Building Kind Social Networks (2018)

Real name policies may (or may not) foster civil discourse, but they do so in a way that favors the already privileged. It's a burden for marginalized people and a barrier to them resolving their issues.

I was molested as a child and women generally tend to have less agency over their lives than men. When I first got online, I used my real first name and last name. I eventually moved to middle name and place as my default semi anonymous handle for privacy reasons because my first name plus last name is so distinctive. I'm back to using my full name online, though my handle in most places is first name plus middle name.

It was a long journey of getting there. It included a divorce, figuring out how to talk publicly -- which I think men tend to get inculcated with early and women don't -- and assorted other factors.

The perfect is the enemy of the good. If you only want civil discourse in your space and that's all that matters to you, you can achieve that by limiting it to very privileged people with no serious personal problems. Insisting on real names is a polite means to exclude anyone for whom speaking publicly under their real name might be a problem, so I'm sure it can help keep things superficially civil in your little corner of the universe.

I am also sure it helps further narrow the lives of people with already narrow existences by ever so politely silencing them online in ways they are already silenced offline. Which isn't actually all that kind, imo.

I don't think that a use-real-names policy is conducive to good conversation, because it means that everything you say has to be something you would be comfortable saying in front of your family and your employer and the whole rest of the world. That takes a lot of topics off the table -- sex, politics, anything that is controversial, anything that might become controversial in the next ten years... Discussions become very bland when everything you say has to be designed to protect your real-life reputation from every audience that will ever have power over you.

It's better to create a system of reputation independent of real-world identity. If new users have limited privileges until they've been around for a certain amount, or if only one account is permitted per IP, even an anonymous account with a name like XxX_FakeName_XxX becomes an identity with value and a reputation. By engaging in bad behaviour, that identity would lose reputation, and might even be banned. Because of the loss of privilege or technical challenge associated with creating a new account, bad behaviour is disincetivized without actually attaching real-world identity to anything online.

There's a balance to be found between lowering barriers to entry and raising barriers to re-entry, but if the balance is done properly it can make a big difference.

Of course, none of this works without moderators doing the legwork of throwing out bad actors, but this is the difference between effective moderation and token moderation that is too swamped to actually do anything.

This also works better in smaller communities, but I think smaller online communities are just healthier in general. This is part of why monoliths like Facebook and Twitter are so toxic -- there is no "Twitter community," rather there are a thousand Twitter communities all of which are bumping into each other constantly because they occupy the same space.

I helped build a (acquihired and now defunct) startup in this space. Totally agree that if you care about kindness / civility, you have to bake it into the design from the get-go.

We ended up sticking with a real-name policy, which does have some downsides (examples like the one in OPs post where someone can come out as gay in a country where it's illegal obviously wouldn't fly), but having people use their real names meant less ability to hide behind anonymous identities.

Obviously, that wasn't enough on its own, so we tested a few other dynamics that also helped. For example, you had to commit to a pledge before writing anything. It did end up being really civil and thoughtful, but we never got beyond thousands of active users and never figured out a business model.

I think the obvious solution is to give users power over who can comment on their stuff. My Facebook feed could easily pass as a “kind social network” because I only follow blood bowl interest groups and only have friends I actually like in the real world.

Don’t get me wrong, I too had a friendslist full of anyone I’d ever met, I followed news and stuff like that. And it drove me to the point where I was ready to quit Facebook. Then I got into blood bowl and needed Facebook for our national league, and I had to figure out how to make social networking not suck. The answer was to remove all the people I didn’t actually care about.

These days my feed is relatively slow, and usually rather boring, but I use Facebook more than ever because of my blood bowl interest groups. These groups too are moderates in a way that would get the average Twitter commenter banned by their first post. Sure we might as well use some phpBB thing, and we might as well use IRC instead of discord, would be nice for a privacy and anti-advertising concern, but Facebook is where people are.

My experience with podaero.com has been that things are very civil in small groups where everyone gets to know each other - regardless of whether real names are used (users there have the option between real name or pseudonym).

I think it's when the groups get so large that nobody really knows each other - that's when things become less civil.

edit* - here's an invite link to take a look if anyone wants to: https://podaero.com/info/hacker-pod

Trying to enforce characteristics for the network at the global scale is incompatible with the most basic degrees of freedom of expression. However, at some point all large corporations - so far - want to weaponise their control of the network to steer its characteristics at a global scale. This is why all large social networks suck so badly. They all try to be a one-size-fits-all social overlay to the Internet, and this is a fool's errand.

The double edged sword here is groupthink. If you are trying to have a discourse about being gay in a social network comprised of people from Saudi Arabia, they might flag your very loving and helpful posts as being hostile. Thus banning you from their network.

In the end, I think it would result in even tighter bubbles where all information we find uncomfortable is eventually filtered away.

I think a better angle would be to figure out how to create an environment that encourages open mindedness and willingness to let others be themselves without forcing anyone into our own views. Easier said than done, I know.