Reputation works with pseudonymous identities too, and those have security upsides (eg can't be as easily pressed into service of others by extortion or rubber hose). And of course privacy is a value in itself.
Need long-lived pseudonyms that can accrue reputation. Ideally they'd be securely portable from site to site. Some schemes for this use fancy cryptography, which may have some value. But something simple with web domains might be able to do the heavy lifting.
Could that reputation been carried throughout an anonymous identity? The only benefit from having an actual name is verification of identity. But when you talk in a certain manner, identities can become fluid and obvious of spoofs -- eliminating that need for verification.
The advantages of using your name can often outweigh the disadvantages.
Reputation is a valuable thing. You don't gain a good reputation by hiding away. You build a good reputation by making a positive impression on lots of people over a long period of time. You can't do that if you are always anonymous.
If I was hiring someone, I'd google them. And if nothing turned up, that would give a somewhat negative impression. Better than seeing them being a jerk or idiot or criminal, of course, but still.
On the other hand, if I saw a long history of them behaving intelligently and diplomatically, going back a long time, that would make a very good impression.
I say use your real name, but don't be a dick, and don't be stupid.
It's not about people being anonymous or not that causes the good behavior, it's that when people use their real name, they have risked something of value - their reputation. The way to ensure good behavior is to require that people take some sort of risk with something they value when they participate in your site. This might be in the form of a deposit, using their real name, or the loss of a potential reward.
One of the great benefits from an online alias is being able to build relationships in a community while retaining the ability to cease (and resume) that contact at any time. The alias may as well represent its own individual, with minimal risk to the underlying user(s) as to its reputation. It's a huge relief and a boon to expression to be able to communicate without worrying about the reputation of a sole "real name".
accountability. Using your real name on social media makes you much more accountable than using a pseudonym. Some people really believe in that (I do too, just not on most social media platforms)
Is there any reason to prefer anonymity to protected aliases? I'd say people should be able to post under their nicknames and only their lawyers/notaries/trustees should be able to disclose their identity in a some lawful procedure. It should not be a responsibility of a platform, but there must be someone who knows the true identity and can certify the relationship between it and the alias.
Surely trust can be achieved through consistent identities which aren't real names, or by allowing the option of (but not mandating) user names which are real names.
4chan is an example of an "anonymous" system, not a "pseudonymous" one: the difference is whether you have stable identities over time, and therefore can build up reputation (positive or negative) for a particular "pseudo-name".
As long as you have mechanisms, whether social or political, to "default distrust" new users that don't have much "cred" yet (mechanisms like the "green" user rendering that Hacker News uses for this purpose), you are not going to lose the benefits of "anonymous" vs "real names".
In fact, one might even argue that claiming otherwise misses the point of names: even when I am going by just the name "saurik" (seldom, but it happens: like here on this site), I care deeply about what I say as it affects my identity.
As an example near and dear to many people on this site, no one had known who "why the lucky stiff" was (maybe they do now? not keeping up with that much); but, if he had started being an idiot on forums and started "proliferating senseless hacking and child pornography", you can be certain that that would have been quite bad for him.
(In fact, if your real name is not known by anyone, and everyone knows the entity that actually has all of the reputation capital you draw on on a daily basis, then arguably there is no risk in doing something stupid with your real name, and total risk in doing so with your pseudonym.)
However, there are significant safety issues associated with requiring people to use their legal names for online discussions, and I think that it will seriously muzzle political dissent, social movements which don't currently enjoy mainstream support, gender and sexual minority group discussions, the creation of "safe spaces" (which, I realize, are something of an illusion, but still have value), and vigorous intellectual discourse.
I certainly wouldn't have been comfortable being as politically and socially outspoken as I am on G+ (a deliberately public-facing persona with a unique nym for that purpose), if I had been forced to use my full legal name for the purpose.
Given some of the hate and harassment that has been directed my way (and, honestly, I've gotten off light compared to many), I absolutely would not feel safe engaging in some of those discussions if my name, phone number, and location were easily accessible.
I know that it's difficult to completely compartmentalize between nyms and platform identities, but I think that the ability to choose which face is forward, appropriate to the social group that you're engaging with, is an important part of the human experience.
