> Reality is that it would drastically reduce comment trolling, if your real identify was viewable and searchable by all you know
Is this true? I've seen various studies saying that the opposite is actually true, but I can't currently find any of those studies. Does anyone have any sources?
EDIT: some sources, though I don't know the strength of their validity:
> the Facebook requirement with its real-name policy could go some ways to curtailing that kind of dialogue.
This was the theory was for a while, but empirical evidence has refuted it. People are just are bad or worse when posting under their real names, and it's not just an anecdotal feeling anymore: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160729/23305535110/study...
> (For all the flack that real-name policies get, they do reduce spam and hate speech by a big margin, so any service which doesn’t verify identity isn’t really a drop-in replacement for FB as far as that news org is concerned)
Did we not see the same studies?
As I recall Google+/YouTube's real name policy came under fire because a large minority of people received substantially more hate speech.
> I don’t want to waste my time talking to accounts under pseudonyms..
I've been thinking about this a lot after newspapers started demanding full names.
What I think I see is that full name policies correlate with more toxicity. This might sound counterintuitive at first but there is a really simple explanation:
- Smart people are careful.
- Less smart people care less.
- The same goes for people who have extremely strong opinions.
- Finally a lot of trolls can live just fine with a made up name that resembles a real one.
Full name policies optimize for trolls, dumb people and people who have very strong opinions.
If real name policies was a good idea, Facebook and the comments in online newspapers should be nice and HN, lobste.rs and Ars Technica should be really ugly and dumb.
>It's abundantly clear now that there are more than enough people who are willing to be jerks under their real names.
I hate this argument, because the argument has never been that no person would be rude under their name, it's that there would be less rudeness:
I think axiomatically we can assume that real-name policies won't make people more rude (except maybe on the topic of real-name policies). Here by rude I mean the stupidity of the sort you basically only find in online comments.
So we can then say that there just as many (or less) people being rude on the same site with real-name policies as a site without. I feel less incentive to be rude when my name is next to the comment. I use YouTube. Therefore there is less rudeness thanks to this policy.
For every website I use that has a real-name policy, it has been effective in reducing the amount of rudeness by 1 person's worth.
I would really hope for some scientific studies on how much awfulness we could avoid by people owning up to what they say.
Reality is that it would drastically reduce comment trolling, if your real identify was viewable and searchable by all you know.
That is not at all clear, especially as a percentage of comments. There are plenty of sociopaths who are perfectly willing to troll under their real name. Meanwhile, more reasonable people may quite rationally be worried that expressing any opinion on a controversial issue will lead to online mobs trying to get them fired from their jobs, kicked out of school, or otherwise ostracized. Not to mention scenarios like being a gay teenager in a very socially conservative environment.
> My experience is that the Real Names policy was hated by a small but vocal and influential group of users.
Another way of putting this is that most people don't need pseudonyms, but the people who need them really need them. Search for .e.g. "google outed me".
> Isn't it interesting that time and again every online forum with moderate affordances for anonymity quickly degrades into name calling and other generic abuse?
Happens in systems with Full Real Name policies as well.
IMO Full Real Name policies only deter people who 1. Have something to lose 2. Have a dissenting view 3. Does use a fake account with a Fake Real Name.
I.e. IMO a Full Real Name policy alone just sets us up for an echo chamber situation.
> Keep in mind, however, that "making it trivially obvious to the rest of the world, Google, future investors" is exactly the point of the proposal!
Which is exactly the problem-- it's important not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. There are good things and bad with attaching real world identities and that was not considered in your post. It's not a panacea and has real and (to me, at least) severe consequences.
I happen to work a great deal with gaming communities which are notoriously trollish and awful. In my experience, physical identity would help with those problems, but it's overkill. It's like the "nuclear" option, in a sense.
What we've found works best is the general act of tying the identity to something the individual does not want to lose casually. The real enemy of the net is casual trolling out of boredom or random flashes of meanness. The highest return on investment is found by eliminating that one aspect-- it doesn't require the "nuclear" option of turning us all into our public personas.
For example, we've found that physical/real-world identity is not nearly as important as the combination of:
* Tying access to something people don't want to lose, such as months of their time/effort, their reputation to people they respect, or to their wallets. Note that reputation can be based on limited identity revealing to key people, or even simply reputation amongst people they associate with under a particular identity (even if they whole group is using non-real identities-- for example, a gaming clan).
* Broken window theory (i.e. http://ta.gd/broken )-- hiding/fixing trolling as quickly as possible. This is one of the best methods we've found to keep incidents down and people behaving. If they don't see it as commonplace (as trolling is on Reddit/Digg) then they aren't going to dive in as readily.
* Having strong, respected moderators/spokespeople encouraging respect and frowning sternly (and directly) upon negative behavior. This ties into both of the above points.
My company is actually investigating using some of these techniques in a service to reduce griefing in games, but requiring physical identities in that case is a deal-breaker.
> Instead, they have far more incentive to contribute, in order to increase their reputation.
This is only true if you believe that people want to increase their reputation solely tied to their real world identity. This is a motivator for you, but it is not for me and others-- otherwise people would already be using their own names 100% of the time on things they are proud of.
