Anonymity has real value, both in comments and elsewhere | Hacker News Reader

Anonymity has real value, both in comments and elsewhere

gigaom.com

73 pointsignifero15 comments

Do my coworkers need to know that I'm a fan of internet memes and exceedingly cute cat pictures? The presumption often seems to be that people are anonymous because they want to hide something, or be jerks. I want to be anonymous because my interests are esoteric and I know my co-workers wouldn't understand, or would tease me.

HN is sorta anonymous, but the core purpose of anonymity is undermined. The purpose of anonymity is that it shouldn't matter if I'm a dog, my arguments should be what matters. Anonymity prevents punishing people with discrimination.

Meanwhile, on Hacker News the tying of all comments to an account leads to easy censorship. A previous account of mine had accumulated 1200 karma over the course of 6 months. One day I reset cookies and came here and looked at a thread I'd been participating in, only to notice that none of my comments appeared! Turns out I'd been silenced by the censors of HN. I wasn't trolling, I wasn't engaging in personal attacks, and I got no warning... in fact, they made it appear to me like I was still participating, wasting a significant amount of my time.

The community liked my comments over all. My average score per comment was just a bit under 6. Clearly I was a contributing member of the community.

My best guess is that one of the mods at HN didn't like an opinion of mine and so they silenced me... rather than rebutting me.

After investing all that time in a community, to be so unceremoniously censored, I will not make that mistake again.

I will only make comments places where I can be anonymous, and don't have to create an account. I only created this account because of a moment of weakness where I saw people missing a piece of history that was painfully obvious to me (and that thread has since, itself, been censored. The entire discussion removed from the index of HN for no apparent reason. It was actually a pretty good discussion before it got censored.

I know that revealing the censorship on HN will result in this account being destroyed as well. But like a soviet citizen being hauled off to the gulag, I just hope that a few who think this is a just society will hear my story and be wary, lest they invest time in the community and have it taken away as well.

Now, please excuse me as I log off to see if this account really appears in the discussion, or if I've just wasted 15 minutes writing and editing it.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2670772

Dead, but not forgotten. (At least for logged on users who set their showdead option to "yes".)

Seems like you were hellbanned... More info at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2619641 (especially ck2's comment and the responses)

For those who are interested in the trade-offs between anonymity and accountability online, here is a really great talk by Vint Cerf:

http://www.livestream.com/internetsocietychapters/video?clip...

In particular, I found the distinction between "identity" and "identifiers" (with strong cryptographic verification of the latter) to be enlightening.

There's a demand for anonymous identities that isn't being exploited.

People want the value of reputation without the cost of exposing their person information.

Facebook comments forces you to expose personal information. I want to leave comments with a reputable identity, just not linked to my real one.

There's still the option of making a second (or Nth) Facebook account just for anonymous posting. Granted, that doesn't address the main problem.

There is a solution to this problem. Websites should allow people to log in with their public key. You can create a new, internet-only identity with a public key. This would be a little cumbersome at first, but if browsers supported this ability, it could be just as easy as logging in with a password.

Here's how it could work: There could be metatags that specify where to submit the public key. The website will then send back a message that can only be decrypted with the private key. The browser has the user type in the password to access their private key, decrypts the message, and sends it back to the website. The user has now started a session with their public key.

Since you would use the same public key on all websites, your identity would be the same. This would not require a central server like OpenID.

SSL client certificates are a possibility, but there is very little UX to manage them and present them on a per-site basis.

I imagine simply assigning your users a unique key as a cookie would get you 90% of the way there. The chances are good that if a person is returning to your website then they are using the same browser.

The 10% you miss are cleared cookies and different browsers/private browsing. This could be seen as a feature however since extra anonymity is gained through existing means.

Doesn't something using Twitter or Google for authentication fix this? Unlike Facebook, they don't require your real info. (Not that FB does a great job of policing that anyway.)

have you tried to create a google account lately? they now require a cellphone number to complete the sign up.

You can blog anonymously at http://instablogg.com/

I love being pseudo-anonymous on the Internet. The only issue I have ever had with maintaining it is using PayPal.

Must... resist... anonymously trolling his comments. Not gonna be that guy, not this time.

heh yea Im glad HN does not have anonymous comments. It would turn into a crapshoot.

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