The anything goes / mass surveillance dichotomy is false. It is possible to have small-scale, individually-moderated websites, if the software to host them is available and easy to run, without sacrificing privacy (or even accountability). Pseudonymity is usually good enough, especially for things like Omegle.
Unfortunately, that requires a return to the days when most people's primary computing device was capable of acting as a web server, and computer literacy implied empowerment: that might be tricky, but if we work hard enough I'm sure we can get there.
Why does there need to be one uniform solution? Some sites can be entirely anonymous, some can be pseudononymous, some with real names... some heavily moderated, some lightly moderated... some facilitating one on one conversation, some for small groups, some for the wider public... and so on.
The web need not be homogenous. Omegle, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, hacker news... They can all exist differently and that's fine.
I've always thought using anonymity for targeted communication works really well.
Omegle used to be a lot of fun when it was mostly college students who were bored waiting for class or something and wanted to talk to someone interesting in a different place.
It's a good 'risk free' way to get to know someone.
I think a mobile app that did one to one anonymous communication restricted by .edu would be really successful (especially if it was just your school initially so you could potentially meet).
The general idea of self-censorship in non-anonymous systems is probably the main counter that I could think of to the original post. You get bad and good from it, but it's better to live in a world with both as a result than with neither.
Increasingly it feels like we can only "think" anonymously, not speak. Technology like Tor allows me to surf the web untracked, which is good. There are chilling effects from mass surveilance that cause people not read about sensitive topics[1]. It's good people can expose themselves to primary sources unimpeded.
But if a user tries to say anything of substance or simply become part of a community rather than rotate nyms every year or so, they're opening themself up to fingerprinting.
Right, also StackOverFlow, now that I've been reminded by someone in the comments above, Is a perfect example of an open community system where almost anyone can join. So using some of this logic we can control the anonymous madness. I mean we don't want to completely be like 4Chan but...
I grew up with a web where labor-of-love personal websites -- often about a deep topic the author was passionate about -- were slowly crowded out in number by dynamic blogs where the engine handled all but the content, and the barrier to entry of sharing personal details was lowered. Correspondingly, the depth of the material got more shallow, but the breadth of it got wider.
This transition was happening as commercial ventures first moved beyond sites that were mere billboards, individuals began reading news portals and opening webmail accounts, and communities like phpBB and vBulletin forums flourished as pseudonymous, do-it-yourself takes on newsgroups of old. Aggressive moderation typically kept the conversation in check.
There were corners of the web where moderation was shallow, and some of these places achieved notoriety for being cesspits of depravity, and eventually, hate. The depravity was authentic. But there was an air of privileged bravado about the hate, where its expression was used as a shibboleth to an in-group more so than an authentic expression of beliefs. If you were a true hater, finding other true haters was not a trivial task.
Early social networks were pseudonymous. 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. Ten years of Facebook moved the Overton window quite a bit, and now there's a set of people who aren't afraid to bare their cards, or of doxxing and reprisal. And now, they too have tools to build online communities of their own and find like-minded people on the web rather than in person, regardless of the popularity and acceptance of the views they hold.
Meanwhile, e-commerce is now everywhere, and so is content and services that can be consumed with no upfront cost. Both of these are supplemented by adtech-like schemes that harvest and correlate user behavior. Despite real harm having occurred from these practices, jurisdictions have been slow to regulate them for many reasons: ineptitude, lobbying, corruption, and ineffectiveness in enforcing regulations in a global, dynamic, resilient system. Shady, underground actors and mainstream actors alike will continue these practices until widespread, debilitating user backlash, or widespread regulation puts and end to them. If they are regulated, only ruthless actors will engage in this behavior: trolls, stalkers, profiteers, and intelligence services.
Social Networks with real name policies can be just as anonymous as 4chan. And sometimes, an IRC channel where everyone has a pseudonym can be more intimate than anything else. What makes the difference is:
- Moderation
- Small Groups
- Regulars who get to know each other
You can achieve this anywhere online. But I think IRC lends itself to smaller, closely knit communities.
I think there's a small but significant difference between putting things "in public" vs. "on the cozy web" in that (with not a lot of effort) the cozy web is practically safe enough for most folk.
We've reached a point now where the average person feels some anxiety about their future employer seeing an unsanitized public blog, but future employers aren't poking into a Discord and de-pseudonymizing usernames. Nor is my worst enemy; he's a meathead and lacks the savvy to do that, nor the competency to hire someone to do it for him (yeah, I said it, and you know what you did so don't act like it ain't true, name redacted!).
We've gone past the generation that thought if we lived with our private lives in public everyone would realize that everyone is human and be chill about that and we've built the infrastructure to have public selves and pseudonymous selves that (for most people) won't get cracked because it's not worth the hassle. Sure, nation-states and criminal syndicates still have the resources and incentives to do that kind of cracking, but we can only hide from them by staying all the way off the Internet, and we've definitely reached the point where that leaves one with a massively de-enriched lived experience.
Framing this as "what about the children" is an easy way to attack just about anything that's not strictly top-down from some large corporate vendor.
On the other hand, I do wonder if "talk to strangers" is indeed a reasonable model. Our brains form largely on the basis of neurons talking and connecting to strangers. Clearly that model works there. But then again the neurons are simple (relatively) cells with much more cohesive goals and behavior, while humans are complex entities with behavior ranging from the cooperative to the ghastly predatorial.
