Comment by Larrikin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Larrikin | Hacker News Reader

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As someone who was a long time user of 4chan and that believed this once before, I now adamantly disagree that total anonymity leads to better discussion and believe that 4chan and the like are ultimately failed experiments.

With total anonymity you end up with trolls or people who are just seriously misinformed arguing vigorously.

You can spend the time and present arguments to possibly convince an actual reasonable person. It gets tiresome over time posting the same basic information. Most of the boards on there end up with a good baseline of information for their topics over years, but for anyone slightly knowledgeable it is tiresome to move topics to that eventual baseline and especially to move them past it. That same information can usually be collected from less toxic sources in a few months as opposed to years that the collective takes.

Every once in a while you'll get a fresh expert that hasn't gotten tired of posting the same information, but I stopped years ago bothering to share any information I had. It's always an up hill battle and the posts will be gone in a few hours or, at best, days

But trolls end up dominating. If you waste your time writing informed sourced posts about anything (slavery is bad, the Holocaust happened, Earth isn't flat, etc) all that will happen is the person will eventually just criticize basic grammar mistakes, insult you, and post the same garbage in a new thread.

If you make the mistake of arguing with organized trolls, you'll get link bombed with shit sources and barely tangentially related long sources that suck up your time before you realize that they don't present any facts that are actually relevant to the discussion.

Even 4chan knows this. The business board has measures in place to inform readers when a poster is the same person.

Real names are not needed online to have good discussion. But it's absolutely needed for posters to have repercussions for past posts. True anonymity leads to shallow discussion and trolls.

4chan's failure to me has little to do with perceived anonymity, and a lot more to do with the culture of an online community, what is tolerated within that community, where the red lines are, and how this is enforced. And "gamification" plays a role, i.e. virtual online points of some sort, be it "likes", be it "karma", be it "upvotes".

Compare 4chan to HN, which is also open to anybody like 4chan, allows anonymous (or rather pseudonymous) posting, and has a somewhat sizeable community of people posting and many more "lurkers" just reading.

Unlike 4chan however, HN does a reasonable job - in my opinion - of being clear what is allowed and what is not, enforces these community standards quite vigorously most of the time, through moderation not just by moderators but the community (flagging), and generally stops outright abuse and harassment, and more often than not stops trolls and people accidentally starting flame wars. That has to be balanced against not over-banning/over-flagging content, which happens, too. Not everything is perfect in the niche that is HN - nothing ever is - but the contrast to 4chan is quite stark, even to the supposedly more moderate and "sfw" 4chan boards like /g/ (technology).

Gamification is a double edged sword. On one hand, it may encourage people to instead of their actual views post quick quips or hide their true opinions and opt instead to just say what they believe the community wants to hear. On the other hand, in places like 4chan which lack such gamification, you don't have to fear burning your reputation as nobody has a visible reputation, which may encourage people to cross lines as there is no way for the community to sanction such behavior.

4chan is also just a bad demonstration of how anonymous culture functions, too. It's become such a pop-culture hotspot that not a single board is really 'usable' like they were in 2012 ("I think I'll check /t/ for $NEW_MOVIE"). However, as you start to branch out into other imageboards, this lack of identity really helps drive the discussions. When you completely remove the upvotes, downvotes, score-based comment ordering and profiles, people are less interested in petty, pyhrric victories. IRC is also another great place where people are oftentimes more interested in fruitful discussion than saving face.

>which may encourage people to cross lines as there is no way for the community to sanction such behavior.

It's also hard for some people to understand that individuals who hold extreme views and use poor sources/facts could, in fact, be people who actually hold those views. They're not trolls. They're not doing it to get a rise out of you. Sometimes, those people are legitimate in their beliefs, regardless of how ass-backwards they are.

And I don't know why people don't understand that.

4chan is also a poor demonstration because you can't be persistently pseudonymous. It's an imageboard.

Compare that to forums which are based on usernames, where there is usually higher quality discussion because you have a post history and this weeds out the bots and trolls.

Well, you name quite the case, but besides that. I think the fact that anonymous discussions derail easier and don't exactly get the best out of people, isn't relevant at all. I would even say, it is a price, we should be willing to pay.

First of all being anonymous is important if you want to call out far more powerful entities than you, which can lash out to you. Second I think it is important to see, what the darker side of society thinks. Even if you remove them from the normal internet, they will still find a way to communicate, but now it is no longer out in the open. It is better to know then to not know.

You need anonymity with reputational score.

Satoshi Nakamoto.

Associate anonymous posts with an optional pubkey signing. Have tooling that can filter out bad actor signatures and highlight the ones you care about.

Have your interest graph and peer graph suggest new public keys to follow.

Identities can remain private.

I'm not aware of any platforms, blogs or other internet entities (accepting public comments) that chose this system. I'm thinking there are reasons for that choice.

The reason is that it's a technically difficult problem, and thus requires investment to solve (and the most profitable/successful platforms don't want to reduce the amount of information they have about their users).

Fortunately there is work being done in this area by Free Software projects. In particular, the Matrix team are trying to implement a decentralised reputation system[0] and there's no reason this couldn't be applied to the Fediverse too.

[0] https://matrix.org/blog/2020/10/19/combating-abuse-in-matrix...

Secure Scuttlebutt does exactly this. It is supper effective, and the only social network that I participate in, except for HN.

It's effective because you follow the profiles that you find interesting, when a profile becomes abusive you simply block them from being replicated by your machine. Folks can have as many profiles/feeds as they like, so you can separate out portions of your life that others might find distasteful, or boring.

What's the difference between doing this versus just using nicknames like everyone does already?

The reputation graph prevents Sybil attacks (mobs of sock puppets, etc).

The crypto aspect can obscure a series of posts by the same author although I don't think it would protect you from the site owner themselves.

Every imageboard besides 4chan functions just fine and has perfectly good discussions on things. You can blame 4chan's moderation and administration for its failure.

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