Anyway, I agree with your desire to keep HN strong. I actually think HN has been doing great for the while I've been here. It has its ups and downs, but I think we have other options to improve that don't include tying Facebook Connect into every aspect of the online world.
> As privacy invading it is, I can easily see how this would be effective means to curb bad behavior online, such as trolling or spamming—or worse.
I'm not so sure about that, reading Facebook comment threads on news articles clearly shows that a real name policy isn't really stopping people from misbehaving online.
> A real ID may be required for you to post comments in all websites. [I]t would drastically reduce comment trolling, if your real identify was viewable and searchable by all you know. But at what cost?
The cost is that it would prevent people from anonymously reporting abuses, which means that fear of retaliation will have a chilling effect. We've already seen this where people get death threats, houses burned down, etc, when they do things like report sexual assault.
> Who says a "Real Names" policy any significant impact on a harasser?
Because if this service was worth any merit, the real name attached to the hateful speech will have the same reputation-destroying effect as it being printed in any literary source. I completely understand that this won't deter everyone, but it will deter most people.
I have very high demands for this type of service, folks assume that people using the platform will just fake the 'Real Names' policy. Well, I don't want some hokey system in place, when I talk about linking a Real Name to someone's content, I'm linking a real person to their content. How will this connection be establish, maintained and not abused? I don't know, but I do know if it worked in the appropriate manner, there wouldn't be so many functional holes as people keep saying.
G+ in its current form does not appease my demand for a service that utilizes a real "Real Names" policy - they half-ass it and frankly retard the prospect of someone trying to do it legitimately and true to form.
> the harassers already knew their real name, I take it? How would abolishing the real-names policy help
Without the policy they don't have to use their real name, which means harassers can't find them (as easily) on Facebook. The ability to use a real name that is not your actual name is just a clunky workaround for the policy, not a proof that the policy works.
> I feel like a large part of why people on the internet are so terrible to one another is that there's really no accountability because of the anonymity.
Sounds plausible until you consider that many of the worst comments are written by real people logged in using their real Facebook accounts -
... and some of the best forums online don't demand anything but a username and password like here.
IMO real name policies are way less effective than some people want you to think, and they'll effectively prevent certain minorities from participating in online debates.
> the idea / theory is that by using real name, there'd be less anonymous trolling.
> Offense might become even worse when it's not done anonymously though. Then it becomes a real person kicking a target's shins.
If you completely ban pseudonyms, the trolls will just impersonate other people. The effect is that it will be even more harmful for personal well-being for both those who get trolled and those who get to be impersonated.
> I don't think this can be solved, but it's real.
Of course it can be solved, just not on a public pseudonymous forum. As long as people exist that are entertained by trolling, derailing or just in general making the internet a little worse every day you cannot win. Filtering content or accounts is a fools errand, filtering people allowed to comment and post on the other hand would trivially solve this, especially when their real reputation is on the line with every comment but then you don´t get the network effects that low effort account creation and pseudonymity give you.
> And, frequently, it allows for anonymity, which removes the social consequences of malicious actions.
I don't think anonymity is a problem per se. Real people engage in all kinds of shitty trolling using their real names. And their real friends egg them on.
The difference is perhaps that their local real life community don't know about it, outside of their friends.
> They (and their advertisers) stand to benefit massively the easier people are identified and profiled.
I agree that predatory advertisers are the scourge of the modern Internet, but one can profile a nickname as easily as a real name. On the other hand, it is certainly true that a person posts more carefully if his real name is attached to the result.
From the perspective of a website operator, a nickname has an associated IP, and a real name has an IP -- they're the same, both easily tracked. A nickname arises in a browser indexed with cookies, as does a real name.
> ... nothing but a load of self serving bullshit ...
For "surprisingly good evidence" the TechCrunch article blatantly ignores the findings of the Carnegie Mellon study linked to [1].
TL;DR the study found "that the proportion of negative postings has decreased on the pseudonym-based forum after the law; whereas, the law was not influential on the website in which real names were being revealed regardless of the law." It gives little insight into what happens when a site switches from being pseudyonym-based to real named.
The Real Name Verification Law of 2007 required website owners verify the identities of users but did "not force websites to reveal [their] real names". Thus, it resulted in pseudonym-based forums that can now link to a real identity if needed and sites which always used real names but can now verify them.
On the pseudonym-based forum, after switching from unlinked pseudonyms, i.e. anonymity, to linkable pseudonyms "the proportion of bad postings clearly decreased...in both short-term and long-term compared to the control group, and they are statistically significant". The switch was "not salient" on the real name board that always used real names. Plus one TechCrunch.
The study readily states that the "proportions of bad postings [on the real name forum] are smaller than those [on the pseudonym-based forum]" across the board. This suggests a real name board will contain less vulgarity.
If one is worried about switching from unlinked to linked pseudonyms, note that the "composition of user groups did not change over the period regardless of the law".
We should also qualify articulating these findings to the United States given that "South Korea’s household broadband penetration reached 95%, which was the highest rate among those of all 57 surveyed countries" and that their political culture tends to be a mark more boisterous than we have here.
Is this true? I've seen various studies saying that the opposite is actually true, but I can't currently find any of those studies. Does anyone have any sources?
EDIT: some sources, though I don't know the strength of their validity:
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