Re:Online abuse: banning anonymous social media accounts is ...
by lionkor on Tuesday October 26, 2021 @05:40AM
(#28998281)
> how many people have upvoted your content that you produce
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.
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).