Which is besides the point; why do you think Elon will do any of this, when the previous board/company/ownershop did not?

Right now having a verified account is a form of privilege were you pleased some sort of twitter corporate representative who decides these sorts of thing. They have a history of giving blue check marks to accounts they agree with and taking it away from verified people they disagree with.

By handing out checkmarks to anybody willing to pay them for it (and by extension tying their legal identity to their twitter one) then it neutralizes the political aspect of verified accounts while improving a revenue stream.

The revenue stream would improve in more ways than one.

Turns out knowing a person's browsing history and what accounts they have online is not really that useful or interesting to advertisers. It's not a big money maker.

However if you can tie financial identities into online identities then that is vastly more interesting and is something advertisers are willing to pay for.

This is why Facebook insists on having "real identities" nowadays when people sign up. They partner with other data mining operations and tie people's financial history into their facebook accounts. This way adverisers know people's buying habits, income levels.

Pretty much everything you fill out for drivers licensing, hunting licenses, loan application, credit card history, debit card history, mortgage applications, etc etc.. is now tied to your Facebook account if they can figure out to connect the dots. Which isn't that hard for most people.

I don't think that extends in the fashion you believe it does. It's like the HashCash solution for email. It was never employed because it probably didn't work, it just made spamming more expensive but didn't eliminate spam. The current walled-garden state of email has also made spam very expensive, but email spam persists to this day.

Ability to pay for something online also does not indicate actual identity. It's trivial to get an anonymous Visa number, and so on.

Not only because it is an incredibly niche market, but probably because they don't see the advertisements in the first place.

We are talking about people trying to figure out how to extract money from tracking and documenting the great unwashed masses. The hyper tech freaks can abandon these platforms en masse and it wouldn't amount too much more than a rounding error.

Remember:

The purpose of Twitter and Facebook and other social media sites, including Reddit, is to provide services to people willing to pay to disseminate propaganda. Primarily in the form of advertisements.

The platform for discussions and content is not the product. The product is the people that use the platform. Anything they can do to improve the quality of the product, ie information about the users, can increase revenue.

Comparing to email doesn't make sense. Also Email is such a garbage protocol nowadays that it is much more profitable to prolong its brokenness than actually solve its problems.

Please fact check me because who knows where they finally landed on this but at one point Elon Musk backtracked on the blue checkmark in favor of a different symbol for a paid account (iirc down to USD 2 from USD 3 and different amounts for different countries).

I do 100% agree. Sadly, I don't think it'll be possible to stay anonymous in the future. Not because of credentials or personal data, but the things we say and the way we say them online. These things will be enough to link personal accounts and alt-accounts. Sure, you can obscure and keep quiet about things, but what's the point then anyways?

Something else that comes to my mind: Lot of people on HN (me included) share rather personal stuff here. Everything I ever said with this account should (in theory) fall in a consistent picture. But those bots are not there to mimic that. They have other purposes (some of which you already mentioned).

Are you basing this on writing-style analysis?

The rest of this post makes sense but what is this supposed to mean? How is using real names "a position of privilege"? Does this just mean that some people's name is more influential than others? In which case, renaming "influence" into "a position of privilege" to attach to SJW ethos to something completely unrelated is double-plus ungood.

To take an example from a sibling thread: If you live in Turkey and write negative about Erdogan you get charged with terrorism. It's something people can only afford to do if they are reasonably sure they will not be identified and I think we can agree a real name policy makes this rather hard. So, if you ask for a real name policy you ask for a policy which not everyone can afford to adhere here to. You probably[1] can, so it's a privilege you have, others don't have. Therefore, written from a place of privilege.

[1] If someone asks for a real name policy while not being able to adhere to it (without dire consequences for themselves) they don't write from a position of privilege, but imho that's a rather academic case.

Also, in my view, no democracy is safe, things can change in any country and I wouldn’t want a history of things that can be linked to me so easily. I am pessimistic coming from a place I did. Check marked people at least have money and connections to navigate those issues.

