I think it's useful to not necessarily have to link your posts to your account if you don't want to.. anonymity from other users and anonymity from the staff have never been the same thing anyway. A lot of the problems on sites like this (HN, reddit) stem from their focus on chasing after and maintaining reputation, which itself can encourage an echo chamber and a sense of elitism. Having an account would make it easier (not necessarily effective, but easier) for the staff to deal with systemic abuses, because you have something more persistent than an IP to deal with.
They are usually discouraged, downvoted and flagged as they should be. But that happens with established accounts as well, so the anonymity itself doesn't seem to be the problem in those cases. Unless your account links to your real world identity in some way, there isn't much value in having an established account at all.
I think the relevant property is not anonymity, it's accountability. The argument against anonymity is that it will make people more accountable, but that's not always true. Rather, it's the way an online community structures itself.
For instance, here on HN we have the ability to be anonymous (on a sliding scale -- people can say who they are in their profiles, or be completely anonymous, or somewhere in between, posting contact info so that with effort they can be tied to their offline identity). But compared to many online communities, there's very little abuse here, and I'd argue that's because there's accountability -- there are clear standards, and those are enforced both by the moderators and by the community itself. Whether you post as yourself, fully anonymously, or somewhere in between, there's a community standard that hold you accountable for your posts.
I, personally, highly value the ability to have online identities somewhat separate from my offline one. I'm not trying to hide anything, I simply find it freeing to be able to enter a community without dragging around the weight of previous personal history, and to be able to establish an identity specific to that community I'm participating in. I always found this one of the amazing things about the internet, and I've been saddened to see that undermined. At the same time, I absolutely try to be accountable for what I say online, I expect others to hold me to that, and I hold others to that standard. None of this requires I know someone's "real" name, or that they know mine.
I do most of my posting and discussion on HN with my real name (which is nearly pseudonymous to begin with), and links to my real life. I have other user names for anonymous discussions, which I almost never use. I would need to log in and read comments of these accounts just to remember what my last use-case for anonymity was.
I tend to hold 15-year-old moot's mindset; I just don't see the appeal of participating in anonymous discussion. I will read it (I'll unabashedly lurk SA, 4chan & reddit) but rarely feel the need to chime in without having a tie to my identity. Perhaps it is discounting the power of ideas, but identity is approximately ONE HALF of any communication in my mind; I always want to consider the source, so I don't have much to say without BEING the source. Short of discussions of philosophy or existential beliefs, the source identity is always important to me in evaluating ideas.
Having said that, I've learned a great deal from anonymous users here on HN and each of the forums named above.
I think that the people that comprise them are what give online communities their culture; anonymity does not cause the meanness in these communities, the acceptance or encouragement of meanness by the community causes that meanness. anonymity allows users to remove their filters right quickly; it is the communities that encourage or discourage particular communication patterns.
Anonymous or not, you'll get down-voted and poo-poo'd on HN if you are overtly negative and 'mean' (particularly true when contrasted to other online forums). This is not a function of anonymity; it's a function of HN'ers having an aversion towards these behaviors as a whole.
I do this too. I found it almost impossible to post on my account under my own name, on any topic about psychology, politics, economics, or diversity because I am too afraid of what I've said being taken out of context later, or used against me in ways I can't anticipate now. I found myself frequently writing a post, only to delete it shortly afterward, worrying that it was somehow too risky.
In today's climate, you can't really even propose a thought experiment or discuss a hypothetical without being accused of holding that position yourself, and criticized as such. I don't even really have strong convictions about most of the things I discuss, except the desire to analyze them rationally and objectively, and the willingness to challenge both conventional wisdom and new radical positions.
Even while posting under an anonymous username, I still find myself self-censoring because of the risk that my identity could someday be connected. HN administrators can certainly trivially connect me, since they see the origin of my traffic for my two accounts, and I have not taken pains to anonymity the traffic for this one. However, HN admins themselves like pg have been posting under alts (and probably still do, for the same reasons), and seem to support this.
