more often than not stops trolls and people accidentally starting flame wars. That has to be balanced against not over-banning/over-flagging content, which happens, too. Not everything is perfect in the niche that is HN - nothing ever is - but the contrast to 4chan is quite stark, even to the supposedly more moderate and "sfw" 4chan boards like /g/ (technology).
Gamification is a double edged sword. On one hand, it may encourage people to instead of their actual views post quick quips or hide their true opinions and opt instead to just say what they believe the community wants to hear. On the other hand, in places like 4chan which lack such gamification, you don't have to fear burning your reputation as nobody has a visible reputation, which may encourage people to cross lines as there is no way for the community to sanction such behavior.
It's also hard for some people to understand that individuals who hold extreme views and use poor sources/facts could, in fact, be people who actually hold those views. They're not trolls. They're not doing it to get a rise out of you. Sometimes, those people are legitimate in their beliefs, regardless of how ass-backwards they are.
And I don't know why people don't understand that.
Compare that to forums which are based on usernames, where there is usually higher quality discussion because you have a post history and this weeds out the bots and trolls.
First of all being anonymous is important if you want to call out far more powerful entities than you, which can lash out to you. Second I think it is important to see, what the darker side of society thinks. Even if you remove them from the normal internet, they will still find a way to communicate, but now it is no longer out in the open. It is better to know then to not know.
Satoshi Nakamoto.
Associate anonymous posts with an optional pubkey signing. Have tooling that can filter out bad actor signatures and highlight the ones you care about.
Have your interest graph and peer graph suggest new public keys to follow.
Identities can remain private.
Fortunately there is work being done in this area by Free Software projects. In particular, the Matrix team are trying to implement a decentralised reputation system[0] and there's no reason this couldn't be applied to the Fediverse too.
[0] https://matrix.org/blog/2020/10/19/combating-abuse-in-matrix...
It's effective because you follow the profiles that you find interesting, when a profile becomes abusive you simply block them from being replicated by your machine. Folks can have as many profiles/feeds as they like, so you can separate out portions of your life that others might find distasteful, or boring.
The crypto aspect can obscure a series of posts by the same author although I don't think it would protect you from the site owner themselves.
Yes and no. Anonymity also prompts people to make lots of assumptions about you based on what and how you say things that may not hold and may even distort how the messages are received.
For example, I'm an ethnic minority but if I break from certain aspects of identarian political dogma it is generally assumed that I am White. Women who deviate from a certain line on gender issues are, similarly, often assumed to be male unless they indicate otherwise. On issues where a person's lived experiences stemming from their identity might matter, the assumption of there being a 'default' identity ends up kind of polarizing perspectives and eliding nuances and potential middle-ground on a host of issues.
Put another way, it has been said that "on the internet nobody knows you're a dog." But not everyone defines themselves by their "dogness" to the same extent, nor does being a "dog" mean the same thing to all dogs. But since we assume everyone is a default template until they loudly and proudly fly an identifying marker, the only voices who speak for the dogs will be the doggiest of the doggy, the people whose identity as dogs is the most important thing to them in that moment.
Bringing that back to a concrete example, I remember when I first made the switch from Windows to Macintosh in the early aughts (in the peak of the Switch ad era). Initially making the switch was kind of a revelation. I had really just never experienced a computer that was well designed before nor technology that put this much attention towards--what I would later learn to refer to as--UI/UX. I could not stop evangelizing this to everyone who would listen because, to me, it was new and super cool and I was just really really enthusiastic about it. This happened often enough that Apple fanatics online got a reputation for being over-exuberant and kind of deluded. But the thing is, after a few years I just stopped posting about Apple stuff because I had grown into having more balanced and nuanced perspectives on computing. But the assumption in a place like Slashdot back then was that you're a Linux or Windows guy unless you state otherwise. Thus only the newly converted, over-excited Apple fanboys are taken as representative of Mac users and the ones with mellower perspectives are drowned out.
With computing platforms it's all rather frivolous and probably doesn't matter. But when it comes to social or political issues, this dynamic can have real effects on what we think of as an authentically [group] opinion and who gets to speak for whom. I think it has a tendency to foster a certain essentialist way of looking at the world that is rife with ecological fallacies.
I often find myself having a wonderfully deep discussion with someone online, and when I eventually find out what they look like (etc), I often realize that they dont look as friendly, educated, etc as they are.
Humans are really bad at this, and you will put people into groups in your mind no matter how hard you try. Anonymity mostly removes this bias, and leads to real and pure equal exchange of ideas.