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Comment by izzydata | Hacker News Reader

I highly dislike this forced real identity thing on the internet. What is the problem with using internet aliases to post internet stuff in a manner entirely unrelated to your personal life?

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Because, while extremely imperfect, making a modicum of effort to make sure someone is a real person still screens out a lot of bots and anonymous scammers--which is at least a start.

While completely destroying a core benefit of the internet.

Anonymity was not really considered a core benefit of the early Internet.

In fact, early Internet users typically had true names associated with universities, companies, and the government.

If you define "Internet" to be email and such, yes. But as soon as the World Wide Web went mainstream in the mid 90's, being pseudonymous while online was very much a core principle of the internet. "No one knows you're a dog on the internet" was a common saying.

nothing stopping you from chilling in IRC or mastadon

it's just the normie networks that want real names

Disagree, i think it's so you can find your friends.

The problem is you're adamant on using these platforms. The Internet exists outside them and still works fine. In fact, Google and Chrome are a bigger danger as they can force people to do whatever at the very point of entry to the Internet. Smart Kants.

Companies are incentivized to do this because investors and advertising partners want assurance that what they're buying gives them access to real users.

More like they (the providers) don't want competition (access to their main asset – human users). Why buy ads if you can buy fake accounts and advertise/"influence" through those?

don't forge the story of The Ring of Gygees

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_of_Gyges

IMHO anonymous internet account names were fine with just universities and nerds and big smart tech companies. As soon as we forced everyone's cousins and uncles and grandpas on to the network we needed "real-names" because those new people... love 'em, but they're not baptized in punch cards.

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