"It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit."
It's also amazing what you can say if you don't care who's attributed. Anonymity or pseudonymity can be of great value here.
For someone of Livingston's stature, writing under a pseudonym may not seem as attractive an option. When sharing anything really valuable, via a pseudonym, there's no opportunity to leverage existing audiences, or build reputational equity for your 'true name'. And for the already-prominent, if a pseudonym is later pierced the blowback can be larger. So why not spend your time and words elsewhere, either on safe topics, or only sharing 'dangerous' thoughts privately?
Thus Livingston mentions, in her footnotes, increased sharing in controlled environments with trusted associates – as on Facebook. But most people may find pseudonymity the best strategy for collecting the benefits of freer, more honest speech.
I even suspect that a "right to create uncorrelated secondary identities" may be a crucial 21st-century freedom, worthy of encoding in law and custom.
> If you want to maintain a blog about a subject, if you want to speak out publicly and gain some sort of online rep, then you risk your identity being released.
No, you shouldn't risk your real-world identity being released. People have good reasons for having pseudonyms; Scott Alexander gave a number of them in his post explaining why he took down his blog.
Freedom of speech does mean being willing to stand behind your speech and defend it. But that can be done perfectly fine under a pseudonym. The reputation simply attaches to the pseudonym.
> If you want to be actually anonymous, I suggest not using facebook or any other online identity tied to your real name.
You do realize that you just contradicted yourself, right?
>> It wasn't until Facebook's meteoric rise that it became mainstream and commonplace to put one's real name next to one's off-the-cuff words online.
Do you believe this is a good or bad trend. I personally see it has universally bad and is could directly be attributable toxicity of those communities, as the most extreme people, the people that either have nothing to lose, or do not fully understand the risk are the only ones that engage in any meaningful way, those groups then feed upon each other. Everyone else either leaves or self censors so the only remaining conversation is an extremely toxic one where people are talking past and over each other yelling into the void. There is no moderate middle as the moderate middle shuts up for fear of pissing off both extremes.
Anonymity is a bed rock foundational element of free speech, even the founders of the US understood this which is why most of the Federalist papers, and many other pivotal writings in history were written under Pseudonym's.
This idea that "real names" policies improve discourse is simply false and IMO lowers discourse
I haven’t thought up a framework, but one thing I’m wondering is why the identity of the person alone is newsworthy.
I’m probably missing part of the background here, I’m new to the controversy. Did some kind of mystery arise around the true identity of the author? Your comment implies that NYT obtained the true identity of the author through legal means — how exactly did they do that?
I don’t think finding out the identity of someone who wishes to remain anonymous is, in itself, sufficiently newsworthy to overcome the privacy interests of the individual. I also wonder if this story has a more interesting angle buried in it about the complexities of identity in the internet age: the author of the blog achieved notoriety, but in some ways that character is distinct from the physical person living their life and doing their job. The NYT wanted to publish a link between those two personas over their objection. Why should they be able to if the story can be written in a way that doesn’t?
Consider someone like... Satoshi, of bitcoin. The character has achieved this powerful notoriety and managed to remain anonymous. Do people want to know which person on the planet created that persona? Sure; do they need to know, is the identity alone newsworthy without some reason to need to publish it?
Honestly I tend to say no. That’s just... gossip, isn’t it? How is knowing a different name to associate with the character going to enrich and inform me in any way?
Examples where I think revealing the identity might be of substance:
- suppose someone committed crimes to keep their identity secret
- suppose government officials intervened to help them remain anonymous
- suppose the person turns out to BE a powerful government official
> I'm not convinced that a plausible pseudonym is more privacy preserving than something that's obviously just made up.
I think that's true, but vibe I got from this was more about wanting anonymity and to avoid certain social frictions (and maybe not incur a trust penalty). An obvious pseudonym comes with certain costs.
What's the use of pseudonyms when it is easy to deanonymize writing? If the writer is a well known academic it shouldn't be too hard to at least identify a probable author.
> [Autobiographical memory] might be boosted by anonymity and pseudonyms, as a way to pull down barriers to risky behavior, but anonymity and pseudonyms do much less for aggregate [utility per person] than postmodern, perceivably rigid reflections of reality on Facebook do.
There's a lot here about self-gratification through performative identity, but nothing about the value society derives from the unflinching evaluation of unpopular ideas. I find this to be nearly absent in "this will go on your permanent record" oriented venues, which in turn is why I find those all but useless. It's reception and counters to my arguments that I value; what I write would be anonymous (and on slashdot it was) if a dissociated pseudonym weren't required.
I'll grant that the pseudonymity cuts both ways but in that mindset doesn't everything? There's trade-offs to pseudonymity, anonymity and real identities but each has contextual value.
> Choosing to post anonymously, rather than using my real name, made things much easier. I’ve occasionally commented under my real name, and am embarrassed looking back at my post history. There’s nothing terrible, but I’m sure some of my colleagues and friends have stumbled upon it and smirked. This might be projection or paranoia, but it causes enough anxiety to deter me from posting regularly.
One thing that pseudonymity will do is allow you support positions you don't actually hold. To steel man them. To really stretch your brain to find the best way to present and argue in favor of them. Doing so pseudonymously means never having to explain yourself to friends, family, employers, or three-letter organizations later.