I have been wanting to propose that HN or some site like it offer a feature where you can switch your post to "Anonymous Coward" later, if it proves to be too controversial. Or post as "Anonymous Coward", and later assign the post to your name if you feel OK about how the discussion turned out. I think this would be better than having people feel like they can't post at all, or that they need alts to post. Having an alt is kind of like Anonymous Coward, except that you can't claim credit for just a single post that you turn out to feel OK about later.
The thing is, I think, that humans "try on" ideas like they try on clothes. We don't necessarily mean everything we say all the time (unless we take great pains to ensure it). The public discourse seems to expect that people have their minds firmly made up about everything, and a completely firm viewpoint that can be understood and criticized, but the reality is much more fluid. Or to put it differently: writing something that you can firmly stand behind requires a lot of time and energy, and a bar of quality and thoughtfulness and judgment that can rarely be met for Internet forum comments. Sometimes I'd just like to have a conversation, without fearing that something I say can be taken out of context and used against me years later when random-topic-of-the-day becomes a hot-button issue.
It's an interesting idea. The number of 'throwaway' accounts on HN suggests there might be some value to a network where now and then a comment or thread couldn't be traced back to an account.
It doesn't mean at all that you would necessarily get more valid answers to your questions. If that were true, the boards on 4chan that aren't /b/ would be glittering beacons of civilized discourse. People given the mask of anonymity can act more truthfully but also deceptively because they don't bear the consequences of identity.
Of course, there's public anonymity and there's anonymity to the mods and anonymity in the database. If the NSA wants to know who's who in your network, encrypting messages and hashing IPs probably isn't going to keep them at bay. What will the server logs tell them, for instance? Or packet sniffing? Or planting a mole on your staff?
If you allow file and image uploads by anonymous posters, you WILL inevitably wake up one day and find a ton of child porn, that's just how anon rolls sometimes. How will you deal with gore, porn and copyrighted material? When someone makes a threat against another user and posts personal information about them, will you go to the police? Under what conditions would you as an administrator violate the anonymity of your users?
Maybe only allow the anonymous posters to post text, or make certain that the mods can tell which account it really is (although this by definition makes the system less secure for users.) Either way, I think you'll need to be prepared for trolling and mischief, have your moderators ready with a clear set of guidelines, and even a few rather fascist options available like blocking Tor if need be.
You can make a new user account on Reddit in 30 seconds and don't even need an email (last I checked).
Pretty easy to maintain a significant degree of anonymity by just deleting your account and making a new one.
With that said, most users are more concerned about being anonymous to their peers in conversation than they are to Reddit's administration itself, IMO.
I tend to recycle accounts every so often, and make a reasonable effort to keep each account anonymous (although a determined creeper could likely identify me). I've also got a "real world" account, but generally prefer the freedom of posting anonymously, to avoid any potential Google-sleuthing later on.
It's a double-edged sword, though. Not associating opinions with my real world identity encourages me to post a lot more nonsense.. the freedom to be anonymous is also the freedom to communicate with no discipline, which couldn't be beneficial in the long term
Agreed. I do everything online under my real name. With that said, I see the option of using an anonymous account to be very important and I think the internet as a whole would be worse off if that option were somehow removed as some people want.
That's great if you sign up with the intention of posting anonymously, but if you post here for years using your name or your chosen alias (eg I'm onion2k on everything; it's trivial to find out who I am), and then decide you don't want to be associated with your HN history it's not so helpful. Also forensic tools are clever enough to take someone's comment history and use the little information in there to work out who you are. We leak information all over the place. A user name isn't the only way to find someone.
It's fair for people to change their mind and ask for functionality to delete data that's associated with them. I don't think the internet would be nearly as useful as it is now if everyone had to be anonymous from the start in case they want to stop other people seeing the content they created later.
