4chan founder: Mark Zuckerberg is “totally wrong” about online identity | Hacker News Reader

4chan founder: Mark Zuckerberg is “totally wrong” about online identity

venturebeat.com

185 pointsbond75 comments

It's interesting to contrast the Japanese style of online identity (which inspired 4chan) and the style that Zuckerberg is trying to promote.

Millions of Japanese have profiles on sites like Pixiv (popular art site with ~15m images) or Nico Nico Douga (popular video site with ~15m videos). They create art, videos, etc, and upload them under a name. Many of these people earn money off their work, publishing doujinshi at Comiket, creating art and promotional videos for commercial games, and so forth.

But there's no attempt to ensure that these are real names. Typically they're aliases. Even their most popular social networking site, Mixi, works the same way. To the Japanese, there's absolutely no reason why "my life as a doujin artist" and, say, "my life as a software engineer", should be given the same name.

Interestingly enough, this is how it often seems to have worked in the West as well... prior to Facebook.

From what I heard (but I am no expert at all) Japanese culture encourages an extremely sharp (at least from the standpoint of Europeans and I would guess Americans) separation between business and private life, e.g. behavior which Europeans would consider highly eccentric - say a high powered banker running around disguised as Mickey Mouse in his off time - are considered a non issue.

In case this is true, this could be a reason why Japanese people don't really see much of a need to ensure that an online identity can be traced to "real identity", because they consider the "virtual identity" to be "good/real enough".

Maybe there's a market for a social networking site that let's one maintain sets of identities, segregated (or joined) by groups or "circles" of people from different facets of their life?

I know we often talk about separate facebook accounts for work/regular life people, but why not for online identities as well?

FB doesn't allow this (nor do any other social networking site I'm aware of)...

Google Circles was supposed to do this, but it turned out that the entire product was a misunderstanding.

A better way to maintain private circles is through closed Facebook groups.

If you want to go one step farther and talk freely/anonymously among friends and colleagues, see my comment below. I am working on a startup that does just that.

okcupid works like mixi in this way (and a lot of other ways, too). It's a shame that they call themselves a dating site; they're really a social network for people who met online.

I would love to see those guys pivot, and release a multi-identity facebook killer.

Not that they need to (I think they are bootstrapped), but it would be cool.

They also just got acquired by match.com, so probably not happening.

Well, I hope they can vest soon.

That only works as long as the segregation is securely maintained. The risk of hacks, subpoenas, or employee misbehavior is too high to make such a system trustworthy, in my mind at least.

The best and simplest way is to simply maintain separate accounts, such that the separation is enforced in your head.

Appleseed and The Diaspora project both have "life-aspect" separation as explicit goals.

Closest thing I know of is Ning.

pseudonyms for artists are pretty well established, but most people on facebook don't create anything.

they're just ordinary folk wanting to connect, e.g. as they did with the new tech of the phone.

Interesting. Is this a privacy concern or just something intrinsic people do in Japan online?

(somebody stop me if I'm completely off-base)

It's been my observation that Japanese culture appears to be more accepting of and comfortable with people putting on personas to suit a particular mileu than in the west.

In the West we strongly equate what a person is wearing and their behavior at that moment with their overall identity. It's been my observation that in Japan a person may put on a persona like one might put on a costume and it be perfectly acceptable.

There's exceptions of course but nothing is more disconcerting to me as a westerner, watching an interview with a Japanese Rock and Roller or Rapper, expecting them to have the FU attitude I'm used to seeing during the interview and instead see them behave with politeness, nicely bowing at the right moments and talking politely to everyone.

It's actually quite refreshing in a sense to see this and I think it can encourage experimentation as it prevents people from getting too wrapped up with a persona they are building right now and drop it and try something else that suits their fancy.

This could be due to the strong emphasis Western culture places on "integrity." This term originally comes from the same Latin root as "integer," which itself means "whole, entire." Having integrity implies that your private self and public self are one and the same.

Multicultural roots of Western culture may have made integrity an important signifier of trustworthiness. Even going back to Shakespeare, you saw the theme of split identities everywhere in Western literature, and most of Shakespeare's villains are noted for their two-facedness.