Ultimately it seems any such service can't be anonymous. Talk to strangers... fine. But you need to register first, with your name, face, age, and meet consequences for what you're doing on the service, if your intent is less than noble. Alas this takes people and money which Omegle apparently didn't have.
See, in an ideal world there would be an internet with lots of web sites, some that make people like smokinjoe happy by requiring real names and others that make you happy, by providing a forum for people to speak out anonymously.
If anything, your viewpoint--that every single website on the internet has to be run the way you would run it--is the more oppressive one.
Yeah, I think people underestimate that risk and what it means long-term. Do we want to solidify the web as purely just an access point for one of a dozen huge platforms?
There are several web forums I’ve visited that allow anonymous accounts to be created and allow commenting. They are well-moderated. Some were also very niche and run by like one person. Making a law like this is a one-way street that could potentially destroy that capability, some of the best parts of the web.
I never argued for tightly controlling information. Let 4chan and EFnet do their thing. But at least allow for people to build platforms that are non-anonymous. There is a cost to anonymity and it is never paid for by the person who is expressing themselves.
Also, a water filtration plant could introduce psychotropic chemicals to placate a populace, so don’t let your guard down!
Why does there need to be one uniform solution? Some sites can be entirely anonymous, some can be pseudononymous, some with real names... some heavily moderated, some lightly moderated... and so on.
Being able to opt into a layer of the internet with identifiable authorship -- maybe still pseudonyms, but pseudonyms registered and linked to real-world identities through at least one identifiable real-world actor -- is a long time coming.
It's not for everyone, but a lot of people who have been scammed by anonymous online merchants or targeted by anonymous online harassment and threats would love the option to step away from the cesspit of anonymity and live in a world where bad actors don't require sophisticated digital detectives to track down and prosecute.
30 years ago, when anonymity was the default on the internet because of the low standard of trust that was universally presumed, this worked remarkably well. I'm thinking about IRC's golden age now. There is a small number of special-interest communication media (in software development, for example) where this still works today, like hackernews or freenode.
But for the vast majority of people and types of communication acts, anonymity is basically no longer an option: The presence of non-anonymous media like Facebook has displaced innocuous communication from media like IRC that do allow anonymity. People aren't going to go looking for kiddie porn on Facebook but IRC still enables that kind of information-seeking behaviour. People doing foodie-posts are not going to do that on IRC but go on Facebook instead. -- This means that IRC has become a really scary place to be if there's a possibility you might get deanonymized, and generally not a place where you will find like-minded individuals unless you are one screwed-up individual. On the flip-side of the coin, at Facebook etc, you are going to be the victim of surveillance capitalism.
So: Compartmentalizing doesn't work. Unless anonymity is the default for everyone and used for both sensitive and non-sensitive communication, it doesn't actually provide a solution to the problems of surveillance capitalism. And the majority of people are always going to be too dumb not to be tricked into deanonymizing themselves most of the time.
I always thought anonymity and accountability were interesting tensions in a social network. Maybe we allow named accounts with the ability to post anonymous comments or content to other users. But I'd imagine the site admins would need to know this mapping to moderate obscene content.
I think a lot of it comes down to social norms. From what I remember, 4chan was almost boringly pleasant outside /b/. Because the norm and moderation were towards thoughtful posting.
On the other hand pseudonymous reddits with the norm of knee jerk responses and political twitter are awful. Because that’s the encouraged norm.
I can't help but agree that the communities seem to be disintegrating around the edges - but only in the feeling of community from the way the old generalized communities used to be. On the other hand, its hard to find something in real life that doesn't have an internet forum or 3 devoted entirely to it. I feel like a huge portion of my interests can fit neatly into existing forums that form their own specialized communities. Of course, there is no semblance of real anonymity there, I can use a pseudonym, but it would certainly not hold up to a determined investigator - public or private.
Of course, another trend here which really pushes things away from the anonymity/community is that the rise of Social profiles being tied to true identity has become a common denominator across a lot of the content sources on the net. Mobile access has also pushed us toward sole points of access to many of those communities. Sure, you can still log into many sites with a username and password from any old computer, but as more and more sites become personalized it becomes inconvenient to manage the multiplicity of web presences on a phone without resorting to using apps that are permanently logged in and tied to your single point of access.
Finally, the burden of defeating spambots has become nearly impossible without some strong anti-spam membership requirements. defeating spam has become a huge driver for anti-anonymity. The problem is, that even if you defeat bots, the giant number of people participating in discussions virtually guarantees that someone will post something in need of moderation under a pseudonym. A friend of mine at the NYT said they had to implant special filters to moderate the amazing amount of hate speech that would end up as non-sequitur comments on nearly every article. They are not alone in that experience.
Its not so bad, all in all, but the internet is a big place now. Some part of my thinks that when communities are small, they self-manage much more easily since there is a kind of group-accountability. On the broader internet, this isn't true anymore. on large public websites, it isn't true. But thats why we self-organize into smaller communities like Hacker News. As they get bigger, the rules necessarily become more strict because the feeling of accountability for the community's well-being on an individual basis goes down. </rationalization>
Unfortunately, that requires a return to the days when most people's primary computing device was capable of acting as a web server, and computer literacy implied empowerment: that might be tricky, but if we work hard enough I'm sure we can get there.
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