This also works really well for positions you're leaning toward but don't know why. Or half-baked ideas you'd like someone to respond to. Or just questions that you're embarrassed to ask.
This may not fit with the letter of the HN guidelines, depending on the distinctions between "throwaway," "pseudonym," and "temporary pseudonym":
> Throwaway accounts are ok for sensitive information, but please don't create accounts routinely. HN is a community—users should have an identity that others can relate to.
But I think it fits with the spirit. From "What to Post?":
> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
Until the real name leaks, which is only matter of time. Anonymity is what i mean by fixing the issue by hiding the information.
>If you post with your name, you have become a public persona. Just hinting at the fact that public personas often have staff to manage public relations. You could of course kill that, but the repercussions would be quite severe
Yes, right now it is an issue with using real name. We should not fix it by hiding the name, we should fix it so that using real name would not cause harm.
In other words, we should take the information being public as the base condition and solve the problem that arise from that.
Pseudonyms allow a person to own what they say* without opening themselves up to retribution from people who misunderstand either the content or the context of what is said, or who take advantage of power imbalances to advance an agenda. People should not feel pressured into putting everything on the line merely for the right to speak freely.
* Maybe not in the sense you mean but in a sense that I think is sufficient -- that statements from that persona can be challenged and measured against other statements in the same context for consistency.
That's not true. The problem with anonymity or pseudonymity is that there is no way to trace bad behavior beyond the persona and back to the person behind it. A single person can even adopt multiple personas, some of which may be trustworthy, others not. The use of real names constrains this kind of gaming of the system and so makes trustworthiness easier and more reliable to establish.
This is not to say that the costs of using real names outweighs the benefits. They may very well not. But to say that there are no benefits to using real names in terms of establishing trust is just wrong.
This doesn't surprise me. Pseudonyms are the middle ground between anonymous and real. This article seems to point to the fact that pseudonyms are the best of both worlds, ie more likely to comment (from anonymity), while the quality remains high (from actual identity).
Whether or not this report is comprehensive, and I believe it to be pretty airy, this is still extremely fascinating.
This strikes me as less an argument for pseudonyms and more an argument for impermanence. It seems to me that the thought experiment is more like putting a mask on, and then yelling your revolutionary ideas, rather than doing it in public and just hoping to not be recognized.
> Pseudonymous publishing has a long and respected history.
Well there's definitely a history of authors publishing pseudonymously. I don't know of a tradition of keeping the identities secret even after they've been revealed. Unless legally mandated as it is in come countries[0].
I mean someone afraid of getting killed for their writings would certainly not make it obvious who they are and then rely on others not mentioning it. There's certainly no tradition of that.
The whole phenomenon of "doxxing" as I understand it is something new. In the most radical form the ask seems to be that you should outright not mention any information about a person unless it has been explicitly volunteered to you for publishing.
I guess the problem here is many people publish publicly on the Internet not expecting much of anything. And then after they become notorious they may regret giving up their privacy. So there's a new push to create a stronger norm of what's considered private and who's considered a public figure.
[0] say some places will mandate redacting last names of people charged with crimes
> Why should someone interact with something that the author doesn't throw his/her/their name into?
> you're free to engage openly
This is what I was going to answer.
Sometimes I disagree with my own writing later. It's easier to distance from this writing when I have released it through a pseudonym so that when that old self dies because of a life event or transformation/initiation, I am able to more easily close that chapter of my life, instead of having this old self be connected to my new self.
I also don't think we've reached this stage of the awareness of 'evolving selves' yet in internet culture. That's why taking precautions, like using a pseudonym, go a long way for my personal peace of mind. I do treat most corporate services as compromised because of excessive surveillance/Snowden's NSA leaks, but I think individual data leaks will start happening (where these pseudonyms would be revealed through NSA [and thus Google, FB, Google] metadata) after the current power structures topple, and a Commons-based peer production paradigm emerges.
At the same time, my reluctance to embrace my old selves and their viewpoints also comes from a lifetime of having been told I was not 'smart' (i.e. in school). Now I am learning that my delayed development was actually due to insecure attachments to primary caregivers. Together with frequent moves around the world which disturbed the possibility of forming secure attachments to other adults, this hindered my cognitive development. This means I am behind in some areas, yet it also surprisingly drives my immense interest in adult education/lifelong learning, as well as Sudbury schools etc.
It's also amazing what you can say if you don't care who's attributed. Anonymity or pseudonymity can be of great value here.
For someone of Livingston's stature, writing under a pseudonym may not seem as attractive an option. When sharing anything really valuable, via a pseudonym, there's no opportunity to leverage existing audiences, or build reputational equity for your 'true name'. And for the already-prominent, if a pseudonym is later pierced the blowback can be larger. So why not spend your time and words elsewhere, either on safe topics, or only sharing 'dangerous' thoughts privately?
Thus Livingston mentions, in her footnotes, increased sharing in controlled environments with trusted associates – as on Facebook. But most people may find pseudonymity the best strategy for collecting the benefits of freer, more honest speech.
I even suspect that a "right to create uncorrelated secondary identities" may be a crucial 21st-century freedom, worthy of encoding in law and custom.
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