The modern day implication of that cultural legacy is our cult of authenticity. For a rap singer to be taken seriously by his peers, he has to be "real." The realness is a hard earned credibility by showing a singular identity, and not being perceived as the real thing for someone immersed in that culture would be the equivalent of "losing face" in Eastern cultures. Something akin to social isolation and even death.

Another, perhaps more relatable example, is something I often hear Americans say. It's said that in America you can be who you say you are. That is at the heart of the open society for which Americans are praised, and Americans take your word at face value, until you say or do something contrary to their expectations of your self-proclaimed "role."

So thinking over what I wrote, I think the reason why role-playing works in Japan and doesn't in America is because Americans have a culture of self-invention, a culture built on appearances, they also have a wariness about being taken in by people who change their appearances often.

Not intrinsic to Japan as the OP noted, but it comes naturally to people. Zuckerberg's stance is mostly motivated by earning money off peddling Facebook.

Mostly? I would say entirely. It's funny when someone keeps doing something people hate over and over for money and then eventually develop a "vision" that allows them to keep doing the same thing.

I founded a startup with dsebrow and jsebrow to try and address this issue. We let users have private and anonymous conversations with their friends and colleagues, with a twist: you can see who is part of a conversation, but you can't see who made individual comments. In other words, you can have anonymous conversations with people who you respect. The trolls can't comment, because participation is invite-only.

There is a demo at http://freeversation.com/about/ but please don't excessively promote it or repost it to HN yet. We're not quite ready to go live. (Until this discussion hit the homepage, we weren't planning on allowing the public to access Freeversation.com until later this week.)

We will be applying for YCombinator.

Well that might lead to awkward situations.

Donny, Steven, Eric, and Bob have joined the Freeversation

Anon: "Hey guys how's it going."

Anon2: "Donny cheated with Mary."

Anon: "Okay, who said that?"

Anon: "Eric it was you wasn't it?"

Anon2: "Donny also stole booze from last nights party."

Anon: "I will find out who this is."

Full disclosure: I don't know how bros talk, but I can see Freeversations leading to confessions or straight out bashing. Best to lay down some etiquette for new users.

We're planning on adding some moderation options, but we also trust our users. You get to decide who to invite to a conversation, so presumably you won't invite someone who is going to make a joke out of a serious discussion.

If people don't live up to our expectations, we do have some creative solutions for encouraging people to behave.

Have you actually tried this with a couple of friends? I'd expect to be able to pick out who's who fairly quickly...

I do think it's a nice idea; but I would still be very careful saying anything serious on there.

Partly for that reason, we envision the site as being most useful for groups above 20 and below 200. That way you have less of a risk of identifying specific users, while still developing a sense of community and relevance.

Ah ok, that makes more sense.

Will you assign the same alias to the same user every time, e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identicon? That'd allow some kind of reputation system, at the cost of making it even easier to de-anonymize users.

As of now, users do not have persistent identities. Depending on how Freeversation develops, we may eventually let users opt-in for such aliases.

Were you thinking of Plato's Republic when you wrote this?

No, do you mind explaining? Sorry if I am missing the obvious. It is late and I am tired.

I'm referring to his idea that a perfect legislature could be formed if there was a way to make the representatives forget who they were while they were debating and voting. Then they'd have no choice but to vote for the common interest and not their own.

What would happen if Senate votes weren't made public? It would decrease accountability of senators to constituents, sure, but would it also decrease the power of special interest groups?

Another way to fix this would be to make legalized bribery (the current US lobby system)... illegal.

That sounds like John Rawls 'veil of ignorance'. Are you sure it was in Plato?

No, it was not Plato. They are mentioned together in so many places, I had them mixed up. Plato is not about Democracy. It's Rawls.

But Plato is, actually, relevant to our site. The cave analogy is a perfect description of how we see current social discussion- people understand themselves and others by interacting with mere "shadows" that are not very substantive. Facebook lets you know who you're talking to, but profiles are often more about what that person wants to be seen as than about who he actually is. Our goal, conversely, is to let people strip away the superficial and discuss their real opinions in an unadulterated form.

