Anonymous comments improve online debates | Hacker News Reader

Anonymous comments improve online debates

ajr.org

25 pointsssn20 comments

There may be some situations in which the only way to get honest opinions is to enable people to post anonymously, but in the majority of cases where I've seen people posting anonymous comments, or comments under pseudonyms, the quality tends to slide. HN is a conspicuous exception, although that's probably due to its fairly restricted scope of interest.

I find that Reddit is great because of anonimity. People can talk about problems they can't talk about to anyone. People share experiences they would never dare to share. You get to realize some things are extremely common yet never discussed, because of shame or stigma.

Anonimity is the key to getting truth. Even the extremely superficial posts like "U SUCK DICK! LOLOL!" or extremely incendiary posts, or illegal stuff like child porn, they show what people are like or what strange and dark thoughts sometimes pass through their minds.

Anonimity is the counter to hypocrisy.

Certain parts of reddit is only usable because of that, but I doubt that /r/pics or most of the "normal" subreddits require it.

It might be a useful option to be able to set in the options though.

Hypocrisy, maybe, but not misdirection. Anonymity makes it easier to build straw men to defeat, or make it sound like your opponent is an idiot, because nobody knows if you're you or you're them.

It's not like misdirection is not possible without anonymity. In fact, anonymous misdirection is less effective because the source is more questionable. Misdirection from an authorative source is the really dangerous stuff (WMD's in Iraq?).

>Anonimity is the counter to hypocrisy.

Care to explain this?

If nobody knows or cares who you are, then you have no reputation to defend. Concealing true beliefs with nice platitudes or nasty posturing is pointless when those remarks are not associated with a persistent identity; no credit or blame will accrue to an anonymous poster for their degree of social compliance, so there's no economic reason to construct a false persona.

On anon boards like 4chan you can sort of pick out individual speakers in a thread by their phrasing or from the conversational context, but following 'anons' from thread to thread is just impossible without a way to track IPs. Of course mayhem abounds in this environment, but there's a surprising degree of substantive discussion too. People are verbally much more aggressive, but psychologically less so, because it's pointless to attack the motives or consistency of an anonymous commenter.

There is still a lot of trolling, naturally, but it tends to be of the sensationalistic or entertaining type rather than the sort dedicated to accumulating social capital and its use for the promotion/suppression of particular viewpoints. That makes it possible to have very frank conversations about subjects that are normally impossibly awkward, which can lead to serendipitous insights.

Uh huh, but what does that have to do with hypocrisy? For that matter, what do you think hypocrisy means?

I think hypocrisy means stating a certain position while acting out different position.

The need for stating a position comes from social or political correctness (or misdirection in which case it doesn't work) which are unnecessary with anonimity. So when you are anonymous you are free to give your true position, the one you act out.

Actually, when you're anonymous, you're free to be a hypocrite without being caught...

Yes, and if you don't realize you're being a hypocrite that isn't changed. But the benefit of being a hypocrite goes way down, while the benefit of being truthful goes up. I mean this in a personal way: People generally like to say what they think is the truth.

Robot 9000 systems seem to work pretty well.

The quality doesn't just slide, it plummets. c.f. YouTube, Chicago Tribune, etc.

The right tool for the right job. Anonymity works in some areas, not so great in other areas. While many sites are shifting to real-world user IDs, I believe that is an extreme step and something like 'expiring comments' could be a better alternative to deal with the problems that come with anonymous comments » http://j.mp/cKstr2

>There are ways to curb abuses in the forums, whether using high-tech solutions or good old-fashioned editing.

Similar sentiment:

All code is efficient given a sufficiently smart compiler.

No. Your compiler can't compile out side-effects. (Or at least, it should not.)

Well, I guess that would explain the high quality of discussion on 4chan, then.

Sensible article. But very US centric.

Yeah, I find the whole framing the thing around the US constitution unhelpful. This is really a human psychology issue rather than a cultural history issue.

The thing that makes me curious is whether "semi" anonymity is the best of both worlds (where the person whose platform it is knows your identity but it is not published). In the example of women not writing letters to the editor because of their names being published, would they still object if the editor verified their identity but then published the letter pseudonymously?

This is a sane solution, only if you can trust the editor never to reveal your name. Ever. Not even to law enforcement.

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