I am sure there are more examples. I think it was a valid statement.

However, while accountability might have worked 50 years ago it sure looks like it wouldn't anymore - it's not as if people, including prominent people actually go to the effort to hide their identity before spouting nonsense - some of it fairly vile, some of it so idiotic it surely would have caused reputational harm a few decades ago.

Real names won't work where there's no sense of shared reproach; no sense by the speaker that their friends will be disappointed or even outraged. Worse, they revel in it; being crazy is a point of pride; as is harassing others (made even easier should a real-name policy be adopted).

So whether or not anonymity for the oppressed is worthy enough aim to accept also supporting yet more disinformation campaigns is probably a moot point; real names will no longer discourage extremists from spreading their special brand of insanity.

I'm gonna call nonsense on this. Practically every social media platform that forces real identities are cesspits because of the real name policy. Largely because of the soap box celebrities/influencers who shill their views and monetize their followers.

I prefer reddit/HN a thousand times over the garbage of twitter/FB/etc..

The lack of real names, and shitty games prevents influences and garbage celebrity monetizations.

I haven't seen a Cambridge Analytica style event happen on reddit. That happened brazenly in the open, and still happens today on Facebook/Twitter to subvert democratic processes (e.g. Brazil, India, US, UK).

The best of reddit and HN can only exist because they're niche subcommunities.

We should be under no illusions what would happen to HN if 5% of YouTube commenters showed up tomorrow.

disagree. it's about - and has always been since the first usenet message - moderation. lots of free speech absolutists confuse moderation with censorship and Elon will learn the difference with sweat, blood and tears if he doesn't know it already (note: I can hardly imagine why he wouldn't know it).

It's not a question of scale, it's a question of culture. Also, Reddit and HN do have active moderation.

Yea you get toxic, cancerous, illegal subcommunities etc... On the whole though I am happy with the upvote, downvote curation compared with the algorithmic trash provided by FB. Even before reddit went overly filtering for advertisement purposes, I was happier on Reddit/Digg than the trash that came aftewrards.

In my opinion, humanity would be significantly better off without Twitter/Facebook.

I have seen death threats, anti-vaccer junk, brexit/trump/le Pen, Cambridge Analytica style election manipulation (including for Bolsonaro and Modi), the Myanmar genocide and human trafficking on a massive scale via FB/twitter.

I remember being pitched specifically about several cases of groups/companies using Facebook/Twitter to subvert democratic processes via selective targeted propaganda.

Nobody subscribes to all of Reddit.

Nobody subscribes to every Youtube channel.

So what is your point?

It's a model that work and scales to half a billion users per month.

Reddit's moderators are volunteers with iron fists who only police tiny sections of reddit. Admins get involved in TOS violations, not direct moderation.

Your comparison makes no sense.

What moderation? For what are you talking about? From what I gather they predominantly rely on automatic filtering, with barely any human filtering. They don't even moderate some of their largest channels.

E.g.

LinusTechTips complaining about spam junk and community fed solutions. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zo_uoFI1WXM

MarquesBrownLee doing the same. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Cw-vODp-8Y

Reddit does the same broad stroke in that yea they have broad generic spam/bot detection, and also rely on reporting moderation and community driven tool. They already operate in a similar/better model than youtube.

The original argument was that Reddit/HN couldn't handle 5% of Youtube community and I am calling nonsense to that.

That's false, admins do get involved in direct moderation, and Reddit has a whole team of admins (Reddit employees).

In that case, why would you care about the threats exactly?

The threats caused by people like Trump, Joe Rogan, Musk, Russian bot farms, Farage, Le Pen etc... and their toxic ignorant views on Vaccines, climate change are far far worse to society than some vague inactionable death threats.

The community decides in absence of who is saying whether my words have merit.

If it doesn't, I have a healthy ability to toss my entire account and walk away.

In some countries a lot of people share the same full name.

People just got tricked in to doing this because Facebook was centered around connecting people at college, where you interact with people in real life. It was obsolete and an aberration the moment Facebook decided to open up to the wider world.