Good luck buddy.

What if they are both right?

Facebook model is phenomenally successful, clearly Zuckerberg must be right.

4chan model is phenomenally successful, clearly Poole must be right.

The only issue I see here is our polarizing attitude and insistence that one must be better than the other.

It's not a zero sum game. We have both because they target different, non-overlapping scenarios and we have hundreds of other, smaller communities, each with different rules.

We don't discuss it when people who like bitter chocolate claim that those who like sweet chocolate are "totally wrong". I think we have enough space on our servers for both Facebook and 4chan.

Only one of those people is making moral judgements against people who use pseudonyms ("an example of a lack of integrity") and making phenomenal amounts of money out of marginalising the practice.

Facebook hasn't marginalized the practice terribly much - at least half my FB friends are also using aliases.

You can use alias, but the friction to do so, and also to eventually change alias, is considerably higher than on most sites.

All in all, you are not supposed to do that on facebook, even if plenty of people do it, and that does make quite a difference.

What if they are both right?

Well, Zuckerberg's position seems to be everyone should have one online identity that is visibly anchored offline, and is used in all online communication. It doesn't allow a lot of room for Poole's model.

>Facebook model is phenomenally successful, clearly Zuckerberg must be right.

That's quite a jump. Couldn't it also be that Zuckerberg is very good at marketing and taking advantage of being out front? Why would you assume his privacy model is the reason Facebook got big? It's my impression that Facebook got big inspite of it which tells me he isn't right at all. He's just not wrong enough to overcome the perceived value of using his site.

"Non-overlapping"? 25.822 * 10^-6 of Facebook users (1 in ~43,000) use canv.as[1]

[1] https://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=17624556239...

canvas is hardly what Poole is famous for.

It's like the saying "It's difficult to make someone understand something when his job depends on him not understanding it".

Facebook's popularity is driven by attaching your real life to an online identity. 4Chan's success is driven by total anonymity.

That the two founders have diametrically opposing views on anonymity is not really surprising. There's certainly merit to both view points.

I think you're misunderstanding Poole's stance on this. Zuckerberg seems to be pushing for a huge reduction in anonymity - maybe to the point of removing it altogether. That is definately because it would benefit him directly.

Poole, though, is just saying that it would be a mistake to assume there's no value to anonymity. He's clearly not saying that everything should be anonymous, since, as pointed out in the article, he's also creating a new site that utilizes FB profiles.

“The cost of failure is really high when you’re contributing as yourself,” Poole said.

So Mark Zuckerberg is "totally wrong?" This makes me knit my eyebrows. Just because putting your real identity out there can have good uses doesn't make anonymity "wrong." Neither does the utility of anonymity make real identity wrong. Clearly these are both useful.

The presence of hordes of anonymous least common denominator users can have detrimental effects too. Sometimes, there is a place for close social distance and the good behavior it brings. Sometimes there's a place for freewheeling anonymity and the frankness and creativity it enables. Neither is "wrong."

Agreed, they both have their place, although I am biased heavily in favor of using personas that link to your real identity. If FB allowed anonymity, I would be using it. It's for my connections and those alone.

And that should be I wouldn't be using this. Notice it too late to change

this is very true, in the sense that in high school i was a very shy person that other people picked upon. on coming to college [in a different area from where i went to hs], people were from different places, and i didn't have a background as that insert random/weird label here kid, and as a result being my authentic self, i made nice friends, and no one really cared about what i was or was not in the past.

This is actually an issue now for new college students, because of Facebook. People form an opinion of you from your Facebook profile (and thus your social interactions with your high school Facebook friends) long before you meet them face-to-face.

Kind of weird that the founder of 4chan really seems to get this a lot more than Zuckerberg, founder of the largest online community in the US (world?).

Actually, I think it makes a lot of sense. 4chan's appeal is the anonyminity, and facebook depends on having accurate data on people to mine and sell.

