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Comment by colechristensen | Hacker News Reader

This is one of the reasons I think anonymity on the Internet is a bad thing. Not that I am saying it should be banned, but it should not be the norm. Much of the toxicity simply would not happen, could be prosecuted, or could be filtered if a "real person" attribute was widely available.

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Toxic comments can be just as common in non-anonymous forums and venues. Facebook produces a lot of toxicity, for example. Further consider; the Internet is much less anonymous then twenty years ago and that hasn't stopped the overall level of toxicity imo. The type of person who spontaneously makes toxic comments spontaneously will still make them when forced to use their real name (they'll just suffer more from it). The provocateur, those who calculatedly elicit toxicity, is always going to be here too - no matter many Russians Facebook filters.

One factor is that once one person begins attack another person, both using real names, both people have a hard time backing down, especially if they know each in real life or if they are semi-public figures. For a lot of people, admitting that they are wrong is a huge hurdle - and these tend to be the people who engage in toxicity in the first place.

...and people have been jerks since there were people, I am not implying that people being unpleasant was created by anonymous commenting.

However there would be quite a bit of backpressure against certain kinds of Internet toxicity if people were less anonymous.

I think it's the other way round. Anonymity (or rather: the right to present different personas to different audiences and to give up a burned persona when you see fit) makes the internet a bearable place. It also allows people to make up their mind without standing in their own way, and disregard hurtful comments as trolling (which they often are). Facebook painfully shows that real name policies do not necessarily lead to more civil discussions, instead they facilitate ad hominems, and expose vulnerable groups to hate everywhere, as aspects of their identity can not be selectively hidden anymore. This even extends to their real lifes, with their names being publicly known. Now speech needs to be controlled, because people lost control of their personas and need to fight everywhere, instead of just when they choose to.

Absolutely not.

Facebook comments aren't much better than YouTube, especially non-English ones that Facebook doesn't bother moderating at all. With about 97% of social market share in my country and a real name policy, it should be a brease to use it. It's absolutely not.

As for the prosecution, only if your country decides to give a fuck. There's a case in which a soldier called for a journalist to be raped and killed in a public Facebook post using his real name. He didn't face any consequences despite the story being picked up and screenshots of his public Facebook status shared all over the news.

Death threats, hate crimes, separatist movements, fake news... Real name policy stops absolutely nothing.

You are not the first person to think this, and some even put it into practice [0] hoping it would frontload forum moderation, but couldn't follow through with it [1].

As another commenter pointed out, facebook (and facebook-based commenting) has plenty of trolls in public comment sections. Anonymity is not what makes people jerks. More real reasons why internet forums enable trolls include:

- the asynchronicity of negative feedback: our primitive brains don't get to closely associate the negative feedback with the moment we expressed something in a socially unacceptable manner

- the lower bandwidth of negative feedback: IRL involves awkward silences, dirty looks, snickering, people turning up their nose at you, telling their children not to be like you within earshot, etc. All of this is suppressed over the internet, at most summarised by a downvote (which some trolls feed off of as positive feedback, knowing they ticked someone off, but don't face immediate social consequence). The trolls don't get conditioned to avoid doing things that hurt other people or are socially unacceptable.

[0] https://kotaku.com/blizzards-real-name-forum-policy-has-fans... [1] https://kotaku.com/blizzard-scraps-plans-to-display-real-nam...

   RL involves ...

I would add the most powerful (because most feared) form of feedback available in face-to-face communication: physical violence.

I intentionally didn't list that, because that's something else that's often cited as a reason why people aren't jerks in real life compared to the internet, but I don't think that's true in most civilized cultures.

If I'm a jerk in public, outside of racist/prejudiced violence or a mentally unstable antagonist, I'm not at serious risk of being physically attacked unless I start breaking laws or pose a notable threat to someone else. Because about 90% of the less edgy side of trolling (just being annoying or verbally mean, mostly) won't really draw physical violence in meatspace, you'll just be treated like a jerk or risk being politely asked to shut up or leave by an authority figure. Yes there's a risk of physical violence, but it's overplayed as a reason why people aren't trolls in real life as much as they are online, and I think it's significantly superseded by the things I mentioned, and probably other things too, which stop people from being jerks far before physical violence needs to be brought to the scene.

you need only look as far back as the covington incident to see that 'real people' are hardly inhibited from vile and abusive behavior just as long as they believe themselves to be on the right side of the mob. this has been the case since time immemorial. in my admittedly anecdotal experience, fully anon communities are far more respectful & a have a better standard of decorum than communities with high standards of verification, even and perhaps especially in dealing with the sorts of topics that tend to make more highly regulated forums collapse into flame wars. real name communities are prone to witch hunts, purity tests and all sorts of hysteria full of very real life consequences. anons just call you a retarded faggot.

Not sure why this was flag killed. The Covington incident is a good example. A controversial event occurred and everyone from every 'side' was inflammatory and no one maintained civil standards.

EDIT I guess flagging indicates part of the problem. Society is so busy screaming at ourselves that the only thing reasonable people think they can do is check out of controversial topics.

EDIT Would any downvoters care to engage about why they disagree?

HN has many great qualities, but some of the most important conversations we need to have are too emotional and inherently divisive to be connected to any kind of social currency system. there are times when identity itself is simply too much of a barrier.

I've read this a few times and I don't quite follow what you mean...

the heavily moderated upvote/downvote system of prioritizing content is great when dealing with technical topics that aren't too emotional and don't challenge cultural established norms too heavily. however there are many aspects of life that are too messy, too heated & too shameful to be effectively dealt with in this format. these tend to turn into shadow topics that are better out of sight & out of mind, only discussed behind closed doors where the risk of vulnerability is limited and even then they still carry potential repercussions. in 'real name only' networks there are far too many risks to ever be a real person at all so we cultivate a brand that is the best & most superficial version of ourselves. we hide our pain, our doubts, our regrets. this extends to pseudonymous networks as well and anywhere that a cumulative identity is present. very few people want to be recognized as assholes and no one wants to be a pariah, a victim or a failure even if they really are. in a sense the only time you're really talking to anyone is when you've both stripped your personhood away and have nothing to lose.

It's just fun to trigger people by downvotes :)

Ironic you would say this on a low toxicity anonymous forum.

HN has some pretty toxic behavior, depending on the topic. it’s not as egregious as others due to moderation and flagging but definitely not low.

Toxicity is a non issue compared the the huge disadvantage of losing anonymity. In fact you're feeding the trolls by giving them hints of ethnicity, gender, etc.

A real name policy also wouldn't actually address the actual problem. Toxic behavior is possible because on the internet you can write angry comments to a person on the other side of the globe and then forget about that person tomorrow. If that person does come back tomorrow then it doesn't matter if they are called "hahaurmom" or "Jonathan Willis".

The word you want is "impunity" not "anonymity". Because awful behaviour persists in actively de-anonymized contexts (eg: Facebook) when there's a power imbalance that puts society (or a local subset of it) on the side of the troll and against the victim.

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