Scott Heiferman (Meetup): "We won't escape real identity, & anonymity will die." | Hacker News Reader

Scott Heiferman (Meetup): "We won't escape real identity, & anonymity will die."

atroundtable.com

12 pointsha47015 comments

I read his comment as "a corporate controlled police state is inevitable so get used to it". He is clearly an enemy of freedom.

I worked for Scott at Meetup and can promise you that's the opposite of the truth. He's all about empowering people and communities, and disrupting traditional institutions. Read his full post on the page. He was making a prediction, not endorsing it.

OK thanks. It will be interesting to see what work we can do to prevent the dystopian outcome that Google and Facebook are working towards.

Hey Josh, I wonder if your opinion is any different that Scott didn't mean it that way now that part two of the interview has come out at http://techcrunch.com/2011/10/04/founder-stories-heiferman-f... and he states clearly that he doesn't trust those who don't allow themselves to be tracked and monitored by Facebook? Seems pretty nefarious to me and not so easy to find it an innocuous comment. People do change, perhaps he has changed since you knew him.

Every time I see that guy's name, I think of the guy who unnecessarily destroyed an iPad for attention: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EfypkhII1KY

Yikes, thanks, I had not seen that. That sort of stuff drives me crazy, it's the same sort of thing where someone smashes a guitar to bits on stage. Someone spent time building the guitar and it's a perfectly good guitar that if you don't want it anymore there are plenty of kids that would love to have it. Destroying things you made yourself, fine. Destroying things that someone else made, even if you paid for, is disrespectful and reveals the destroyer as a selfish immature person who does whatever he wants for attention. It doesn't look good.

I think he is probably just very pessimistic. The problem here is that he and many others are preaching to the choir here, namely: us. I believe there is a pretty small number of HN users who need to be convinced that a free and (reasonably) anonymous internet is imperatively important. Now politicians and industry figures, that's a different story and I don't see how they can be reasoned with at this level. They don't understand arguments or ideals, they just understand pressure.

I'm surprised to see no one has mentioned Quora on there. Their approach to making anonymity variable based on topic and context, while at the same time requiring real-identity backing it, works well. Users are able to hide their identity as needed while the site can still maintain accountability.

Personally, I am not for real name policies or anything like that, but the problems with non-anonymity needs to be fixed if possible. For example, I remember during the Google+ nymwars that someone said on Google+ that it is odd that anonymity is needed to talk about nymwars.

This is all mildly ironic since the easiest place to remain anonymous is the internet.

Real Name policy my ass. More like seemingly real name policy.

Anonymity is certainly shifting but death? Don't think so.

There was anonymity before there was an internet.

I feel a bit out of my depth answering these. What did I get into?

Why am I getting downvoted?

I am one of the participants of the roundtable discussion.

You get downvoted a lot. shrugs

My alternate thesis ...

Anonymity will not die but be self-regulated to those adult enough to handle its set of responsibilities to serve the greater good of the world..

Anonymous seems to come close to it as far as different factions within Anonymous now getting clued in that criminals have infiltrated their group and splitting of to continue specific goals..

Reply on news.ycombinator.com