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Comment by nialse | Hacker News Reader

Common misunderstandings are that there was no control over the internet and that anonymity was for protecting freedom of expression of the individuals.

The difference is that what once was covert in the West is now out in the open. Anonymity enabled the troll culture, famously exploited by any and all bad faith actors in their favor. Control in terms of surveillance on metadata level is just a manner of having enough endpoints at your disposal for a nation state actor.

It was a nice illusion and the wake up is kind of harsh.

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> Anonymity enabled the troll culture

You will be blown away by stuff people post at eachother on facebook, the site where you use your real name

Consider;

a. Not all people using Facebook are using their real name,

and

b. Not all Facebook accounts are real people

You have a good point. Some people have anonymous accounts on facebook and that means that my old neighbor did not publicly surprise her husband by announcing that she was polyamorous in a status update

Real names? I have an old novelty account (not used) which still sends me updates via email from the family of the same name as the ready made meals company I was making fun of.

At the same time you are completely right! Troll culture has enabled an era of unhinged communication. Many people have lost the little decency they had. I’ll be the first to admit I’m not immune to it.

Yeah my point isn’t really about troll accounts. They exist but that doesn’t have anything to do with the amount of crazy stuff people post under their real names on facebook. Like I could say “imgur, the place where you post dogs” and that would be accurate even if somebody saw pictures of a cat on it

> Anonymity enabled the troll culture

And so what if it did? That's the price we collectively pay for a free internet.

> Anonymity enabled the troll culture

Anonymity enabled honesty and free expression. FTFY.

That is indeed the paradox. What sometimes made true community possible, sometimes made exploitation easier. The line between the two is thin, and we’ve all seen both sides of it.

I'm old enough to remember the internet before the WWW and yes, anonymity enabled the troll culture (among other things). Honesty and free expression didn't require anonymity because people weren't being constantly monitored or having their every pronouncement judged (by the mostly anonymous). Yes, there were lots of flame-wars, but folks by and large had the gumption to hold their name to their positions.

* I may be wearing rose-tinted glasses. It's been a very long time since I'd spend 4 hours a day reading and replying on various Usenet groups.

You don't need anonymity so much until certain things show up: other anonymous people, commercial bulk data aggregation, bullying subcultures, blending of real life with the online world, political intolerance.

Unfortunately, I don't see a path back to the kind of internet where we don't need anonymity so much.

Anonymity was important back then to, and I was a strident defender of anon.penet.fi (look this up if you're not familiar). The problem is that what worked well as an option with a degree of persistence created its own set of problems when industrialized. We are not imho better off with fully anonymous swarms or the increasingly default situation of website ownership being hidden from the public, both of which have enabled the automation of abuse, misinformation, slop content and so on. Over the last 30-40 years internet communication/communities have gone from relatively high trust and levels of user participation/democracy toward zero trust and an extremely bimodal power distribution which has produced an excess of toxicity and adversarial behavior. I blame hacking/phreaking culture to a certain extent, because openness and information exchange valorized in that culture are also accompanies with a lot of drama and personal backbiting.

> Honesty and free expression didn't require anonymity because people weren't being constantly monitored or having their every pronouncement judged

This feels revisionist. The internet was almost entirely anonymous. Whether it was “required” or not is irrelevant. People could be honest and not fear censorship.

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