It lost me there. Not only am I not proud of my social track record through the ages, but the idea of "privacy is dead" online identification is quaint, naive, and/or intolerable to me. For better or worse, there's a sharp, strategic/emotional partitioning of how I interact with or present myself to strangers, friends, family, employers, and law enforcement, and the chilling effect applied to my behavior from all angles is very limiting.
LONG live pseudonyms. : D
Nor should they be a privilege. It is cute when a celeb adopts a "stage name". We don't really consider that hiding, but politicians use stage names too. When you want to actually research a person, say to find out if they have a criminal background, cute "stage names" become barriers to legitimate research. If the wealthy and powerful get to use pseudonyms, everyone gets to use pseudonyms.
Then the CIA and FDB have jobs for you. There are a great many people who very effectively hide their online activities from even the best and most determined adversaries. Encryption, obfuscation, old fashioned trade craft, it isn't all that difficult to hide online. Anyone who deems the fight unwinnable has accepted an end to privacy.
See Dread Pirate Roberts for a good example. People eventually get caught if they make enough mistakes and are sufficiently valuable to powerful adversaries.
May be we actually agree about how hard it is, but are saying different words, like when you say "a great many" and I say "very small bunch" (like a "great many" in light of the power of actors like governments and ubiquity of surveillance). But such a perspective of complacency expressed here could only lead poor folk to being too lax, and thus, eventually finding their security compromised.
If you are a high value target, then you need to step up your game, but people always make mistakes and don't appreciate unusual attack vectors.
If you have really serious fame of the sort that means millions know your name, you may find it hard to obfuscate your activities. If you are doing something so bad that some government wants your hide, yeah, they may find you.
But for most folks who just, say, don't want their "respectable clients" to know their porn habits or something like that, having a nickname that your friends know you under separate from your "public"/professional identity can have loads of value and can be sustained for a lot of years without much effort at all.
People have tried to discover who he really is for over a decade, and only have a guess for his real name and age. Given that people have known of him since 2006 (for a twitter account with ~100k followers and known lead for a game with a million MAU), in this era, that's super impressive.
If you want more of a discussion on this topic, I would highly encourage reading some of Larry Lessig's work on internet identity and "cyberspace". Code 2.0 is a good start. He viewed pseudonyms like you, very much as a feature.
The fact is, people act differently depending on their degree of anonymity, and there's a place for everything on the entire spectrum from pseudonym to real name only.
If there's one thing I'd associate with hacker culture it's pseudonyms, especially l33t ones.
The commentary may have been more relevant in the 90s and more about people calling themselves random names and writing viruses, rather than contributing to Open Source with their names standing behind their work.
The grimy, day to day, forgettable things... not so much. That's the "being human" layer. Not many get to do their more ideal work as their actual job in society.
Out there among the Great Unwashed, I suspect the issue is more about the value they get from reading. People read a lot more than they write, after all. People were already getting tired of watching all their friends' highlight reels. Then since the last election there have been far more fights in comments, and the feeling of being manipulated, and people pretty naturally start to wonder whether this is time well spent.
I'm not dismissing your concern, but I don't think it's particularly relevant to the OP. Barely makes a dent, really.
I know the chilling effect of the widened pool of viewers is real. I also know the quality of the feed is generally terrible.
What keeps me there is the quality of the groups (mostly people I don't know) and the somewhat reliable means of contact. I don't know anyone who keeps a phone number for more than a few years, but very few change social networks frequently.
Now, I allow myself back on only from a computer at home. I've removed it from my phone. It's still bad, but it's less bad. It saddens me, because I do like keeping up with old friends and new (it's especially great to see people that I lost contact with decades ago, and to keep up with the lives of my sisters and nieces and nephews some).
In the place of all that FB time, I've developed a love affair with my Kindle. I carry a paperwhite with me, and also the Kindle app on my phone, so I have two books going at once. It's so much better for my mind!
Today's two books: Strange Stars: How Science Fiction and Fantasy Transformed Popular Music, by Jason Heller, and The Better Angels of Our Nature, by Steven Pinker.
So yeah, the "value they get from reading" matters a lot. And Facebook has poor value relative to the addictive qualities and bad social habits they design into it. When I came back after my hiatus, FB put me through a quiz, and in an open answer section, I said flat out that the addictive nature was a serious problem. A little hook is good, but not too much! I think I said they should be selling candy, not heroin.
You pull down... something spins... sometimes you get a reward.
Can it really be pure coincidence that Facebook and one-armed bandits have exactly the same UI?
Facebook is clearly in the low-effort category. It's designed to be. That doesn't mean it should be shunned entirely - we all need to relax somehow - but it does mean it should be managed. For some people that means limiting time. For others it means increasing the reward side of the equation, which might paradoxically mean more engagement. I have a friend who's a moderator for a very large and active group there. She has made lots of friends that way, and it makes her happy. Good for her. For still others, a complete separation might indeed be the right answer.
The important thing is that no size fits all. Kids need to be taught how to make these decisions for themselves, and in the better school systems they often are. Given the newness of technology, I think a lot of adults also need such education, and sadly won't get it.
Unfortunately, some sites forbid this to varying degrees. HN perma-banned my primary IP address because I was rotating several times per year. As is their right. But savvy people will generally stay in lurk mode as a result.
Maybe that's the future: Most posts by bots, most humans reading only.