The anonymity I know
chrishateswriting.com
chrishateswriting.com
Karma systems attach value to a 'handle' which is its own form of identity. So I can create an account on a forum as xyz123 and say what ever I want, but if the speech is of low value to the community I'll get "down karma" (what ever the mechanism is) and that identity will become less valuable, if instead the speech is found to be of value I will get "up karma" and that identity will become more valuable. I might find at some point that my identify as xyz123 is more valuable to me than my "real" identity. So am I anonymous? Sure, but does that mean I don't have an identity? Absolutely not.
Of course this allows for sock puppetry, for whom Scott Adams will forever be the patron saint. And in that sense there is value in being able to isolate uniqueness. Which is to say these two names are the same human, versus these two handles are two different humans. And this is the point that rubs on the 'anti-anonymity' folks. As much of the conversation's interpretation can change when you know the relationship between the participants, it can completely flip one's perception of it. And not knowing the underlying relationships can make us susceptible to manipulation (which is used often enough to have its own name "astro-turfing")
I keep wondering if we'll ever get to a system which has both anonymity and structure, but I don't know if that is possible as identity is often discernible by the relationships.
The high value response would have been to infer he didn't know the incident you were referring to, and then to explain it to him.
Essentially that is how it ended up. After rewriting it a couple of times from the original link to lmgtfy I probably should have just said to myself "You know, if that was a serious question on his part he would have done a search and known the answer long before I could compose this reply, so just let it sit there." I attribute it to being depressed at the lack of response to the 'Take Action' stuff yesterday which has put a huge damper on my mood today. After this comment I won't say anything more on HN until my mood improves.
Quite a few people have mentioned this in passing, but I think it's actually the central point.
What you're called has no relationship to meanness at all. Whether your actions can have consequences for you is what has a relationship to meanness.
This holds true in real life too. The Stanford Prison experiment degenerated because the prisoners had no meaningful way of creating consequences for the prison guards, not anything to do with names. Abu Ghraib abuses occured because the mechanisms to hold the guards to account were (perhaps even deliberately) not working. They used their real names.
The rule of nature is that groups of people who can suffer no consequences for their actions will tend towards worse and worse behavior.
This is obvious. Imagine a forum where you could call yourself whatever you wanted in conversations (and different names in different conversations), but you have to log into it with a password and passwords cost $50 to acquire and for sufficiently bad behaviour they can be revoked. The fact that you can call yourself whatever you like isn't going to change the fact that people will be careful not to do things that risk their $50.
Reddit and hackernews and stackoverflow tend not to degenerate because the identities on there have history and value. If you behave badly enough, your identity will suffer loss, and you yourself will lose some of the value you've built up.
One of the most wonderful things about the internet is that you can take part in communities where race and sex and family history and class and age are subordinated to achievements, ideas, and skill at expressing them.
You don't have to imagine it, take a look at the Something Awful forums. People still get banned but the discourse is better, from my limited experience.
Take for example the 2010/2011 My Little Pony craze. Could you imagine young men in their mid-teens to early twenties generating hype among their peers for a show targeted primarily at little girls with literally nothing to go on except the name of the executive producer, the title logo, and two pieces of concept art?
On a karma-driven pseudonym system like Reddit, most would be too embarrassed and/or afraid of getting downmodded to hell.
Pseudonym systems, especially Karma-based ones, are a lot closer to real names than to anonymity.
Hell, I have two different news.yc accounts, one at work, one at home. I don't "shitpost" on either, so it might just be an interesting machine learning task to match the two, given that I don't post all that much :)
Edit: Asymmetric, not asynchronous.
Do you mean asymmetric rather than asynchronous?
I feel like this point is really overstated. I'm much more worried about people in disadvantaged positions suffering abuse from people who do not even feel the need to be anonymous, because society tolerates their abusive behavior. Comparatively, some anonymous screeching on a message board doesn't seem all that worrying.
If only it was limited to "anonymous screeching".
