Hacker News Reader

Comment by tomohelix | Hacker News Reader

This is why I prefer anonymity for my online activities. You never know when or how your online posts will be used against you. Maybe everything I do now is appropriate and "moral" but in 20 years they would not and some nobody would grab those and slander me. You can never be sure.

Back to the article, I guess one good thing coming out of this is that the guy can apply for political asylum green card now...

View on HN

Makes sense. I can imagine future AI can perform unprecedented detectice work to connect the dots also between anonymous social activity on the internet.

If you were anonymous your mom wouldn't be arrested and no light would come to the situation. It would have been a forgotten comment/post.

[deleted]

Why

What exactly was the comment? Feels like the most important bit of information is being left out.

> This is why I prefer anonymity for my online activities.

Thats funny because this is why I think I’m starting to prefer using my real identity.

When you use your real identity you behave in a way that you will stand behind. Anonymity goads you into acting in a way that you might feel embarrassed about or regret. And given that you are a real person posting online, there is always a chance you lose anonymity.

It’s complicated though. Anonymity to bypass authoritarianism is obviously good. More ideally speeking, we just have stronger free speech values across society so people don’t feel like they need to hide and discourse, think, etc in secrecy.

Amused to find this posted from a pseudonymous account with a blank profile.

I think we need places of both. There should be places that are facilities anonymous interactions. And others that require a real identity.

This allows for more extreme and less politically favorable ideas to be explored in anonymity while providing a public place that moves slower and takes longer for ideas that are less favorable to become more favorable.

We should start with congress. All votes yes or no must be attached to a name. No more of this yay or nay bs.

Don't we... track that?

https://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_votes/vote1...

In the US, many (I think most, now) votes are just voice vote. This makes sense when many votes are simple procedures with overwhelming support.

IIRC, any senator can force a roll call on a vote. I think the House has a similar rule but requires a minimum number of House members to support the motion.

Sure, we could log all these votes. But I think most people make their senate voting decisions on different criteria, or at least I do. Like where they stand on issues and how they voted on bills, or legislation they submitted.

Sure. I meant that there's no general requirement for bills to get a roll call vote, where each person has to record their vote.

And even when Congress has internal rules (not US law) requiring a roll call vote, they can suspend those rules to permit a voice vote.

> just have stronger free speech values across society so people don’t feel like they need to hide and discourse, think, etc in secrecy.

That's a good place to start from, but the individuals in power protecting themselves via censorship etc won't be stopped by this.

> When you use your real identity you behave in a way that you will stand behind.

Whats the point of 'standing behind' if the consequencz is being arrested and thrown in jail.

"Better be alive than right" as the saying goes

> Whats the point of 'standing behind' if the consequencz is being arrested and thrown in jail.

See the history of nonviolent protest, civil disobedience, US civil rights movement, etc.

It looks like the history of countries with functioning justice systems. How is that strategy working in countries like Russia?

How did it work for these people?

https://www.splcenter.org/what-we-do/civil-rights-memorial/c...

I didn't say it was without risk.

Neither did I. I meant to say that such acts have little to no positive effect in dysfunctional systems. After all, every country has activists.

Gandhi's nonviolent resistance moved the British but did not persuade Hitler, though he tried.

Anyway, these are all good things. I don't mean to dissuade well-meaning activists. Just pointing out that you need to understand the environment you are operating in instead of blindly emulating others.

I think you could say that the US (at least in the South) had a dysfunctional justice system. How many people were beaten or murdered, often by the police, with no consequence or without even a serious investigation? Yet their activism did bring change.

I disagree, because the American justice system quickly corrected itself. I think the bar is not having an unblemished record, but being responsive. When the local cops got out of line JFK and LBJ spoke out against it. The DoJ dispatched the feds and created the Civil Rights Division. Some bad cops were not enough to stymie the civil rights movement. Dysfunctional system just don't make progress due to corruption, concentration of power, etc. Of course there are ongoing racism issues but I am not sure it indicates a systemic flaw.

that's easy to say when it's the US and you'll probably stay in jail a month or two at most, as opposed to having a loved one thrown in prison, tortured, and then executed because of some political statements that you made

>>When you use your real identity you behave in a way that you will stand behind.

5 minutes spent on any Facebook comments thread proves this to be completely false - people are vile, disgusting, racist even when their real names are attached to what they are saying.

That's because they stand behind that behaviour. They will face no real consequences for it, because that's the norm for them.

Because it's the norm for their community, which you would also be expected to follow if the necessities of life put you inside it.

Yeah and that makes the entire concept meaningless. All it does is make it easier to bully people.

This has never been a good strategy vs "evil" states or in resistance like circumstances, which as the poster said could happen unexpectedly in ways never imagined and quickly.

> When you use your real identity you behave in a way that you will stand behind. Anonymity goads you into acting in a way that you might feel embarrassed about or regret.

People use/present different 'selves' to different people all the time, even without using pseudonymous identities. It's a core part of navigating life. Online pseudonymous handles help facilitate more separation between contexts but it doesn't (necessarily) mean people change their integrity (I certainly don't).

There's a useful critique[1] of Mark Zuckerberg's 2010 quote that proclaimed there should only be a single identity for everyone. An excerpt that summarizes the piece:

> Individuals are constantly managing and restricting flows of information based on the context they are in, switching between identities and persona. I present myself differently when I’m lecturing in the classroom compared to when I’m have a beer with friends [...] This is how we navigate the multiple and increasingly complex spheres of our lives. It is not that you pretend to be someone that you are not; rather, you turn the volume up on some aspects of your identity, and tone down others, all based on the particular context you find yourself.

Also this cross-linked piece[2] by a teacher which brings up similar points.

[1] https://michaelzimmer.org/2010/05/14/facebooks-zuckerberg-ha...

[2] https://crookedtimber.org/2010/05/14/an-internet-where-every...

>When you use your real identity you behave in a way that you will stand behind. Anonymity goads you into acting in a way that you might feel embarrassed about or regret.

And I'm sure he has no regrets regarding his mother's arrest.

Full anonymity is indeed cancer. But pseudonymity and what I call “train seat conversation” are still different from full disclosure. E.g. I’ve discussed many things on trains and on forums that I wouldn’t discuss elsewhere. And it wasn’t any sort of -ism or matginal topic, just something that opens up a little more about you than your official image at some circle does. Another example is my HN account. It is what I call “absolutely normal”, but tbh I’m a little nervous about showing it to someone I know, because it feels like sharing a diary, even if it isn’t one. The idea that you can just scroll through my written thoughts is very uncomfortable (but strangely okay if HN fellas do it). For that reason I avoid logging in or visiting this site like at work or near people I know.

I’m not disagreeing, just had something to add, basically unrelated to the context.

If what you say is the truth then it's doesn't matter who is saying it; whether it's me or The Pope.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com