I agree that there is a social control tempering the aggressivity and nastiness in individual physical interactions. But in a sense this is merely social norms inhibating people into not being themselves. I think the anonymity of internet is more similar to the anonymity of a crowd or mob. And mobs behaviour often isn't pretty.
The real life interactions are much more civil because of the fact that being an a*hole gets retribution from the person you are being an a*hole to or from the society.
Perfectly nice people turn into psychos when they interact with people online. Observe kids playing games in real life, they are very rarely as vulgar or sadistic as on online games.
A walk even in the most crowded places is much nicer experience that an anonymous online place.
Oh and yes, the very few cases where anonymity is useful are exactly that kind of cases(whistleblowing, journalism targeting powerful figures etc.). These are rarities and are valuable but %99 of the discussion on the internet are not about these and I suggested a mechanism for anonymity anyway.
I used to buy into the premise that anonymity + Internet = lots of people acting badly. Social media over the last decade has taught me that anonymity is absolutely not a meaningful requirement (I believe the masses of users, over that time, have adjusted to being comfortable with publicly being jerks without much concern). A lot of people feel no need to have a good reason to be jerks, it's their character, it's who they are all the way down. Some people are just rotten and there isn't much more than that to it (as it pertains to dealing with them as shit throwing types on the Internet). I feel like the author is suffering from not understanding or not accepting that this is the case, that in many or most instances, a person doesn't have a good reason for their terrible behavior online.
The reason for the clichéd build you up, tear you down, repetition process throughout all of human history, is that a vast number of people will be rage monsters, petty, filled with envy and jealousy. The types that are prone to that ill behavior, will come pouring out of the woodword once you've acquired any consequential amount of success/money/fame/whatnot. These are not good people, they are not capable of reasoned discourse, their opinions do not matter, their hostile negativity should be ignored and disregarded accordingly (they're also, fortunately, extraordinarily easy to spot and separate out from the more reasoned criticism; their entirely unnecessary over-the-top negative behavior provides for easy filtering).
The principle driver of antisocial behaviour online seems to be impunity, immunity, and/or disinhibition. Anonymity and/or pseudonymity are related, but nowhere near identical.
As Yonatan Zunger, chief architect of Google+ (and now an ex-Googler) pointed out, compulsory identification amplifies rather than removes power relationships. This is his principle (and IMO devastating) response to David Brin's Transparent Society argument. Minorities and the disempowered obliged to identify themselves lose even more power in the bargain.
What empowers abuse is the ability to inflict harm without perception of risk, whether that perception is accurate or not. Disinhibition reduces perception whilst overall risk remains high. (The concept is captured in the word "assassin", deriving from the Arabic, hashishin, referencing hashhish --- assassins had reduced inhibitions through pharmaceutical influence.) Legal immunity, the cover of a crowd, operating extrajurisdictionally, cover of a state or other significant actor, or simple mass delusions can all provide the reality or appearance of impunity.
Mandating identity itself creates new avenues for abuse, including the revoking of official credentials, bureaucratic incompetence, bribery, and the potential of a "permanent archive" of all accesses (already substantially present through numerous mechanisms) which can be mined at arbitrary future dates, but as-yet unknown entities with as-yet unknown motives.
I'll note that I'm one of numerous reasonably-well-know pseudonymous HN members.
Anonymity is not to blame here, but rather proximity. People with real real identities tied to their online avatars are just as bad if not worse than anyone else on the internet. ie, they're not anonymous. Internet hostility is more analogous to road rage.
The argument is that online anonymity itself also creates real-world consequences, such as character assassinations, harassment, and downright internet crime.
If "Civility" means "being nice to each other", why shouldn't we value it, in and of itself?
This is going to be an unpopular opinion but I'm hoping someone can explain why I'm wrong.
I actually would really welcome online activities no longer being anonymous.
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.
This is true in many areas including hate speech or posting illegal/inappropriate material.
I suppose I don't know if I think it should be LAW that requires everyone be deanonymized, but I do wish people on the internet would treat each other closer to the way they do in real life.
I agree with you 100%, the anonymity gives people incredible courage, but face to face people are more likely to be civil. But I think that is because the threat of physical violence is high if you said such hurtful things to other people.
Sometimes I feel the anonymity aspect of the Internet brings the worst out of people. If we didn't have anonymity to begin with, people would have not tried those kind of harassment. Or if they do, it'll be a routine case for the police as opposed to requiring substantial FBI involvement.
>It's sad that people's alcohol fueled idiocy -not crime,but idiocy, becomes public and has repercussions in real life.
I'm not sure I have this thought out well enough to write down but I'm going to try. I love the Internet, I love the Web. I love the new communications these technologies allow and empower. However, I have long been worried about the perceived anonymity of the Web, from both perspectives of (1) "hey you really shouldn't think you are anonymous" and (2) "wow, you are a complete moron when you think you're anonymous". I have also witnessed an inexorable degradation of personal content and personal speech on the Web, largely due (in my opinion) to this perceived anonymity.
