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Comment by Barrin92 | Hacker News Reader

I agree with Mark as far as social networks are concerned. The 'social' part of the name is important, and social relationships cannot function without some sort of stake.

Having a unified identity guarantees that people are held accountable for what they say, it reduces fraud, trolling, and it means people have 'skin in the game' when participating in a social environment, it's the basis for trust.

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But in social networks IRL, it doesn't really work that way - because real life bubbles mostly don't intersect, it's as if the person had a separate identity in each. Online social media effectively pushes all the bubbles together, which transforms accountability into witch hunts, where a singular misstep is quickly propagated and results in outrage mobs across all the bubbles. Thus, the scope of social ostracism is rarely proportionate to the transgression.

Very well put! I don't think I had quite connected the two that far. It's not even because the person actually used their real name while "transgressing", but because there's usually enough other real name metadata laying around to create an expectation that anyone can be doxxed.

This is a great concrete example of a rule that Zuckerberg himself worked to promulgate, and is presently causing real ongoing harm.

Having separate identities is literally “being a woman on the internet 101” so forgive me if I don’t think it’s a solution to trolling.

"Results show that in the context of online firestorms, non-anonymous individuals are more aggressive compared to anonymous individuals"

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

That is really not what I would have expected, very interesting.

Awesome. So you're going to change your HN username to your real name and put your address and phone number in your "about" section?

No, because I don't treat this website as a social network. I have no friend connections here, don't expose private information, it's a technical discussion board in my opinion.

Facebook on the other hand is a network for the exchange of private or personal information, including for example people forming groups about particularly sensitive topics (abuse experiences, disease and so on), in which personal identity is important to not open yourself up to potential intrusion by people who are not trustworthy. (Cynically enough stalkers for example trying to inject themselves into support groups)

Which is also of course why privacy and identity considerations between HN and Facebook differ.

> Facebook on the other hand is a network for the exchange of private or personal information

No, it's not for me.

> people forming groups about particularly sensitive topics (abuse experiences, disease and so on)

It seems exactly the opposite to me: I would not want to use my real name to publicly discuss sensitive personal topics.

For example, I may not want my friends or employer to find out that I'm a drug addict. In many workplaces, it could cost me my job. What if someone else in my support group happens to be a co-worker of mine?

It also raises the stakes for impersonation and identity theft. This can be the difference between life and death in some cases.

Also, maybe some of us don't want to live in a creepy ad-supported pan-option where the links you click become your actual identity.

> ...social relationships cannot function without some sort of stake...

Depends on what you mean by "function". Enjoying cat photos or playing a round of a video game doesn't take any stake at all.

>Having a unified identity guarantees that people are held accountable for what they say, it reduces fraud, trolling, and it means people have 'skin in the game' when participating in a social environment, it's the basis for trust.

No, it doesn't. People are perfectly willing to troll under their real name. When Youtube forced people's G+ accounts to merge into their comments and people suddenly found themselves commenting under their real names, it stopped the trolling and hate... for like a week.

Hell, plenty of people on Usenet were assholes with their real names and emails in their signatures.

This sure is getting a fair bit of downvotes. I mostly agree with you though. Having a single identity reduces trolling, it's as simple as looking at Facebook vs Twitter. People are less likely to message nasty things to others if their real life reputation is on the line, I take that as fact.

I see the exact opposite: the reasonable voices are chilled into silence due to lack of identity siloing, the grotesquely uninhibited remain vocal.

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