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Comment by wallacrw | Hacker News Reader

I think you’re onto something here with people thinking they know a lot, but isn’t the real issue anonymous internet posting? Having to take zero responsibility for sharing ideas has ruined intelligent discourse society-wide: Web 2.0, then social media, turned out to be the beginning of the end of experts having credibility. Journalists, scientists, all experts became demonized by persuasive bots or anonymous internet posters. Instead of a world of democratized intelligence as promised, we got a world of “anyone’s opinion is valid, and I don’t even need to know their credentials or who they are.” If we forced everyone to have to stand by everything they said online on every forum, we’d have a lot fewer strong opinions and conspiracies, IMO. People (voters) would be thinking a lot harder about their ideas and seeing a lot fewer validations of the extreme parts of themselves.

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My hottest take is that it wasn’t anonymity, but auto correct, that spelled (literally) the end. Without autocorrect and auto-grammar, ideas were tagged with the credential/authority of “I can use they’re / their / there” correctly, which was a high ass bar.

You think people don't have those ideas in person? They absolutely do, and not being anonymous does not stop most of them.

While I agree the Internet has contributed to this belief, I do not see how being anonymous or not would fix that. To say nothing of the myriad other issues that would come with a non-anonymous Internet.

The internet took every Cliff Clavin out of his neighborhood bar and gave him a global platform.

Society wasn't ready for what had been private discussions to become public.

>I do not see how being anonymous or not would fix that.

I mean there are some valid things that show up here. For example Bob is racist, and Steve is racist, but they don't know they are deeply racist. You typically have to slowly enter into conversation to ensure you don't offend them.

Being anonymous can shortcut this process. You show up on a semi-local forum as Anon1 and talk to Anon2 about how you want get rid of all those dirty $_fill_in_the_blank's. You realize you share the same convictions, and it's safer to exchange details on who you really are.

Now, it's correct non-anonymous internet is bad, especially if you are a targeted group that hasn't done anything wrong, for example gay groups.

You don't need to be a targeted group for anonymity to be important, nor do you need a "valid" reason to be anonymous on the Internet. I have yet to hear a compelling reason otherwise.

People like to say, "Well you're not anonymous IRL" and ... well, yes, we are. We are not forced to say, "My name is X and I live at Y" when we stay stuff in public

>We are not forced to say, "My name is X and I live at Y" when we stay stuff in public

I mean these days you can pretty much be immediately identified by facial recognition. Not saying it's a good thing, but it is the world in which we live.

If you're mad at one, then be mad that the other because this is what technology enables.

Don't worry, I'm not exactly thrilled about that either, but that's beside the point.

Not really, the fact is technology is going to make the world really tiny and public and it's likely we can do very little about it in the end.

So we should lean into it and speed it along and make those things even easier to do?

It's more like we've fell into a raging torrent screaming down river at 30km/h and the best we can do is a backstroke 1km/h upstream.

I mean, I'm not saying it's impossible to slow it down or stop it, but I feel that in itself would require it's own dystopian level of enforcement as it opens up game theory to the one that defects and progresses technology as the winner in being able to control others.

We flew towards the sun, and went to high, and then the sun swallowed us.

It’s still “new tech” to our monkey brains and it takes a long time, and probably a lot of destruction, before our we develop better cultural norms for dealing with it. Our cultural immune system has only just started to kick in.

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