Hacker News Reader

Comment by onosendai | Hacker News Reader

> Social accountability is provided by linking your Twitter or GitHub accounts

I never understood the reasoning behind this kind of social login. If you're dead set on being an ass, then you'll be one regardless, even if it takes creating a burner Twitter or GH account. Anything short of demanding proof of identity and linking your real name is useless (and now you have two problems.) All this achieves is forcing people to sign up to another service in order to use your own. A low barrier to entry with community moderation is enough to keep the value of the comments high, while keeping noise to a minimum.

View on HN

> I never understood the reasoning behind this kind of social login. If you're dead set on being an ass [...]

The purpose is to influence people who exist on the spectrum somewhere between angelic and dead set on being an ass.

I understand the purpose, I'm questioning its efficacy.

Is the offline version of this strategy efficient? By that I mean if we're standing in a room together are you less likely to be an asshole to me than when you're behind a keyboard?

This method is simply trying to replicate the offline version of the experience by adding a face to the name. I'm not saying it's the perfect solution, but it's probably a step in the right direction.

The offline version of this is requiring everyone to wear a "Hello my name is __________" sticker but not actually checking that they put their real name on it.

I don't understand your reasoning. People who are genuinely dead set on being an ass will be an ass, period. Like you said, adding friction can improve things (you mentioned requiring proof of identity) even if the friction can still be subverted (IDs can be faked). The fact remains that adding any sort of friction should be expected to cut down the number of asses, so I don't see why requiring authentication via a service that's generally not anonymous (Twitter or GitHub) is a bad idea.

> Like you said, adding friction can improve things (you mentioned requiring proof of identity)

I said adding proof of a real identity would have some impact, but it would create more problems than it solved, thus it would not improve things.

> The fact remains that adding any sort of friction should be expected to cut down the number of asses

It should also be expected to cut down on the number of users. My argument is that if your objective is to improve the quality of the comments there are more effective ways of doing it, like effective moderation schemes.

> I don't see why requiring authentication via a service that's generally not anonymous (Twitter or GitHub) is a bad idea

Because it's not effective. It raises the barrier to entry, excluding several users who would add value to discussions, without providing any meaningful level of protection. Also, neither of them, as far as I am aware, enforces a real name policy, so I'm not sure what you mean by them being "generally not anonymous."

> It should also be expected to cut down on the number of users.

Of course it would. I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing to reduce the portion of asses in a community at the cost of also reducing the number of quality users. This applies to your last paragraph as well. In this case, for a tech- or startup-leaning community, I think Twitter and GitHub accounts target a huge portion of all appropriate users, and I think it could very well be effective despite it excluding valuable users who don't have or don't wish to use accounts from either service.

As for moderation, it can obviously be an effective tool. But I don't think it's a cure-all feature or even the most fundamentally important feature of a successful community. I have probably seen more online communities negatively impacted by moderators than by users (I would say that holds for Hacker News).

Granted, the "quality" of an online community is inherently subjective, so communities I find problems with might serve a large portion of their users very well. At the end of the day, the people who dislike a community enough to leave will leave, and that improves both the community and those people's lives. That is the fundamental "self-moderation" of online communities.

I never understood the reasoning behind this kind of social login. [...] All this achieves is forcing people to sign up to another service in order to use your own.

Well, no, there is another possibility. Someone who doesn't already have an account on one of those other services might simply not use yours at all either.

I know plenty of intelligent, interesting, civil people in real life, and many of them contribute to one on-line forum or another. I know plenty of people who develop software, both personally and professionally. I literally can't think of anyone I know in real life who actually has an active GitHub account, though, and I only know a handful who use Twitter. Maybe it's a local thing and using these services is more common in other places.

There is actually evidence as far as I remember which indicates that people using for Facebook commenting system behaves nicer because others can identify them.

I've never seen any evidence of this being true. Only opinions on it.

A quick google turned up an article on TC about contrary evidence however. http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/29/surprisingly-good-evidence-...

Real Name policies are obviously valuable in an advertising deck... I'm skeptical on whether the benefits translate to users.

You might be right. I can't remember where I read about it. I do think it does have some impact.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com