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Comment by shafoshaf | Hacker News Reader

I feel like anonymity is just a band-aid. Ideally we would have freedom and accountability. If everyone knew that I watched porn but respected by right to do so, that's the ideal. Without anonymity we would know that account is run by a bot or a foreign state. It goes to how homosexuals were forced to be underground for so many years (and still today for many) and if they were out of sight they were out of mind. That isn't equality if you have to have a really good way to hide.

However, the penchant for people to be complete assholes to each other over things that are none of their business is real and a huge problem. So, yes it makes sense to be able to hide but, sadly, it doesn't advance the social contract.

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Anonymity is not a band-aid, but a fundamental component of privacy. Privacy is an important right which people often take for granted and its erosion makes people less free in a multitude of ways. Even the expectation that one might be surveilled can change a person's behavior in profound ways (Foucault's panopticon has never been more relevant).

It comes down to the fact that other people may do things which we find distasteful or even offensive. You will never, ever be able to get a large group of people to conform to standards of personal behavior to the extent that this is not true, and so privacy becomes a necessity. But as long as those things aren't causing real harm then they simply aren't my business or that of the government.

In my opinion the only worthwhile discussion when it comes to privacy is what constitutes harm and whether a given harm is possible to prevent without causing even greater harm through restriction of privacy and anonymity. In many cases when it comes to safety and privacy, the cure can be worse than the disease.

I don't think Anonymity is linked to privacy. Anonymity is the ability to do public things without being identified. For example, writing a death threat online. There is good evidence that anonymity encourages bad behavior. https://www.psychologicalscience.org/observer/who-is-that-th...

Privacy is what I do without interacting with the public. Playing D&D is a privacy matter. Only my friends and I know we do it.

Not a fan of secret ballots?

Who or What I voted for should be secret. That I voted should not.

In an ideal world we respect that what other people do is largely none of our business. I don't agree with any ideal that thinks everyone should agree on some set of rules and we respect anything that doesn't violate those rules.

I think an ideal society has rich disagreement and a wide diversity of thoughts and opinions. With that diversity comes conflict which provides us all with opportunities to more deeply reflect on our own beliefs.

I think that depends on the level of disagreement. I think gay people, women, and people of color should have the same rights as everyone else, which includes how they are treated at work. I'm willing to say that is a mandatory part of my social contract.

Someone liking to dress in a cowboy hat, underwear, and playing a guitar in Times Square? Not my cup of tea, but sure, go for it.

It only depends on if it's a social contract, which implies some localized majority. You may believe your ideals are the best in the world, but I assure you many other people with vastly different ideals than your own believe differently with just as much, if not more, conviction.

You can't simply beat your chest and claim superiority and thus we need competition of ideas. E.g. the most prosperous happy places on earth tend to have social contracts that look out for groups such as women, homosexuals, etc.

You can't simply prove an idea is better by appealing to your own sense of morals/justice and if there's no evidence that some ideals are better than others, how would you reach consensus anyways?

In order to make everyone share the same social contract you either have evidence based progress or authoritarianism and historically the evidence suggests authoritarianism doesn't pan out all that great.

I think I see what you are saying, an I agree that practically speaking, we have to have some common ground to make things work.

So at some point there is also a line that has to be drawn. The Holocaust is one of those lines, and I pray that I would had the strength to stand up to my peers and say, no this isn't right,and go to whatever lengths I thought I could do to make change. In a lot of ways, I think the civil rights movement was a lot of chest beating and I think that actually helped.

It's not really clear to me that "most prosperous happy places on earth tend to have social contracts that look out for groups such as women, homosexuals, etc." Certainly, when you look at economic prosperity and I don't know how you'd measure happiness.

I don't really measure it, I wouldn't know exactly where to start, but there are people who try to measure it. https://worldhappiness.report/data/ and admittedly I haven't looked at their methods at all, so I'm just parroting information without understanding it. Hopefully I'm not just spreading junk data.

> If everyone knew that I watched porn but respected by right to do so, that's the ideal.

I disagree completely. I think that privacy is an essential component of having a free society. It's not really about porn.

That is not possible though. You cannot refrain from being judged and if you are honest you are also judging others. This is true for clothing and much more so for more intimate proclivities. Also, a certain amount of inhibition might be quite healthy.

Additionally I don't want to share even trivial stuff like interest in music or movies with everyone. If I do, it is on my own terms. I don't want to share who is in my social circle either. My social media presence is highly curated and shallow for professional reasons (although by being shallow it doesn't contrast other online presences too much).

I hide stuff and that is completely fine and something I want to do. If people are interested, they can ask me.

Anonymity isn't just a band-aid here, it is a tool and I value it quite highly. Nothing to do with equality or advancing rights.

I think your version of anonymity is more to what I'd call privacy. There is no reason anyone even needs to know that you have a playlist, much less what is on it.

Anonymity would be you posting your playlist of songs with the theme of Down with Martians (or other group) without anyone knowing it was you. I don't necessarily think we have to have that ability to allow people to do that.

> That isn't equality if you have to have a really good way to hide.

It's still better that they were forced to hide, than a world where they couldn't hide.

> I feel like anonymity is just a band-aid.

The norms of a society are nether stable over time nor across members at a single point in time.

There is no stasis point, there is no right answer. There is only entropy.

>It's still better that they were forced to hide, than a world where they couldn't hide.

Agreed. Just like it was better we had some not great laws protecting abortion than the shit-show we have now. That is the challenge I think, is getting something that is actually in the real world vs. what the ideal is, since none of us seem to be able to agree on that ideal.

>Ideally we would have freedom and accountability. If everyone knew that I watched porn but respected by right to do so, that's the ideal.

sure, but we know ideals are just that. We know even today that saying you are homosexual can get you harassed by certain circles. We know that anonymous sources are necessary so that the whistleblower isn't retaliated upon by the government, company, or peers.

These aren't new issues and humanity has probably dealt with it in all of civilized history. I think preserving anonymity is a much easier fight than trying to make everyone get along and accept one another.

>Privacy is what I do without interacting with the public

You are granted privacy even when in public. You may be wearing a skirt and a strong breeze blows in the park. A pervert isn't entitled to take a picture of you because you were in public and happened to have your underwear revealed. or worse, throw themselves under you and take a picture directly.

Even without the extreme example, there are a bunch of privacy laws in terms of how and who and where you can record in public. Privacy in general simply means:

>The state or condition of being free from being observed or disturbed by other people.

And this is granted to you even if in public spaces. It's part of why we have public indecency laws to begin with: because a person performing lewd conduct (especially in front of minors) has been determined to be disturbing the public's privacy.

The difference is people will still be complete assholes but they also know where you work.

Which could definitely be a problem, but is that worse than being able to harass and bully people with no consequences at all because you don't know who it is?

Of course, there could be a lot of bullying just out in the open too, but anonymity isn't a cure all, just helps with the symptom. IMHO.

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