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Comment by swader999 | Hacker News Reader

Society needs anonymous dissent. This is basic.

Anonymous dissent does not, of course, require anonymous comment directly on any and all websites. There are many other venues for dissent. Most of those aren't run by or paid by other people.

This bill sucks, but it's no real threat to "anonymous dissent".

While I do personally believe this, society having anonymous dissent is quite a new concept.

Anonymous pamphlets and the like were a tool in motivating support for the Revolutionary War.

Not that it was "dissent", per se, but The Federalist Papers were published under the pseudonym "Publius", and I'd say there has been a long tradition of anonymous or pseudonymous dissent.

I meant ideas that diverge from the norm. If you fear cancelling, lowering your social credit score, risking employment you probably won't publish ideas that stray.

"Publius" [0] might have something to say about that.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Federalist_Papers

Are you sure about that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_graffiti

Depends on how you define new. The Federalist and Anti-Federalist were anonymous. Rosicrucianism And other such philosophies come from anonymous sources (they dissented to the religious norms of their time). Basically since the printing press Western societies have had anonymous dissent.

Not really. Publishing anonymously goes way back. Thomas Paine's Common Sense was published anonymously.

I'm not sure about that, I think the main difference is that in the past the concept of identity was not as rigid and well-documented as it is today. Additionally there were way fewer ways to identify someone, either in real life or through their writing. I don't quite want to say 'security through obscurity', though.

> society having anonymous dissent is quite a new concept.

Quite the opposite. Most dissent since the time of print has been anonymous, and plenty before then. Society feeling that every utterance or bit of expression has to be assigned to a specific identity is quite a new concept, especially because it's only begun to become technically feasible.

Needs? As in: twitter and facebook fucked up social structures and we need it?

As in this forum for example.

HN is not anonymous. It's pseudonymous at best.

The two don't oppose each other. Throwaway accounts are plentiful for those who want to use them, people who want to stick with a name can do that, and those who want to use (or otherwise make clear) their real name can do that.

HN doesn't even request a mail. For all intends and purposes it is synonymous with anonymity. Sure, there are platforms that don't even use a user handle. Given, you are free to reveal anything about you.

Now show me how that scales to 8B people ranting away. HN is only decent because of its strict moderation. Twitter and facebook, two examples I didn't name accidentally, don't do that, have a much larger audience, and did sow division, largely because they are anonymous.

The problem with anonymous dissent is that it's cheap and easy to DDOS into irrelevance with the "firehose of falsehood." Just spam the public square with endless amounts of anonymous bullshit and no anonymous comment will be believed. Since it's anonymous there is no way to verify its provenance.

AI is automating this process at scale.

You can do this with non-anonymous discourse too but anonymity just makes it easier.

The future is private forums, channels, Discord/Slack instances, invite-only private networks, etc. The public web and public social media are entering their twilight.

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