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Comment by philwelch | Hacker News Reader

It's very hard for me to imagine someone who wants to try so very hard to maintain a serious public image that they won't be caught liking a silly cat video on YouTube. That seems hilariously self-important.

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>It's very hard for me to imagine someone who wants to try so very hard to maintain a serious public image that they won't be caught liking a silly cat video on YouTube. That seems hilariously self-important.

Eh, I think this idea that we must live our whole life in public (to the /same/ public using the /same/ identity) is a bit insidious. Especially in these days of "cultural fit" - it leads to this idea that you need to spend your private life in service of your professional life.

If you have an unpopular hobby or sexual proclivity, keeping that out of your professional life, in many circles, could be even seen as polite; At the office? nobody wants to know about your love for furry fan-fiction.

Sure, cute cat videos are different from furry fan fiction, but... if I'm "following" you? I will "unfollow" if there are a bunch of cute cat videos. I mean, unless I'm following you for your great taste in cute cat videos. More to the point, if I'm evaluating you and, say, your long screeds advocating a political cause I find particularly distasteful keep coming up, I might have a hard time evaluating you rationally, on your skills. (Also, if I'm hiring you, I want you to be able to leave the bullshit at home. Leaving the bullshit in another identity helps with that sort of thing.)

I really think that multiple identities is the solution. You can have your cute cat picture identity, your furry fan-fiction identity, your radical socialist identity, and your professional programmer identity. I can choose to follow the identity I find interesting. I mean, yeah, if someone /really wants/ to connect your furry fan-fiction identity to your professional programmer identity, they can. However, if you practice proper identity hygiene, it becomes much easier for me (or another third party) to interact with the professional programmer, without dealing with your hobbies I have no interest in, or maybe even find distasteful.

Most of the "real name" folks seem to think that by making everything public, we will see that we are all weirdos, and become more accepting of our differences.

I guess that's my prime problem with the 'real name' folks; I think that it's just fine to do business with, or even relate socially to folks that have hobbies or political views that I believe are downright wrong. I don't think that 'acceptance' is required for that. I think that you can like and trust one facet of a person's personality, without liking other facets of their personality.

I want to be able to say "I think this person is a great programmer" without implying that I also endorse their badly written Spock/Kirk slash fiction, or their half-baked anarcho-capitalist political rants.

but then why do you "like" or "+1" the cat videos in the first place, if not to make it known to the world that you liked them?

>but then why do you "like" or "+1" the cat videos in the first place, if not to make it known to the world that you liked them?

My point is that I may have 'cat video friends' who, you know, are in to that sort of thing, with whom I may wish to share these sorts of things.

My point is that while it's fine to have my cat video friends, I ought to have the option of not sharing my 'cat fancy' with other groups who may look down on that sort of thing.

well then it looks like you are not looking for the +1 button, but for something more complicated than that, an ACL'd endorsement of sorts. Right now the closest thing to that is to just reshare the video to your 'cat video friends' circle :)

I have liked a lot of things as thank-you or acknoledgement to the author. If I want to make something known, if I want to spread the word, I clicked the "share" button, that was its purpouse.

You can send a message to the author if you want to acknowledge something privately. The +1 button is there to make it publicly known that you endorse the content, that is its purpose.

That's still one of the primary ways Google+ tries to differentiate itself as a social network. In fact I remember some of their commercials describing an almost identical situation. 'Circles' let you share things with only the people you know who care about them. I don't know how this works with YouTube, I don't use it very much. But it's implemented pretty well on Google+.

does plus let you display different names to different circles? I didn't think so (but maybe I'm wrong. I'm a big advocate of one browser (or one profile) and one account per identity, so I haven't really messed with circles.) - without that capability, circles are... much less useful.

No, it doesn't. All of my social circles are tied to me in real life in one way or another, so using a false identity isn't really something that's important to me. I can see how it would be in some cases though, especially if a particular social circle is entirely online.

Personally I'm a big fan of encouraging the use of real identities for reputation management in online communities instead of relying on fake Internet points. We'll have to wait and see how it all shakes down!

>Personally I'm a big fan of encouraging the use of real identities for reputation management in online communities

For me personally? I use my real name for most things. It's convenient. And in a "cultural fit" world, well, I am a "cultural fit" for my profession, so why not run with it? Nearly everything I've done online in the last decade has been under my real name.

That's the key, though. Being a 'cultural fit' means that the community is unlikely to have a problem with my personal life, and if they do, it's likely to be a minor sort of thing.

Actually, the multiple identities thing you talked about is one of the new G+ features on YouTube. You can create a G+ Page, which is treated as a separate profile across YouTube and G+. This Page is internally linked to you (but no one can see the original owner) and you can switch in and out of it by clicking "Switch Accounts".

Edit: forgot to mention, you have to explicitly connect the G+ Page to YouTube.

https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/3479900

huh. That is pretty cool. I mean, there's a lot of room here for 'human factors' kinds of screwups, but... that looks like they are heading in a reasonable direction.

Note, that functionality is exactly what the author of the article is objecting to.

That's not typically how people operate though. When you go to your crazy culty church or your Socialist Workers Party meeting or your gun club or your polyamory potluck you don't typically go by a pseudonym, you just don't expect your work friends and your church friends to overlap, and if they do, who cares, your friend was at church too. The problem seems to be reconciling this with a world where you can google for people or add them on social networks where all these disparate things happen online. But even then, there's a simple solution--don't use social networks. Sign up for the gun forum, the polyamory forum, the culty megachruch forum, the Socialist Workers Party forum, and even if you use your real name or a traceable pseudonym, people would have to go out of their way to match things together, and with a lot of false positives along the way.

Google's stated goal is to organize the world's information. That (presumably) includes linking and making easily searchable all those pseudonyms at those diverse forums you use. Trusting that those bits of interaction will stay nicely in their own corners is like trusting that only your high-school buddies will see that compromising picture you just posted on Facebook.

Replace silly cat video with some video about a medical condition (I know I've gone to YouTube to check something relevant and medical before). And you can see how people start to feel uncomfortable when their identity is plastered all over the relevant page.

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