Rate limiting solves the problem of bots crapflooding the service and turning it into a sewer. Not every account you find objectionable is a bot.

This still burns me up. I only signed up for that reason, and it seemed like a great idea, limiting it to people with institutional .edu emails so it was like a modern interactive yearbook. Then overnight it was something else. Like that old commercial for roach traps where they think they're settling down in a nice comfortable living room and then suddenly it's revealed they're trapped and are being poisoned.

I think some people legitimately do. If someone is pretty close to the typical mainstream archetype for their culture, it's easy to get caught up in idealism about how great things would be if all books were open.

The more one sees outside of that bubble, the more apparent the problems become, but being in the bubble reinforces the positive aspects of that model.

Thank you for your smug, hand-wavy, holier-than-thou dismissal of online free speech on behalf of the entire human race.

You claim to be entitled to free speech and your own opinion, yet claim most people cannot use those entitlements responsibly. Who decides what is and isn't responsible use of free speech? You? People who think like you?

i have to delegate trust and if everyone can and will speak whatever they want - or worse, there are FSB troll farms purposefully injecting noise into any public free speech forum, i can't do that. noise floor raises so high the signal can't be filtered out anymore. what then? we declare 'free speech won' and go home victorious, but without a public forum like HN?

I'll give my personal opinion, which you may want to treat as one of many possible viewpoints:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWdD206eSv0 https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/just-go-on-the-internet-and-t...

The internet has run on the concept of trust and reputation for a while now, but IMO, if you want anything close to the full story, you have to put in the work yourself: Compile your sources, evaluate your and their biases, and come to a conclusion. Ground News is a pretty neat tool to help me with this if it's a widely-reported story.

Some examples:

- Something from a reputable news source? Probably true, but not always. I try to wait for a decent handful of other, diverse outlets to report on it before believing it, sharing it, etc.

- Something from a single account on Twitter on Hacker News? Probably not, but not always. I try to wait for other confirmations before believing it, sharing it, etc.

I personally believe it to be a case where free speech wins, people raise the bar for what's worth their trust, and fake news begins to decline as a result -- the opposite being one where people lower their guard due to blind trust in other entities, and fake news can therefore take advantage of that and flourish.

Right now you're just an anonymous account, and by your own rules, part of the problem.

1. People whose opinions are perfectly in-line with the corporate-backed, advertiser-friendly status quo, further cementing such ideas as the status quo

2. Maniacs who have nothing to lose, and/or want to be seen as a martyr

All of the reasonable people will just not use the site cause they don't want to risk stepping out of line and having aforementioned maniacs harassing you/contacting your employer/etc

The school of "we'll destroy your livelihood" freedom of expression made sure of that.

Although there are many crappy communities, no other social platform comes even close to Reddit's best, well moderated subs.

I believe social platforms keep failing exactly because they try to solve spam, etc.. globally and that's not possible. It's better to empower mods community builders.

I also believe there is a good opportunity for a social platform that allows mods and builders to be paid somehow.

Edit: Another though - that's also how Discord took off.

Those people tend to avoid platforms with effective "censorship" as they call it, and that can be done without names. The majority of internet users doesn't spend much time thinking about privacy or anonymity, and it's not uncommon that people make death threats under their real name or end their career with dumb posts on social media.

What we need is smaller communities with better moderation. Twitter with its lack of structure is the opposite and acts more like a global spam folder, and discourages meaningful posts by limiting their length. Insults and other toxic language always fits nicely in a tweet.

Speak for yourself. I've been participating in anonymous and pseudonymous internet communities for decades and it's great. If nutjobs and shills are the price we must pay for their continued existence, then so be it.

Searched a lot but either I Am doing them wrong or unable to locate the exact thing I am looking for.

