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Comment by BorisTheBrave | Hacker News Reader

I think the two most common reasons for anonymity are:

* blogging from an oppressive regime

* to isolate yourself from online mobs

If you write something controversial these days, sometimes it catches a wider audience and you can find yourself under a lot of attention. A minority of those poeple will not be nice, and may send death threats or worse. Your experience is a tiny fraction of what this can be like. Being anonymous takes out some of the sting.

I can't think of a better illustration of the latter than https://metro.co.uk/2020/07/04/last-us-2-voice-actor-shares-....

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Offline mobs too. As a Japanese I completely don’t understand why most English speakers so casually disclose their identity so publicly.

If you post something in your real name, your colleagues WILL find it out and your boss WILL read it and your neighbors WILL scrutinize it no matter how woke your post may read. There WILL be consequences from being pointed at to losing your job and pension.

People using real names for app reviews, online comments, those are completely insane to me. Including shorthands like “John D.” Unless you are paid to do so that is.

Because there is also professional benefits about writing with your real name. For example the famous patio11: https://www.kalzumeus.com/greatest-hits/

He also goes into detail in this podcast about the benefits of writing with your real name too: https://player.fm/series/north-star-podcast/patrick-mckenzie...

Funnily enough, he also lives in japan!

Also blogging from a regime that may become oppressive in 5-10 years (at which point your blogging history about how great democracy is will come back to bite you in the ass).

another factor is the desire to separate ideas from their author.

for example, double-blind peer review.

> [1:] blogging from an oppressive regime

> [2:] to isolate yourself from online mobs

If we're talking about common, I'll add:

3: to normalize anonymity so that people in groups 1 and 2 stand out less, have less peer pressure to compromise themselves, and so that attackers have to spend more resources than if they could focus their attacks on the few people they actually want to target (compare HTTPS Everywhere and other "Encrypt all the things!" efforts).

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