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Comment by josalhor | Hacker News Reader

I want the right to not be identified. I also want the right to SELF identify. I think the toxic culture of the internet has happened in part because anonymity leads to lack of accountability. I want to self identify and interact with other people who also self identify. The cost of running LLM botnets is going down. I cannot imagine how the next cycle of elections is going to be like on all countries. I understand the right to remain anonymous, that should remain, but that state should not be the default on these massively big platforms. Our brains and political systems are not designed for this. And no, "get people to get rid of their smartphone voluntarily" like I see on the comments is not going to happen.

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> I think the toxic culture of the internet has happened in part because anonymity leads to lack of accountability.

It is trivial to demonstrate that this is incorrect (despite sounding plausible). There's plenty of incredibly toxic behavior to be found all over facebook.

Among other considerations it's worth noting that most of the usual social feedback mechanisms are missing from typical online interactions.

> The cost of running LLM botnets is going down.

Agreed that this is an existential threat to anonymous discourse as it is typically implemented.

> There's plenty of incredibly toxic behavior to be found all over facebook.

But is it comparable to the amount of toxic behavior on 4chan?

I'd wager the amount on FB is orders of magnitude _more_ than on 4chan. 4chan's average severity is likely higher, though. They're different problems, but saying that online toxicity only exists on anonymous sites is naive at best.

> anonymity leads to lack of accountability

They didn't say that, they said "anonymity leads to lack of accountability". Even the counter that authenticated sites have users engaging in toxic behavior doesn't contradict the original point.

The clear implication of the earlier statement in context is that lack of anonymity should be expected to reduce the practical aspects of the problem to a useful degree. I believe the general state of facebook stands as a stark counterexample.

That said, I do think it's a fruitful line of inquiry to wonder why that might be the case. Are there any known cases where anonymity alone is sufficient to tip the balance towards widespread toxic behavior? Related to that, if lack of anonymity frequently does not curtail toxicity then what might the important differences be versus real life interactions that can account for it?

Yes, it is far worse because it gets personal far more quickly with non-anonymous users. People don't feel exhausted by 4chan, it is mostly the comparison to others on "legit" platforms.

And to be frank, there is value in 4chan. Nobody would feel compelled to believe obvious bullshit some societies and cultures impose on its members. This shit needs a counterweight. That isn't 4chan of course, but any free platform.

In fully anonymous platforms like 4chan it also just takes one participan to step away to end a dispute unlike non-anonymous or pseudonomynous platforms where there are more avenues for continued harassment.

But really to have this discussion we first need a better definition of what we are talking about than nebolous "toxic behavior". I don't think anyone is going to dispute that 4chan posts are more likely to use crass language than those on Facebook so perhaps that is what gp considers toxic.

There is vastly more toxic behaviour on Facebook, it's not even close.

If there's a severity to toxicity then perhaps 4chan can peak at a 9/10 whereas Facebook posts peak at a 7/10, but there's orders of magnitude more people posting on Facebook. If you pull in Facebook comment sections on news sites and consider those too, these threads where people publicly call for torture, rape and death, you realise that 4chan has an unearned bad reputation compared to the mainstream.

My dad posts daily on Facebook about how much he hates Muslims.

Exactly and the typical societal feedback mechanism for bad behavior are more terrible than the original problem when they are expanded to internet scale and become cancel culture.

Yep, and the alternative is simply ignoring the bad behavior and forgetting about it only minutes later.

I've walked away from so many online conversations by simply not replying, and everything's fine. Those are now just dangling threads in the void that almost no one will discover or care about.

A family member of mine posted several times on facebook explaining how the police should just shoot and kill thieves in the streets.

He posts with his real name and real photo.

Toxic culture was always there but it really took of with social media where users often have zero shame to self-identify. There are anonymous communities that are far more friendly than the common insta group. "My brain" is perfectly fine with anonymous users.

And yes, anonymity should be the default because otherwise the alternative is that you need to identify. If not, most users would stay anonymous because it is simply the smarter decision with the exception that you seek exposure.

Exactly, it has much more to do with the size of the crowd than how easily the members can tie each other to real world identities.

The only reason I'm public and use my real name in some social media contexts is for career exposure, so I can discuss my profession with others in hopes that it interests someone enough to offer me a job or build connections for later.

Outside of that, I have no reason not to be anonymous, and unfortunately it's too risky after the kinds of cancellation campaigns we saw during COVID over procedures, and around the same time, the all-or-nothing nonsense around whether you supported the BLM leaders' mansion fund.

It's not worth losing a job over seeing the writing on the wall before everyone else does, and calling it out publicly.

>I want to self identify and interact with other people who also self identify.

You can do that already, Facebook is pretty close to exactly what you're talking about. They do a lot of work to identify real people and de-prioritize spam/bots. You can configure your account to only be able to interact with real people if you want. Many people like anonymity though, it's important for speaking truth to power and discussing topics which are outside the Overton window.

There's a good reason that many of the United States' founding fathers used pseudonyms when writing. Anonymity and real freedom of speech are foundational to democracy. If you can put someone in jail for saying something that the government doesn't like, then the government will be able to steer discourse towards outcomes it deems acceptable, even if those outcomes subvert the will of the people.

There's no real need to have the government force all websites to always authenticate all humans. The only real argument for such a system is to move us toward dystopian authoritarianism.

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