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Comment by stevenwliao | Hacker News Reader

So the lesson for those who maintain anonymous or pseudo-anonymous identities online-

As your pseudonym's popularity grows, chances increase that someone will be interested in unmasking your identity. The only solutions are to reduce your pseudonym's visibility or staying fully anonymous in the first place.

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I teach my kids to be a superhero on the internet. Never use your real name / change costumes (usernames) everywhere you go.

That's a excellent way of putting it, actually. (Obligatory "inb4 j jonah jameson pops up", though.)

Incredibly sad but true.

There seems to be two opposing imperatives for online social identity. On one hand you want reputation and accountability for what people say to fight trolling, bullying, and misinformation. On the other hand you want some level of anonymity to encourage free speech and expression. I don’t know if this core tension can ever be fully resolved but our current online environment is clearly far from optimal.

This is a solved problem, just rarely implemented in real life on a large scale. Karma systems.

You can be anonymous and at he same time have some valuable history of past interactions.

Slashdot, Stack Overflow, etc. are good examples.

And yes, this is how all online interaction should work. Similar to other PGP pseudonymous internet identity. The world needs the 1990's identity segregation via handles once again. Social media is a fad that simply brings out negative.

It's not sad at all, it's the nature of the beast. Nobody should ever be making all their real life identity and actions public online. Doing so is incredibly vapid and irresponsible. The internet still is for consuming information, and regardless of if 5 billion people do the incorrect thing or not, should not be used as a popularity contest gambling with one's real life identity.

> The only solutions are to reduce your pseudonym's visibility or staying fully anonymous in the first place.

Or maybe don't use a super secret identity that includes most of your real name, and your job, and where you work?

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