While it's representative, moot doesn't have $50bn to lose. His principles are less likely to be marketing than Zuck's.

Not only that, but there's also value in close social distance and the change in behavior it brings.

If you've thought about this subject yourself then you can create your own mix and don't need Poole or Zuckerberg to lay down the law.

Sorry - downvoted when I meant to upvote.

Anonymous web is perfect, communities are able to filter out trolls on there on. If some one wants to have a single identity they are able to do that in an anonymous web. But the reverse can't be done. Zuckerberg benefits financially from a single identity web and that is why he likes it.

Mark Zuckerberg's opinions should make most conspiracy theorist think Big Brother is closer then we think.

Except that Zuckerberg's "opinions" happen to directly correlate with what makes him the most money (through advertising). Big Brother may benefit from his greed though.

They say money is the root of all evil.

Nope, that's a mis-quotation. Money is itself not the root of all evil, it's the love of money.

Look it up: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Root_of_all_evil

Yet he used facebook connect to sign up for his latest project, canv.as?

My impression from the article was not that Poole thinks Facebook is evil, or that anonymity is always better than a clear identity. His point was simply that it would be a mistake to eliminate anonymity from the internet entirely. Both systems have valuable benefits. From that standpoint, I don't see any contradiction in the choice for his new project.

Technology Review also had an interview with him where he brings up the same points: http://www.technologyreview.com/web/25997/

I'm not sure if a subscription is required though.

Maybe a mix of anonymity and clear identity would work best. Let people have 2 profiles, one anonymous and one not, with behaviors clearly owned by the profile used. They can use the anonymous profile when they feel it might be helpful.

But give people the ability to eventual discover who someone is if they have consistently bad behavior over time and when many more people share that opinion than oppose it.

While I don't support Mark's ideas and Facebooks' politics about privacy, I really don't get it when people say that you can't manage who sees your FB content.

Facebook has for a long time supported Friend Lists.

All my photos (and the ones I'm tagged in), except the profile pictures, are only visible to a very small circle of friends. I could do the same thing for status updates if I wanted.

Two examples as to why people say it's hard to control access to your content of the top of my heard are

a) by default applications that your friends install can access your content. b) Facebook has several times changed their privacy defaults without informing the users, causing reams of older content to be visable to "friends of friends" as opposed to just friends.

Unless you check the privacy and application settings approximately every three months then it's easy to get burned when a site upgrade gets rolled out and the "recommended" settings are applied to your account.

Another huge privacy hole is that Facebook itself knows who your friends are.

That's one of the main reasons I quit using it years ago.

What I especially like about this model is the following: "content becomes more important than the creator, which is unlike virtually any other online community. Rather than prioritizing the most valued and experienced users..." This is the foundation of creating value.

The title of this article is very misleading.

is it? Didn't mislead me...

Yep. I was there, and he did say this (amongst other things) during his talk.

Good talk, all in all. 4chan is a refreshing change from VC backed, liquidation-event-directed online communities. Not that 4chan is a Facebook replacement by any means, but it's helpful to remember that an enormous part of what's interesting on the internet is open-source, non-profit, or not profit-motivated.

  what's interesting on the internet is open-source,
  non-profit, or not profit-motivated

You forgot "balls-to-the-wall crazy". An unusual environment is more likely to advocate creativity, from where most of the interesting things spark.

4chan as a whole is not "balls-to-the-wall crazy." Several of their boards are, but as a whole that's not necessarily the case.

True. But I still think it's appropriate because a) when talking about 4chan people don't think of the sane boards and b) the crazy boards hold a great chunk of the traffic (majority?), even if they are outnumbered (not that you need many of them).

Regardless of what we think, 4chan and /b/ are synonymous in most places. And there's a good reason, I don't think international press is interested in the Animals, Traditional Games or Literature boards.

Yeah, I just read this article and I must say the headline is actually refreshingly accurate and non-sensational, which seems to be getting pretty rare in these days of techcrunch style "journalism".

He's right you know. Where would we be without Rickrolling and LOL cats?

</sarcasm>

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