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Comment by dcow | Hacker News Reader

So build accountability into interactions with the internet. For example, I believe for most purposes people should use government-issued access to the internet with an identity that ties to their physical self. Anonymity should cost extra and there should be an implicit lack of trust, credibility, etc. from anything anonymous until it can be thoroughly vetted. I like the urbit model for this where short memorable addresses convey value and social reputation whilst fully anonymous entities are allowed but implicitly untrusted.

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I don't think this fixes anything. Alex Jones already isn't anonymous.

Real name requirements deter dissidents and vulnerable people, not populist bullies. They even make it worse, because you can be more easily targeted by populist bullies who have your legal name than if everyone is using pseudonyms.

If anything we should make it harder to associate internet users with real people to deter this type of in-person harassment from spilling over from the internet.

It's less the real name aspect and more the fact that identity shouldn't be disposable. Anonymity is not a universal fundamental human right at least as understood historically. Perhaps today many would be interested in making it one. I, however, am more interested in preserving things like freedom of expression, formally, than suggesting that we achieve it by way of universal access to anonymity. It's one of my less popular opinions, but I think it's an important topic to discuss especially light of the whole privacy debate, and certainly in light of dismantling internet mobs.

There's also the element of making the reputation war bi-directional. If somebody can trash my reputation without staking theirs, that's pretty harmful and toxic, except in exceptional cases. I think a structure where people steak their reputations when attacking others by virtue of reputation not being a commodity would help "keep things real". On the flip side, a vulnerable person shouldn't be protected just because they're vulnerable. If they're being oppressed then they may steak their reputation or find someone else to do it for them, but they don't get an easy out just because they're perceived as vulnerable.

> Anonymity is not a universal fundamental human right at least as understood historically.

In practice starting over was. For almost all of human history, no matter how bad things turned against you where you were, you could pick up and go somewhere else. You would have to start over from nothing in a place where no one knew you, but at least you wouldn't have to deal with having negative a billion social points forever because of some slanderous allegations that were all anyone would talk about in your home town before slamming the door in your face.

Which you're obviously taking away if someone can effectively move a thousand miles away but still can't change their name, because then any slander would follow you everywhere.

> I think a structure where people steak their reputations when attacking others by virtue of reputation not being a commodity would help "keep things real".

This doesn't actually resolve the asymmetry, because there are a great many people whose reputations aren't worth anything to begin with, or who are too young to realize that they are.

You also still have the problem that reputations are community-specific. If someone is a vicious extremist in a community of vicious extremists, anti-social behavior against outsiders improves their reputation within their community. They may regret it later when they grow up and tire of that lifestyle, but that doesn't stop them at the time. It may even make it worse, because once they've trashed their own reputation among reasonable people by behaving badly, they can't get a do-over and their best option becomes to continue to behave badly and stay in the community where that gets rewarded.

> On the flip side, a vulnerable person shouldn't be protected just because they're vulnerable. If they're being oppressed then they may steak their reputation

It's not about reputation in that context, it's about safety. Democracy advocates in China get arrested or worse. Any system that rate limits pseudonyms has got to be mapping them to real people to determine whether you have one already, but the existence of that mapping is the thing that compromises their safety when their oppressors use it to find them.

> or find someone else to do it for them

So you have a dozen Democracy advocates in China. None of them can use their own name or they'll be arrested. If they use the name of one of their compatriots, they get arrested instead, so how does that help?

Which is why it must be illegal to arrest someone for an opinion in the first place. Anonymity is a tool that can help in certain circumstances, but the problem is that a vulnerable person feels vulnerable to begin with. Anonymity doesn't fix that, the cultural climate does.

I suppose, but when discussing technology for online privacy and anonymity, it's prudent to make worse case assumptions. We can't assume that people won't be arrested, prosecuted, tortured and killed based on opinions, baseless allegations, hearsay, and so on.

Also, "vulnerable persons" aren't people who feel vulnerable, as in being emotionally insecure. They're people who are vulnerable, given their circumstances. For example, Hong Kong residents who advocate independence from China. Or male homosexuals in Saudi Arabia and some African countries.

That feels a lot like saying we don't need seatbelts if we would just stop having traffic accidents. A fine argument if there haven't been any traffic accidents in the last hundred years, but there have.

> Real name requirements deter dissidents and vulnerable people, not populist bullies.

That's where I'm coming from, for sure.

You and like-minded peers could have that, for sure. I can see the value for professional networks. Otherwise it'd arguably be far too dangerous.

I'd love to discuss this in some other context somewhere sometime (: I believe the internet is facing a type of identity crisis, so to speak and there's got to be a middle ground between a giant mass of anons and a polite dinner table gathering. But I'm not sure what the right balance is or the exact mechanisms we're lacking.

Hey, I'm pretty sure that Steve Newman would create a group for us on Podaero :)

The Internet is way large enough for all the spaces that we want. It just happens that I primarily focus on anonymity, privacy, and resistance to censorship. Both to protect dissidents, and to protect the ~clueless from destroying their lives.

Invite only ):

This is from a Show HN that didn't take off. Maybe the code is still valid.

https://podaero.com/info/show-hn

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