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Comment by Footnote7341 | Hacker News Reader

We're going to have state I.D to use any popular website alongside remote attestation and you guys are cheering us along the path there with cases like this

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At this point, maybe we should reduce anonymization? We've had this idea since the 90s that an anonymous internet with signal amplification is a net good, but that's been turning out to be less and less true. If you want to self publish anonymously, you are not entitled to use of one of the big 5 platforms.

Maybe this causes fragmentation of large platforms, that'd also be a net good imo.

You can't really conclude that de-anonymization is good just by asserting that the status quo is bad. One has to make the positive case for de-anonymization on privately owned platforms. What are the trade-offs?

Society certainly didn't anticipate a lot of the drawbacks of anonymous presence.

Why do we automatically assume that anonymization is good? Where are the anonymous town squares?

I dunno, I was pretty careful not to assume that in my comment.

The town square metaphor is really not a great one for the internet. You don't run nearly as high a risk of getting doxxed or swatted for speaking your mind in a physical public place.

And if the unspoken suggestion is that anonymous doxxing would be impossible or too costly/risky in a hypothetical de-anonymized world, I'd call BS. Even if it worked, that would require some kind of "panopticon internet". Sounds bad...

Also, the town square is ephemeral. Sure, maybe it's written down somewhere, heck maybe the local scribe even publishes it in the next day's paper. But it won't show up 7 years later as the third Google search result when someone searches your name.

You either need the right to be forgotten, or the right to be anonymous.

This is the crux of the social good of anonymization in modern times.

Historically, it wasn't current-moment anonymization that was good, but ephemerality.

Sadly, I think the right/ability-to-record is a genie that can't be put back in the bottle (no one can scrape anything?), so we may need to switch from identifiable-but-emphemral (historical state) to anonymous-but-recordable (future state) to preserve the same freedoms.

IMHO, we'd be better off working to curb the worst consequences of broad anonymity (e.g. astroturfing / artificial amplification).

It’s all just that internet is neither a game to be hunted nor a fire to be started. No one knows how to deal with it. Because there isn’t any proper way to deal with it. It should not exist in the first place, says our minds, for which it is all unintelligible.

I guess in theory a government could strongly guarantee freedom of speech while not guaranteeing anonymity — you could say whatever you want, but you couldn't do so anonymously. I suppose until recently in history there was a limited number of methods of making public messages anonymously.

I think Internet anonymity has some benefits though: it's certainly helpful for whistleblowers revealing crimes committed by a company, government or other organization. While you could in theory still drop folders containing documents or a USB drive to different news organizations, with how widespread CCTVs are, so I think that path may become more difficult. In countries with oppressive regimes, that's even less of an option.

I'm also not sure that the lack of anonymity is a sure-fire way to improve public discourse: just look at Facebook comments (which are rarely anonymous.)

As you mention, perhaps anonymity could be allowed on the Internet, but not on the big 5 platforms — that could be a balancing act between chaos and oppression.

Though, while a policy like that might be a net good for someplace like the EU, the precedent of requiring government IDs for Facebook etc. could set a dangerous precedent for places that are less free. Not every country is a full-on liberal democracy OR an authoritarian state where Facebook etc. is outright banned — there are places in-between, where the government oppresses people but still has elections and some degree of dissent is permitted. It's in those places that I see government IDs being required to post on major platforms being a major issue. Being able to share instances of government oppression on major platforms is crucial for those places, but if the identity of those sharing it is revealed, then fewer people may speak up and share such instances.

It's a complex issue to say the least.

I see this angle a lot; " Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory [1]" it's often called. However, Facebook -- the single largest social website in the world -- stands as stark evidence that anonymity doesn't really factor in all that much. I'm not saying it isn't a contributing factor, but it's not the boogeyman it is so very often made out to be.

[1] https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/000/325/699/4fc...

I'm sorry, what?

Wouldn't whatever "signal amplification" downsides happen just as much with decentralized services

The state cured my porn habit with this method.

Have you read the article?

This isn’t a case of “oops we didn’t know the age”, this is about accounts that had an underage DOB set.

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