When the conversation starts with, "Let's ban anonymous accounts!", then enumerating points in favor of anonymous accounts is the right response.
Communities without abuse problems never even float the idea of banning anonymity. One reason being it’s extremely expensive to do that if not effectively impossible.
The medium is the message. One of the messages of the Internet, as a medium, is abuse.
Now, whether the take-away is "we should try to regulate it to stop that", or "people should stop using it to post details and thoughts, alongside PII and all tied to one traceable identity, that they wouldn't ever post to the public-use notice board at the local grocery store, because it's fucking insane (as Zuck might put it, they're 'dumb fucks') to post like that on the Internet and expect it to go well", or something else, is a matter for consideration.
This implies that many communities with anonymity don't face abuse problems, so anonymity is not the root of the problem. Maybe the problem lies in the subject matter that the community handles and the sort of people that attracts.
Of course if you attract only polite people you don’t have abuse problems regardless of anonymity.
Being attacked and/or killed is almost never voluntary. Viewing anonymous posts on the internet is almost always voluntary. Whatever damage is caused is emergent from the framework of interpretations of the individual. This is closer kin to victimless crime as opposed to real crime than it is conditional rules of engagement. I'm under the impression you're engaging in sophistry though, "This is troubling logic if we expand it to other areas." You're correct, a square peg does not fit in the round hole. And you've also failed to negate the myriad arguments favoring continued anonymity with any salient cons, but have instead erected a strawman.
No it isn't. Social media is a near required part of modern life for a lot of people, especially those in the public sphere. For example, it is near impossible to be a freelance journalist without a social media account. Once you have that account, people are free to push their anonymous posts to you.
>This is closer kin to victimless crime as opposed to real crime than it is conditional rules of engagement.
This is just a baffling comment and shows you are out of touch with the type of abuse we are talking about. I can't imagine you have seen any of this first hand if you think this is "close kin to victimless crime". There are very much victims on the end of this abuse.
And I mean, there was that one time that some dude, in person at a press conference threw a shoe at George W. Bush, the President of the United States of America, he wasn't anonymous, and what level of force could've been deployed as recourse ran up to death, evidently not adequate disincentive.
I can make a victim out of myself by a few alterations in my personal narrative. I choose not to.
It is vastly harder to exclude people spreading harmful lies when they can do it under 27 trivially created and then discarded identities across 12 platform.
It's trivial to argue that people agree to engage with online communities as they agree to engage in in person communities but what is the realistic alternative? Both huddle in your basement AND don't engage online either?
It is unrealistic when your online life is a large part of people's gateway to communication and culture. People deserve to be able to engage in such without also expecting harm.
Furthermore people's online hate touches people's lives with or without their opting for engagement when the festering hate nurtured online gives birth to real world violence, mass murder, coup, collapse of civil society.
It seems trivially true that anonymity enables hate and I support both people's right to voice unpopular but not harmful ideas and consequences for those who call for hate and violence.
You may note my username is simply a plain old name and it's my real name. I cannot any longer support anonymity save for cases where safety demand it.
Do they? To me it seems that people demand credentials in most cases to merit trust from an unknown. I certainly don't hop on 4chan and assume literal factual information is being doled out in every post. Nor on Twitter, nor Fecebook. I might backtest whatever they're proposing, but remain skeptical until I've seen it with my own eyes. And in any case if we look into the annals of history, this is blatantly false, there are reams of examples of people lying in plain sight. Tyrants and demagogues, kings and courts, basically every politician, corporations, and just regular people. Of course we've always had the issue of "determination of truth", history to the victor and such.
>It is vastly harder to exclude people spreading harmful lies when they can do it under 27 trivially created and then discarded identities across 12 platform.
Let's assume we've actually objectively determined the truth: what happens when the liars are let free? They're running around screaming 1+1=3, how is it that they're going to intuited by everyone else? I suspect, as idiots. Naive interventionism in this case turns them into a divided minority instead of an integrated (and stupid) extremity. Upon being separated they go off and get more and more wild, 1+1=5, 10, 0... Their bonds grow in strength because they're made a separate minority, and far less likely to cease their stupidity.
>It's trivial to argue that people agree to engage with online communities as they agree to engage in in person communities but what is the realistic alternative? Both huddle in your basement AND don't engage online either?
For one, I'm not saying that everything everywhere had ought to have the facilities of anonymity, but that instituting a mode of state coercion blanketing every site on the internet is plainly a hazard. But this line is non-sequitur anyways, we're talking about anonymity in social media not in-person interaction.
>It is unrealistic when your online life is a large part of people's gateway to communication and culture. People deserve to be able to engage in such without also expecting harm.
How do you define harm? Here's a salient conundrum: a guy asks a girl out, she tells him she's not interested. Or the obverse, however you like it. In either case they're very likely emotionally wounded. Then what? What do we take from this?
>Furthermore people's online hate touches people's lives with or without their opting for engagement when the festering hate nurtured online gives birth to real world violence, mass murder, coup, collapse of civil society.
The Nazis did this, the Khmer Rogue did this, the Bolsheviks did this all in plain sight. Millions dead in their wake. Violence was often a means to a better end - depending on perspective. The Hellenic empire was established through warfare, Alexander has been intuited as a great unifier, bringing together a vast and highly integrated culture made of many diverse cultures. The French revolution was a supermassive turning point, and largely lead us to be where we are today, but it was extremely violent. The USA was founded after a revolutionary war. The concern is wanton violence, which in any case is rare, and I suspect anonymity on the internet has little to contribute to it overall, despite the narratives espoused by many.
Civil society is free discourse, but we've long been eroding it.
>It seems trivially true that anonymity enables hate and I support both people's right to voice unpopular but not harmful ideas and consequences for those who call for hate and violence.
If we adopt the relativistic standpoint, every opinion is harmful to someone. Utilitarianism is flawed, not everyone can be happy, even negative utilitarianism is flawed.
It seems like we would never have gotten this far if it wasn't for the kind of interactions you are defending and yet you are entangled in a debate with someone who likely grew up in a society where this approach to interaction was championed throughout their life who is simultaneously insisting that it's more harm than good.
More unsettling is the fact that when I read the sentence:
>How do you define harm? Here's a salient conundrum: a guy asks a girl out, she tells him she's not interested. Or the obverse, however you like it. In either case they're very likely emotionally wounded. Then what? What do we take from this?
I began to wonder whether if I said that in public I would end up in a lot of trouble and possibly fired for daring to suggest that being rejected could hurt the feelings of the person being rejected in an equally valid way as it may make the person being asked out feel uneasy.
I eagerly await the day when I do not constantly feel terrorized by the threat of becoming socially outcast for saying something which should be entirely benign but which has become taboo.
Please ask yourself how you would feel if this site did that -- or even, in fact, if HN didn't actually make anon accounts (without even requiring an email confirmation) so easy that it's an incredibly common occurrence.
One of the things I like about HN is that while anonymity is certainly possible having an identity which is known to the community (whether that be one's actual identity, or in my case a pseudonymous one), allows us to build (and/or repudiate/destroy, as we choose) credibility and engage in discussions over time.
I will say that 'nobody9999' is not the name on my passport, nor is it the name I use with my bank or (when I actually used such things) social media accounts.
However, a search through HN's archives will, nonetheless, provide a history of my comments and submissions.
Should I turn into a raving asshole, the admins/moderators can sanction/ban me without ever knowing my 'legal' name.
That makes a lot more sense than forcing folks to tie their legal identities to everything they do online.