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Comment by coldpie | Hacker News Reader

I work on an open source project which is popular, but definitely a lot less used than Firefox. I often feel pretty lucky that I grew up with the early internet, back when you hid your real identity and trusted no one. While I don't do that anymore, it does still give me with a strong sense of maintaining a "firewall" with the public. I don't put myself out there as a public face more than necessary. I don't have work email or any of that on my phone. If it's not work hours, I'm not dealing with it. The Internet is an incredibly harsh and toxic place, always has been, and these days I find the less time I spend around technology, the happier I am.

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"The Internet is an incredibly harsh and toxic place, always has been"

Refreshing to read this, compared to the "it was all so much better before"

Flaming was invented when the internet was born. Netiquette came later but didn't really catch on as well..

But before anonymity was allowed, so all this toxicity & harassment didn't hurt too much because you could just create a new identity, start again, and it would go away.

Today most people are on FB & social medias under their real name & with their real face and everything is stored & will hunt you for the rest of your life. With fingerprinting, facial recognition, surveillance, etc. there is now no way to speech freely without having your identity tied to it.

Some people claim this is great because you say less crap when they're forced to put their name on it, I think this is a very poor argumentation when we look at what we're losing in exchange. There is a reason why in most democracies voting is anonymous.

"there is now no way to speech freely without having your identity tied to it."

Erm. Really? Aren't you a bit exagerating?

You can still post anonymous in lots of places. Like right here, for example.

You can say some things anonymously, but I'm not sure how far does it extend. Anonymity is tested not by posting under an alias, but when somebody tries to break it. If you get into the middle of real controversy - how far would HN willing to go before they wipe your account and possibly give the details they have (IPs, email, etc.) to the law enforcement, from where they'd immediately be leaked to the press? Was this ever tested in practice - i.e. somebody anonymous on HN was attacked and kept their anonymity?

Of course they would give your IP if there is a warrant. It is not their duty to ensure that you can say anything here.

But there are plenty of places left, where you can literaly say anything.

Just like in the beginning. Btw. some IRC clients or forums from the old days still run today.

I'm not talking about a court-mandated warrant. I'm talking about a friendly chat with a fellow law enforcement person who cordially asks for help - who needs warrants between friends? And you do want to be friends with the law enforcement, because it's a bad enemy to have, aren't they?

> It is not their duty to ensure that you can say anything here.

I'm not saying it's their duty. I am saying you can't at the same time claim anonymity is alive and well and say nobody actually will protect your anonymity once push comes to shove. If that's the case, then anonymity essentially does not exist where it counts. Nobody cares that you can anonymously praise the Dear Leader. Anonymity is only important when somebody has real reasons to want to break it. It's like with free speech - nobody worries about speech that everybody likes being free. You only need free speech protections when somebody actually wants to censor, otherwise it's just vacuous.

Hmm, are you sure that is legal?

Maybe yes, maybe not, but who cares if nobody ever finds out? And cops are pretty much immune from most illegal acts on the job, once they are sure they are doing the right thing, or can convincingly pretend they were, and once there's no law on the books explicitly, in minute details, prohibiting exactly this particular behavior. That's "qualified immunity". As for the other side, who's going to prosecute them if the law loves them? Private users, who probably can barely afford one hour of lawyer time?

Wait, what's the point of having anti-'bad cop' laws if they're unenforceable in practice ?

People say "there should be a law against it". Well, politicians pass a law against it. And then arrange things in a way that makes the law useless since police unions' support brings in sweet money and votes. And then frame the discussion about police misconduct in a way that you either ok with anything and everything the police does, or you support abolishing the police altogether and violent mobs trashing your town daily for sports. That is good for brining in votes too. So I guess that's the point for them. What's the point for people to tolerate such system? Please tell me if you ever find out.

Before twitter, it was. I mean, there still were flame wars, toxicity and negativity, but they weren't amplified and influential as they are now. I don't remember a case where a toxic mob on Usenet ruined somebody's life. Maybe there were such cases, but I can't think of one. But I can readily name cases almost daily where the same happens with toxic mobs on Twitter. Toxicity existed before, but now there are amplification and focus mechanisms that turn it especially vile and hurtful, and twitter is one of them. And no amount of censorship will ever change any of it.

> I often feel pretty lucky that I grew up with the early internet, back when you hid your real identity and trusted no one.

That's funny, because going through old usenet posts from the 90s I got precisely the opposite impression – noticeably more people posting under their full names than you'd find a decade or two later in comparable forums.

I've also made the same observation for the online community of a long running simulation game I frequent: A lot of the old-time members dating back to twenty years ago or so are posting under their full names, whereas with newer members abbreviated (last) names or outright pseudonyms are clearly predominating.

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