However, that said, it's also reasonable to suggest people shouldn't be able to say appalling things and just delete their account later with impunity. There's a strong argument that someone's internet history should be available as a record.
Anonymity often brings relief to people who weight otherwise self-censor. 4chan is a really good example of this. Though it's got a terrible SNR, the peak signal is actually really high and sometimes you see really intelligent discussions about taboo topics like incest, furrydom, and racism. The anonymity allows people to state beliefs that simply wouldn't be acceptable anywhere else.
Maybe HN should have an 'anonymous' feature for accounts above a certain karma that allows a post to be made with no username attached, and no effect on karma. Behind the scenes, admins can still issue bans for unacceptable comments but the opinion gets protected from the groupthink.
A username isn't the same as anonymity. You can look through my comment history (and as it happens get a pretty good idea of what I do and where I come from). And my username relates pretty closely to my real name. That isn't much protection of my identity.
Total anonymity (no username, no identity) opens the door for anyone to say anything. In some cases that's good. But IME, it is a benefit that ia mainly used by the dregs .
Isn't HN proving the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory wrong? And showing that a decent discussion level is achievable in a anonymous environment. New Users creating their account don't even have to provide a legit email address. And at least your and my account are relatively "anonymous".
I don't disagree that anonymity offers protection against situations like this, but bear in mind that anonymity is very much a factor in the lack of civil discourse online. I'm not suggesting for a second that stripping anonymity is a solution to any of these problems, but personally I feel like I'm less likely to engage in the sort of behavior which might invite an angry mob while posting under my real name.
I regularly see comments on HN where people say they no longer wish to participate on the internet due to lack of anonymity and profiling. I can completely empathize with this.
Somebody recently linked a website that profiles all HN users, associating them with topics in the form of keywords, and even classifying their amenability to discussion. Scary right?
But is the risk that we inherit through the existence of these things greater than the costs of not being able to discuss things openly?
I'm currently in a situation where I want to start a personal blog where I write about issues that interest me. This includes everything from stances on big social issues, sexual behaviors and opinions on the nature of people (intelligence etc.)
These are obviously very contentious issues and having these things publicly associated with my name will make many people raise an eyebrow when considering me for a job or the likes. But is this really as good enough reason for me not to do it? I want to talk about these things and I want to put my opinion out there to see if somebody can intelligently refute my reasoning. I think it will let me grow as a person.
I think it's terrible that we should be afraid of expressing our opinions and as far as I can tell, the most effective way of doing so is by publicly saying: This is me, this is what I think, this is why I think it, I'm open to change should you be able to convince me - have at it.
I think anonymity per se is not that bad, and I'm pretty sure many regularly create throwaway accounts for harmless discussion on many forums just for privacy reasons (avoid profiling & analysis, big brother, personal attacks, etc), not for posting inflammatory or controversial comments.
Websites like Reddit Profile (https://redditprofile.com/about) and HN Profile (https://hnprofile.com) systematically scans all HN comments and identifies all users' expertise, personal interests, activities and emotions, and allow employers to uncover their E-mails and hire them. And it's just a one-man's startup as a social experiment, larger agencies and corporations have at least many order-of-magnitude higher budgets. And I definitely think not everyone wants that.
The problem, I think, is this type of behavior encourages inappropriate uses and abuses of anonymity.
I agree with you on two points. Firstly, you are right to make the distinction between anonymous and pseudonymous, they're two different things and you can build a reputation system and healthy community on a pseudonymous system (see HN). However, I think they both exhibit the same underlying problem that comes with lack of accountability. HN has been lucky, because it's for the most part an elite community full of smart people. Digg or reddit have not been so lucky, and the quality of comments there is quite low. HN is the exception, not the rule.
Secondly, I also agree that there's definitely some edge cases where it make sense for people to be anonymous, or pseudonymous. If you need to shield yourself from your employer for legal reasons, I think it makes sense for you to do so. What I'm arguing is that in most cases, though, it's good for the overall community to enforce true names.
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