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Comment by fc417fc802 | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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> 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.

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.

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.

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