If you don't want your boss and your grandmother reading your opinions on politics, social issues, sexuality, etc., then a pseudonym is the obvious answer -- and I've seen any number of sites (LiveJournal is a particular favorite) implement granular controls on privacy, in order to establish nym identity and reputation, while still allowing users to speak to their chosen audience.
Can you ever be truly private? Probably not. But it's important to be able to have some form of shield from the casual observer, to have a name and identity that you choose, rather than having one chosen for you, which may reveal far more than you intended.
Yes, I post publicly on G+, and sacrifice some level of privacy in doing so -- I do it because I enjoy the level of discourse on that site, and talking with interesting strangers is part of the fun. On the other hand, I deliberately didn't link that profile with any of my other online identities . . . and, while I may not have done a perfect job of it, I at least did my best to create walls between those personae.
As Dredmorbius said, it's important that users be able to maintain those walls if they choose, without a service provider choosing to collapse them and merge those identities without permission. By using their services, I did not consent to that action (in fact, repeatedly refused their attempts to do so), and if given a choice between leaving the Google-services hive and having my legal identity attached to everything I've ever written, I'd leave.
What is deceptive and duplicitous about this latest G+/YouTube action, is that many users who expressly refused the "offer" to merge accounts were merged without permission, and often those merges revealed personal information that the users had not chosen to share with YouTube.
I find that intensely disturbing, and I am seriously hoping that some type of action is taken against Google, as with Buzz, regarding the breach of private user information.
I have been on online networks of one kind or another since 1992. I am 100 percent behind the idea that people using their real names (the rule of some networks I have been on) promotes better online community and people taking more responsibility for their personal behavior in the community. That said, I do have some friends who have long established pseudonyms that have most of the good effects of real names, because those friends still try to build up reputation for those pseudonyms. (You'll have to be the judge of how well I'm doing here building up the reputation of "tokenadult," a screen name I brought here from two other online communities where pseudonyms rather than real names are mandatory but changing names is difficult so that reputation still accumulates for each name.)
That said, I refuse to "out" my niece's dog, who has a Facebook profile. It's important to have amusing counterexamples out there so that people don't invest too much trust in Facebook. In the last week or so a Hacker News participant (I don't know his real name [smile]) suggested that Facebook could monetize by being an online payments platform. For consumer-to-business transactions, I don't trust Facebook as a payment platform because its engineers have the attitude "Don't be afraid to break things," which just doesn't appeal to me for a network that handles my financial data. For user-to-user transactions, I also don't trust Facebook because I don't trust the users unless I know them in person--my Facebook community is enjoyable because it really consists of people whose real identity I know, and who know me. If I want to do business with strangers, I occasionally do that through Amazon Marketplace, but that is because Amazon has built up its own reputation for standing behind transactions there.
AFTER EDIT: Several comments in this thread are along the lines of
It's not hard to imagine a near future, if not a present, in which a person's identity is entirely evaluated, shaped, and determined by a monolith such as facebook.
But most people in the world still are largely stuck with the reputations distorted for them, before they can develop their reputations for themselves, by their family or their classmates in some small community. Facebook is LESS of a "monolith," because it is made up of hundreds of millions of users, than any small town anywhere. A lot of people find it liberating to find online communities based on shared intellectual interests (Hacker News works for this too, of course) rather than just being stuck with their current group of in-person acquaintances.
Not all are bad, but they are frequently abused to not only protect privacy, but to protect against legitimate legal need. It is like hiring a contractor on your house who gives you a false name so they can skip out of town when you figure out they cheated you. There is no legitimate purpose for that degree of privacy. They wanted privacy for the express purpose of providing you no legal recourse.
Pseudonymity is perfectly valid, but there needs to be efficient, effective, and crystal clear means to pierce it and find the actual humans making the decisions with intent when there is a legitimate and well-supported legal need.
I would hypothesize that the correlation is that a pseudonym increases your sense of invincibility.
If you already think there will be no ramifications of friends/people knowing your opinion, then a pseudonym doesn't give you much incremental benefit.
If, however, the potential ramifications are great, a pseudonym does a lot to distance the ramifications from you individually.
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