Using Real Names has Real Consequences
open.salon.com
open.salon.com
The most recent wikipedia fiasco involving programming languages being deleted just goes to show how dangerous it is. The poor editor who marked the articles for a delete discussion was stalked to the point of people on HN discussing the idea of contacting the guy's boss with the intent of disrupting his career in academia.
And all because the guy thought an article didn't have enough notability to belong on wikipedia.
P.S. It's a nitpick, but "just assume" should be "just as soon."
I think it's fundamentally important that as a general principle the internet allows a person to play many parts and to play those parts under discreet, consistent personae if required. The most basic example being that my 'work' persona needs to be distinctly separate so that people can't mistake my personal opinions for official statements from the national broadcasting corporation I happen to work for.
Sites like quora and facebook are a distubing and distressing trend to me, but I haven't really seen a great deal of 'push back' against the practice. Especially from younger web users, and I wonder if it's just a 'generational' thing?
Quora… how popular is it really outside of the tech community? Do we really have any idea about what its adoption rates would be otherwise? I don't.
I think a lot of people who really like Facebook, still don't want it to be following them all over the rest of the web. So FB's high adoption doesn't necessarily mean people want it to use it everywhere.
The Idiocracy hunting down quotes and pictures out of context are part of what necessitates the anonymity.
What exactly happens if one uses a pseudonym at Facebook or Quora? Does Big Brother come to drag you off to Room 101?
Perhaps few people bother to push back against the Real Name policies because there's nothing much to push against. If I decide to use a pseudonym, I doubt that a site would rush to stop me: Better a user with a non-"real" name than no user at all. And even if they enforce the policy, I doubt that they expend much effort. How could they? As patio11 once pointed out at great length:
http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-b...
... the One True Personal Name problem is intractable. It's so difficult that entities which actually care about identity, like major governments, don't bother to solve it: They issue numbers instead.
The Real Name policies also aren't the big threat, IMHO. A company with a Real Name policy is actually being very above-board: Explicitly asking for your real name, and then visibly stamping it on everything you submit, is a clearer signal of a site's privacy policy than any actual written privacy policy. It's intuitive. People understand names, and pseudonymity, and anonymity as they apply in the real world. What they don't understand, and the source of the bigger problems, is that on the web the things that you type under a pseudonym can be traced back to you anyway -- by cookies or IP addresses or traffic analysis or cross-correlation of credit card numbers or mobile phone IDs or word frequency analysis -- and that companies like Google and Facebook are built around building those links and then selling the data. The problem with Facebook isn't the parts that are explicitly public; it's the parts that ought to be private but aren't.
Anyone out there who is actually named Peaches Gnome will need to prove it to Facebook. Imagine the troubles that the Zappa kids go through.
People who insist on using their "handles" are hankering back to the world where online and offline lives were mainly seperate. That just isn't true any more, it's as if you used a fake name in the phone book and wondered why no-one called...
And yes, using a nick on FB means exactly this: you don't want anyone to call you. I simply don't want to network with my friends & family on facebook (better ways are available), but i needed access to the API ^^
Several of my friends and I use full or partial pseudonyms on Facebook; (In fact, I've changed mine multiple times.) As an alternative to that, my girlfriend keeps different Facebook accounts logged into different browsers to keep her personal and professional identities separate.
Identity is fluid, seems so should the names we employ in this even more volatile medium of the web.
As an adult, I attach my real name to just about everything (it's on my HN user page). I might not want to own everything I said as a teenager, but if you won't own what you say at 30, then when will you?
I actually like having an archive of stuff I wrote when I was 13 (and having an archive of thoughts is a prime motivator for a blog). I don't really care what people think of my 13-year-old self, especially if my current self isn't going to ever interact with them to update their beliefs. I think it was Gandhi who said "If you see a contradiction between pieces of my writing, assume I currently believe the most recent one."
* Maybe not in the sense you mean but in a sense that I think is sufficient -- that statements from that persona can be challenged and measured against other statements in the same context for consistency.
Just recently I witnessed a heated debate between pseudonyms and the weaker of the two debaters finally said "I am Dave Foo from Sometown, Oregon - are you going to hide or man up?". The response was "I am Bill Bar from Othertown, California - what of it? You still haven't answered the questions I asked". Real names add little in terms of content of validity.
Real names aren't necessary, but if you want a reputation, you'll need to be consistent with the name you pick.
For example, if you're in a conservative town and you're using your real name while arguing for civil rights for homosexuals, you might draw nutcases tracking you down and harrassing you for your simple viewpoints instead of engaging you in the medium you participated in. This isn't a matter of not owning what you say, but a matter of putting a layer of insulation between yourself and immature idiots.
Another issue with real names comes from identity theft - using real names makes the process a little easier. Real name + known site hack = half the job done.
Pseudonyms aren't just about trolling, they're also a social firewall.
A true "psuedonym" would provide you with insulation, but would follow you everywhere and you would only get one.
To say that anonymity breeds obnoxiousness baseless, especially since there is anonymity all over the web, yet 4chan is the example that everyone loves to use. Where are the other examples? What about http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futaba_Channel or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2channel (4chan's inspiration)? It also provides anonymity.
As pyre has already said, 4chan's b channel is a force unto itself, but there are plenty of other places with no consequences where the speech is fine and isn't the devolved miasma you make it out to be.
Pseudonyms also protect people against unwarranted discrimination. I speak as a white male with a white male name that it's fucking awesome being a white male. But I have observed those who aren't white males get subtley (and sometimes not so) discriminated against online. Check out /any/ tech post where a commenter with an Indian name takes part. Unless the Indian is well known, there's bias against their comments. Same goes for women - if the discussion is outside the 'women's sphere', watch the subtleties as some of the men close ranks. Get an openly-declared woman involved in a discussion on physics in a general forum and she won't be treated as an equal.
