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Comment by aestetix | Hacker News Reader

Yes, it feels like another round of the same old tired "force everyone to use legal names online to save the children" that has been pushed continuously since the Internet driver's license of the 90s.

It will not save any children. It will destroy privacy, destroy free speech, and give lots of money to whatever corporation wins the bid for supplying the tech.

And of course, when that corporation gets hacked and all the personally identifiable information is put on the dark web, nobody will be held accountable.

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It will make children visible targets and be more exploitable.

Blizzard, the video game company, moved their forums from character name to legal name. I think it lasted a week or two before a ton of people got doxxed and they reverted.

Curiously, people doxx themselves. That is like the entire business model of plaintir, collect all the information people volunteer about themselves and others publicly, for free, to anyone that cares to look.

We seem to be at the bit where people liked having their cake and eating it too, until they had to pay for it. This is the part where the bill comes due.

And that is fucking _nothing_ compared to the massive, eye-watering amount of information people fucking pay to give away to an LLM company. sama must laugh himself to sleep every night.

I have no problem supplying my real name online - it's trivially attached to this account via my resume, and I use this account name all over. I also have several other account names, some disposable and some not.

There are plenty of reasons to be anonymous online. There's plenty of reasons not to be. I kind of wish that the government would launch a series of public political debate forums that required real ID, not that I think they would actually be valuable places for debate, but the technical challenges would be worthwhile to solve and the ability to publicly register debate positions would be incredibly useful for nailing politicians down.

The problem comes when the government tries to regulate one form or another, because strongly authenticated, pseudonymous, and anonymous forums all have their place in debate, and there's reasons for both public and private entities to host all three.

> I have no problem supplying my real name online - it's trivially attached to this account via my resume, and I use this account name all over. I also have several other account names, some disposable and some not.

You’re aware and made a choice, that’s good. Most people are not aware and have not elected to make this choice. This is a heavily-conversed topic on this and many other sites.

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