I actually disagree with forcing real names everywhere; it didn't make Facebook any less awful and it shuts out anonymous speech. What Twitter needs is a defense against sock-puppeting. You should be able to totally register a pseudonym and speak out if you need to, but not 10,000 "real names" so you can go and manufacture consent. The problem with this is that it's actually really expensive to limit something that costs nothing[0], and furthermore Twitter does not want to do this. The value of their advertising is big-O[1] proportional to their active userbase, so they want to make new account registration as easy as possible to juice those numbers.

I don't think this is entirely tractable; all large online communities have problems with sock-puppeting and hate speech even when they are trying to fight it. The incentives for any ad-funded social network is to make the problem worse and worse.

[0] The cryptographic term for this conundrum is "Sybil attack", and it's the reason why all cryptocurrencies have to either burn energy (PoW) or internal liquidity (PoS) in order to both prevent rollbacks and remain robust against netsplits.

[1] Big-O notation is a system of categorizing growth curves where you only include the fastest-growing term. i.e. if something grows at n^2 + n, we say that's an O(n^2) process.

We know how Musk feels about whistleblowers:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-03-13/when-elon...

Similar for dissidents. They can generally find a party outside the reach of the regime they are dissidents of that also opposes that regime and agrees with the dissidents. They just need a secure way to communicate with that outside party. The outside party can then handle spreading the message on public platforms.

Twitter is the most toxic "mainstream" community I've ever seen.

IIRC, Facebook's still toxic even with a real-name policy. Wackos often lack the shame or self-awareness to not be toxic even under their real name.

Anecdote time: one of the most toxic people I've encountered online posted under their real name--in a Web 1.0 forum where pseudoanonymity was the norm.

Nope that is not the only way. Federation can also solve moderation issue. Basically you host a server instance and set some ground rules of what is allowed and what is not. But federation cannot generate revenue so I don't think that will ever happen with Twitter unless Elon figures out how to make money from a federated social network.

Currently users can choose to only let followers/mentioned users reply. Maybe add an option to only allow real-name users to reply.

---

[1] I don't know if this is really true or not, as I don't have the money to buy myself a super cool blue tick.

edit: Anonymous accounts that allow for detachment and people need to learn not to consume media they don't like. It is pretty easy actually. People in the public, even small ones like streamers are putting themselves out there and it can become a problem. But there isn't a technical solution, these are the age old problems of PR. This is why popular people in the public sphere have agencies just for that single problem.

The real name idea is overall pretty bad for numerous additional reasons.

Real names is not good solution

I would use Twitter daily if I had an option to control an "identity strength threshold" where I would then only see comments from people who have implemented their organization memberships into an online identity.

Of course this is wildly conceptual and would be an impossible feat to implement, but it's a fun thought exercise.

What I learned is that there are plenty of crazy people online. And I do not want them to have my real identity.

Facebook has real names and the messages are just as bad if not often worse.

Extremely naive to think this will solve anything.

The question is whether people can trust Twitter with that information.

Have you uh, seen "NextDoor"?

Remove the "feature" that recommends something to you. Or alternatively, allow users to turn it off.

Problem solved.

Someone routinely posts and shares something you don't like? Unfollow them.

Someone posts something that is illegal? File a report with the authorities.

This, "you must tie all your thoughts to your government issued identity" only solves one problem: allowing the thought police to come after you after losing their hold at Twitter.

... is how you crush political dissidents.

The ad-revenue model relies on attention, and attention thrives on memes that inspire outrage, contempt, and fear. The solution is a freemium subscription model. But I don't think he'll do that. I admire the guy's accomplishments like everyone else but we all know he's got a bit of an ego. He'll not put a paywall in front of his Twitter army.

The success of most things in the world relies on attention. This is not unique to ad-revenue models of social media companies.

The Republicans announcing public lynching of trans kids are doing it under their real names.

The ad-revenue model relies on attention, and attention thrives on memes that inspire outrage, contempt, and fear. The solution is a freemium subscription model. But I don't think he'll do that. I admire the guy's accomplishments like everyone else but we all know he's got a bit of an ego. He'll not put a paywall in front of his Twitter army.