Maybe it's my British upbringing, but I for one would welcome a few more people being held to account publicly for that which they say in public. For many of us, there existed a world before this one that was less generally rude, more consequential. As a child and a young man, I knew that the people around me might see me acting in a given unsociable manner and report to my parents/aunts/uncles/cousins/whomever. This seems to have been forgotten online.
I'm not certain how far to take this thought, but it seems to me that it wasn't all that long ago that in smaller, more defined communities, more people were similarly held to account by their community for their speech and actions. Our collective community has grown from village and town and city to worldwide, is this not perhaps simply the social mores and expectations finally beginning to catch up? If so, is that entirely a Bad Thing (TM)?
Could it, should it lead to a more polite, more respectful online community of humanity?
One guy willing to attach their name to their mobbing doesn't disprove the almost tautological idea that fewer people would participate in such mobbing if they were all forced to do so with their real identity. That's because right now both that wish to be anonymous and those that don't get to participate, whereas such rules would exclude the former group.
Even the event you mention probably depended on many being able to participate without risk, since one guy alone doesn't make for a very convincing 'mob'.
There are arguments for anonymity online, and I tend to agree that they outweigh the problems. I think it'd be strategically better to focus on these than try to attack the rather intuitive logic at the core of such calls for ending anonymity.
I don't know if that's necessarily true. Look at Facebook - people say mean and vulgar things under their real name all the time, often complete with a picture of their own face. Anonymity can be a factor in the way we treat each other, but it doesn't tell us the whole story.
Haha I remember that argument. The thought was anonymity made people horrible to each other online. Turns out people are horrible to each other online regardless.
> fewer people would participate in such mobbing if they were all forced to do so with their real identity.
I disagree. Mobbing existed before anonymity; in fact, it was very much the norm -- the concept of "honor" is often tied to public displays of condemnation for the "dishonorable". Publicity makes it harder for people to disagree with what is perceived as the opinion of the majority, as unpalatable and uncivilized as it might be. This is why political votes are secret, among others; or why the Gospels explicitly warn against public displays of faith.
Every group of people will have its "dishonorable" enemies, and will always be keen to publicly shame them. Forcing people to attach their public identities to online activity will do nothing to dissuade people who see such actions as a badge of honor, but it will chill the display of dissent from the status quo.
Anonymity isn't the underlying cause of hostile behavior, it's the expectation that you will not interact or need help from the person with whom you are having a negative interaction. Cooperation is evolutionarily successful because of repeated, mutually beneficial interactions.
This is antithetical to much of the internet, and anonymity is definitely a factor, but it's also just what happens when you interact with a much larger amount of people, since the chances of repeated, meaningful interactions is much lower. I would posit that road-rage would decrease if you knew that you would be driving behind/next to the same people every day - in fact, you would probably end up with some form of cooperative driving!
You're anonymous on the streets in a big city too, but people don't become their "true selves" just because of that.
On the other hand, swathes of the internet are not anonymous, and that doesn't stop immaturity.
I think there's a converse to the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory—let's call it the Greater Reality Stick-up-the-butt Theory. Basically, in real life, we enforce social norms on one another that we don't actually see the merit in ourselves, because others expect us to enforce those norms and punish/shun us if we don't enforce those norms (think of the monkey/water story: http://freekvermeulen.blogspot.com/2008/08/monkey-story-expe...). Anonymity allows for the relaxation of those norms, because nobody's around to catch you not calling someone out for doing something that you would normally call them on, but which you actually see no rational reason to be calling them on, besides some vague sense of "propriety."
Basically, anonymity allows people to treat everyone around them as utter foreigners—you don't expect me to have any grounding in your culture, and I don't expect you to have any grounding in mine, so neither of us "needs" to be upset when the other does something that is uncouth. Because of this, discussion can concentrate more on facts, and less on signalling, which I (and I think many introverted people) find a less stressful mode of communication.
Tangentially, I think this explains why many people on the internet have a annoyance-trigger at the undefined name-dropping of specific locales within, say, the US (with the usual response of "we're not all from the US", even if the person stating that is, in fact, from the US)—it grounds the discussion in a specific culture, which increases the likelihood of some subset of the people in the conversation finding a valid means of conveying subtext—which then leaves others out of that subtext, creating a kind of I-can't-enforce-norms-I'm-not-aware-of anxiety which is projected into a problem with the context being introduced in the first place.
In a lesser way, this is also why people tend to overreact to women who identify themselves as such on the Internet: they're introducing an ambient cultural context that increases norm-enforcement anxiety. (Interestingly, there's a specific name for Internet-age gender-role-relative-norm-enforcement: "white knighting." It's quite common to see people calling the practice out, though usually even the people themselves aren't sure precisely why they're unhappy about it.)
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