People should be judged on what they say, not how their name slips hints about their background. To that end, a pseudonym greatly levels the playing field.
A name, pseudonym or otherwise, merely defines a body of work, and humans are complex creatures with interests in different areas. Why should we throw away the awesome things pseduonyms do for us simply because of internet trolls - which have other effective ways of dealing with them anyway (user moderation >>> unprovable 'real name' requirement)
I don't see a big advantage to this, or at least, prefer communities where it's unnecessary. Why do you need information about how someone conducts themselves elsewhere on the net? Imo, if an online community (like any community) is functioning well, its members develop a familiarity with each other based on internal interactions.
For example, in its heydey, I knew all the regular kuro5hin posters by their k5 pseudonyms, and had positive and negative impressions of them based entirely on their k5 posting. Same with the mailing lists I'm on, the smaller (non-Reddit-sized) forums I post on, etc. Knowing external information about what they post on Slashdot or LKML or Usenet doesn't really seem necessary, and tracking people cross-websites like that even seems a bit creepy/stalkerish (unless they themselves link to their own activity elsewhere). Heck, I didn't even care if someone was a troll on Slashdot, so long as their posting on k5 was interesting.
I sort of like that one-reputation-per-community model. It does require communities that are actually communities, though, and have regulars who recognize each other. Gigantic communities with tens of thousands of transient commenters aren't really communities, so run into more problems.
In my case, I back away from "crazies" and flamewars pretty quickly, remain civil at (almost) all times, and apologize (or ignore) quickly even if I really want to tear the other party a new one. But I think this is a good thing. The constant invisible axe swinging around in the room helps me keep my words and manner in check, lest I get cut.
I only recently decided on this route after 17 years of going by nicknames/handles. I think I am mature enough now to know how to handle what I say, and will always think twice about what possible future employers might find or anyone else from my personal life. If they have an issue with what I post under my full name, then so be it, but at this point it has been a rational decision to do so.
One example was in an online debate about a report of necrophiliac abuse of cadavers in a funeral home. Highly emotive topic and sets off the rage in most folks. But myself and a few others were able to look at it a bit more discretely - and through discussion examined where the harm lay: not to the person whose body was so affected (as they're dead) but to the family should they find out (you may disagree, but this helped illuminate something for me about 'bags of chemicals' vs 'human being'). This isn't to say I think necrophilia shouldn't be a crime, but that where the harm is done is somewhere other than the knee-jerkers think it is. Ultimately discussion of this ultra-taboo topic gave me insight to the human condition and was another brick in the understanding-how-things-are-instead-of-how-they-look edifice.
If I had've used my real name in a discussion like that, I would never have pursued it. Some people are blinded by rage and emotion and advancing an unpopular viewpoint is simply inviting someone stupid in the middle of a rage to do something harmful to you without rationally thinking about it. These folks are also the ones that believe that being offended gives them the right (or even the duty!) to harm you.
OK... but let's say that most topics in HN are of a different kind. I doubt you will receive severe stalking because you, say, praised Emacs =).
(For the record, "I'm not worthy" (at least yet) to put a link or my real name in HN.)
Oh mannnn, you haven't been in a vi/emacs flamewar yet have you?! ;-)
I joke. Or do I..
By comparison, if I used my real name, I would be practically anonymous, drowned in the sea of other people using my name, including a well-known footballer and a journalist, both of whom generate huge numbers of search hits.
1) Complete anonymitiy, e.g. 4chan - there's either no name, or it's trivially easy to change one's name. This removes any consequences from what you write, and hence often results in immature discussions.
2) Pseudononymity, e.g. HN - your writings are connected to an account, but that account isn't linked to any real-world person. People who spend a lot of time building up their pseudonym have an incentive to post constructively, but at the same time those who haven't put a lot of time in can post without consequence.
3) Unenforced real names, e.g. Facebook - When everyone's using their real names, there's a psychological pressure not to post things that are inappropriate or offensive. When are posting with people they know in real life using real names, there's a pressure to interact in the same way they would in face-to-face conversation. When people are interacting with strangers using real-names, there's pressure to interact in the same way you'd interact with a stranger in face-to-face conversation.
4) Enforced real names, e.g. official statements or blogs - When someone writes something in this form, you know that they mean what they're saying, and are willing to be held accountable for it.
Less anonymity means more valuable posts, on average, at the cost of increased consequences, less openness, and greater risk. In 4chan you can speak your mind freely, but the vast majority of the content is worthless. In official publications, you have to be careful about what you say, but it's probably going to be worthwhile, or at least grammatically correct.
One issue tangentially related to the article is that it's very difficult to prove your identity on the internet, and make statements in category (4), without sharing things that should not be made public, such as your social security number.
places like 4chan are full of banality, sure, but the extremes are far higher (and lower) than you find on somewhere like HN.
Ive read stuff on 4chan/b that has made me piss myself with laughter, and cry (well, nearly, Im not a crying man, but the spirit was there). Ive read stuff on 4chan that provided amazing insight into the human soul....and stuff that made me realise what a bunch of animals we really are.
HN certainly does away with the banal posts (and the illegal ones) but the cost is obvious, and real.
I choose the times I go to 4chan (very rarely, these days) and I choose the times I go to HN, but they do both have a place.
For example, we have a right to assemble and the state can not deny that. However, a private entity can prevent us from assembling on their property.
In the same way we have a right to anonymous speech and the state can not deny that. However, a private entity (Quora) can prevent us from making anonymous speech on their website.
The reason for this is obvious, would you want newspapers to have to allow the rantings of a raving lunatic if he used a pseudonym to sign it because it can't prevent anonymous speech?
(for testing purposes, I'd never actually have one myself)