> 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.
> 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.
> On a serious note, I think that the only way to fight with the streams of fakes (regardless the country) is a restriction of anonymity on the Internet.
Please stop suggesting that.
There's zero evidence that removing anonymity works and in that process we lose our online privacy. And I think anonymity is precisely what we need to preserve freedom.
Also people are simply jackasses, real names or not. If you don't believe me, engage in conversations on Facebook about politics sometimes. There's nothing that shakes my faith in humanity faster.
> 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.
> Although I don't support it, would the internet be a better place with people being identified?
I don't believe so.
> For this to be a constructive discussion, can we assume companies have a proper and secure way to validate identities and store your data?
What?! No, we absolutely can't assume that. In fact, good default is to assume that data stored will be eventually compromised with high probability. Assuming otherwise is like believing in some magical backdoors in cryptography that only "good" guys can access and other such nonsense.
> I sometimes wonder if the internet as we know it and social medias pervasive influence would be much different if people were less anonymous.
Social media as we know it today mostly stems from FB which has a real name policy. Don't think FB is much better than others (by any measure that interests me at least).
> The internet would be a better place if there were more identity requirements
This is a completely baseless claim, as most arguments against weak (ie pseudo) anonymity seem to be. Outside of banks, healthcare providers, and payment processors, I see little of benefit. Before bringing up any arguments that involve poor behavior or misinformation, please refresh yourself on the current state of Facebook (where nearly everyone is using their full name).
I already think twice before (and often decide against) using a service that requires my phone number. I will _never_ use Discord or Twitter (in my personal life at least) for this reason. Except for banks, liquor, and the pharmacy, I am almost certain to decline doing business rather than providing my ID.
> I think you hit the nail on the head, anonymity can bring out the worst in someone, especially when they feel there is zero repercussions. It’s partly why I hate the throw away accounts here.
It's a tradeoff. There are both good and bad things with anonymity and real name policies:
1. Anonymity: people can express themselves without anxiety, but that gives space to assholes to be assholes (barring other control mechanisms).
2. Real names: lots of people will hold back due to anxiety that what they say may come back to haunt them years later [1]. The more timid assholes will inhibit themselves as well, but not all assholes are timid. The main people who will participate (asshole and non-asshole) will have the personality types that DGAF.
In short: anonymity is somewhat more favorable to assholes, but also more favorable to good discussion. I also prefer it, because I'm the kind of person who will just shut up in a deanonymized space.
[1] In ways they may have never even imagined at the time.
> Communities would self police much better if some level of anonymity was removed from members; its less likely that “John Davidson” would post a racist rant than “xxTrump2020xx”.
A lot of Facebook users have no problem writing racist rants using their real names.
>> 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
> And it isn't just blog comments; it's everything. If people here were using their real names and weren't allowed to create sockpuppets for one-off posts, we wouldn't see nearly the honesty and humiliation we do.
But this isn't about making the Internet as a whole non-anonymous. I realize that Google is a rather large entity, but I put a lot more trust and faith in them than other big internet players.
> don't need to look far to see how successful communities that embrace pseudonyms are.
I don't find a community where some people can say immensely hateful things as all that great. Sure, they can regulate and ban the user, but there is absolutely no responsibility taken for the aggravator's actions.
In my opinion, I'd rather there be several levels of anonymity available. Competition will drive each platform and with any luck, some semblance of a standard practice may come out of it.
I personally want people to be responsible for their actions on the Internet, until it has been completely proven it won't help, I don't see a reason to do away with a "Real Names" policy.
> so many people conflate anonymity with "non-identity", which is absolutely not the same.
Quite a few people have mentioned this in passing, but I think it's actually the central point.
What you're called has no relationship to meanness at all. Whether your actions can have consequences for you is what has a relationship to meanness.
This holds true in real life too. The Stanford Prison experiment degenerated because the prisoners had no meaningful way of creating consequences for the prison guards, not anything to do with names. Abu Ghraib abuses occured because the mechanisms to hold the guards to account were (perhaps even deliberately) not working. They used their real names.
The rule of nature is that groups of people who can suffer no consequences for their actions will tend towards worse and worse behavior.
This is obvious. Imagine a forum where you could call yourself whatever you wanted in conversations (and different names in different conversations), but you have to log into it with a password and passwords cost $50 to acquire and for sufficiently bad behaviour they can be revoked. The fact that you can call yourself whatever you like isn't going to change the fact that people will be careful not to do things that risk their $50.
Reddit and hackernews and stackoverflow tend not to degenerate because the identities on there have history and value. If you behave badly enough, your identity will suffer loss, and you yourself will lose some of the value you've built up.
One of the most wonderful things about the internet is that you can take part in communities where race and sex and family history and class and age are subordinated to achievements, ideas, and skill at expressing them.
> This is why I prefer anonymity for my online activities.
Thats funny because this is why I think I’m starting to prefer using my real identity.
When you use your real identity you behave in a way that you will stand behind. Anonymity goads you into acting in a way that you might feel embarrassed about or regret. And given that you are a real person posting online, there is always a chance you lose anonymity.
It’s complicated though. Anonymity to bypass authoritarianism is obviously good. More ideally speeking, we just have stronger free speech values across society so people don’t feel like they need to hide and discourse, think, etc in secrecy.
It's been a while since I've messed about on here: http://turing.gatech.edu/ (I don't even remember if it's the same thing I was involved in)
People are pretty good at guessing whether someone is telling the truth about their identity on the internet. Anonymity adds unnecessary obfuscation, makes for a game of trying to guess the other person's perspective. Non-anonymity should be a choice, and I believe that it adds value to a person's perspective.
We need to be comfortable with the differences between persons, we do not need some cosmic blur sweeping across our identities.
> 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...
> 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.
> People behave very differently when they perceive they are anonymous.
I don't know about that. I see people on FB who are accurately identified by their real name who have no problem whatsoever expressing "F*ck your feelings" to people who are ostensibly their friends. Lack of anonymity doesn't seem to have helped.
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.
Identities in comment sections have always been fake and anonymous and this is a good thing even if it results in occasional spam reviews. Legal action to enforce real IDs would make the internet worse.
I don't get it. I'd expect highly technical forums to value anonymity despite its drawbacks but I'm continuously disappointed.
>Being able to interact behind a computer screen is a great equalizer. You can't know for certain if Numb3rsFan12358 is a man or a woman.
That's one of the things that most vexes me about that push to removing online anonymity. Ostensibly, making everyone interact on the internet under their real name will "prevent harassment and bullying". But I have no idea how anyone with even passing familiarity with internet communities could believe that (cough Wil Wheaton cough).
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.
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