Bear in mind that 4chan invented the term doxxing. We're talking about the anonymous mob inflicting real harm at many levels - from the mildly damaging (review bombs), to the extremely harmful (threats of rape, death, threats against family, home).
All of the above has happened, not just on 4chan, but in many other communities that are anonymous. It happens so much we have a term for it. It happens so much that Reddit had to make a site-wide decree to get rid of it (to varying degrees of success).
It's a level of abuse that only the deranged would engaged in, or a sufficient combination of sociopathy and anonymity.
We're not talking about "John Doe sucks and is a giant asshole!", we're talking about "Hey everyone troll John Doe by calling in bomb threats lolz!".
Symmetric anonymity is great. It guarantees that nothing exceeds the bounds of "anonymous screeching" as you put it. Asymmetric anonymity allows one side to attack a target that has no recourse whatsoever.
I personally don't worry much about anonymous screeching. But then, I'm a white male with 14 years in SF and a long background in tech. I've got sufficient social and financial capital that some anonymous people being dicks to me is unlikely to make much difference.
But that indifference also means I'm unlikely to be a target. Watch any nature channel: predators are careful to select the targets they can most easily hurt. Having talked with people who have been the targets of sufficient internet abuse, I promise: it, as intended, causes real trauma.
You could have left out the "of anonymity" and still have been true.
When I see things like that, or comments on youtube videos of my talks, I sometimes think "maybe I should retreat and make myself not such a visible target." But I stay because I feel like I'm meant to be a role model for my gender, and people seem to like to hear the things I say. Or at least, I stay for now.
I get the impression that communities like this feel that people put themselves out there purely for their own benefit, and therefore they have the right to attack them, because they are asking for it. I think many of us never asked for it, but given the pros/cons, we stick with it. There are definitely cons, though.
I don't see how to prevent anonymous communities from lambasting public figures, and don't think they should necessarily be prevented. But it sure would be nice if they realized that everyone's a person, and nobody likes to wake up to find they've arbitrarily been chosen as the subject of taunts for the day.
I hope you realize that anonymous comments are also (usually) written by people, and the points of view they express are also worthy of consideration and respect. Making comments which lack a connection to a person's real life identity enables the commenter to use an honest and direct tone, without resorting to passive-aggressive innuendo.
Also, people tend to forget that there is an implicit social contract involved in becoming a "public figure", namely, in return for having a platform for disseminating ideas, the people you are able to reach have a right to respond and criticize them (and you) in return. If your ideas are too weak to defend, perhaps they are not deserving of wider attention.
Many people simply don't know how to respond to something they dislike or feel threatened by and anonymity means they don't even have to consider a valid argument in their aggression. Sometimes race or gender or other feeling of competition are enough to make people feel threatened - not much relating to social contract or "points of view worthy of consideration and respect" then.
Is that just speculation, or did you have an example in mind when you said that? Not being a user of 4chan's /d/ board (believe it or not!), I am not familiar with the particular controversy referenced in GP's post. Not knowing what they were reacting to, and what the reactions were, I can't comment on whether there was any "aggression" without "valid arguments" (real or perceived), but I can not think of anything that could have been posted that would be genuinely worthy of concern (that was specifically enabled by anonymity).
>Sometimes race or gender or other feeling of competition are enough to make people feel threatened
Not sure if you're referring to the commenters or GP poster, but in either case, it's hard to see how any of those could be considered relevant to the question of anonymous commenting.
My guiding assumption here is that a free, open, unfettered exchange of ideas is a higher value than preventing feelings of offense or hurt egos.
Yep. There's nothing you can do about anonymous hate, other than shrug and move on.
Also, if this was limited to criticizing ideas, it might be more reasonable. It isn't. For example, Caroline Crialdo-Perez getting rape threats on twitter for saying it would be a good idea to have a woman on a banknote.
To turn your phrase around, there is an implicit social contract in having a platform for disseminating ideas that you not use it for threats, intimidation, abuse or causing emotional distress.
Are you sure that was /d/ and not /prog/? They are a little different in content.
Try to explain that complexity to my 62yo father that gets angry because people are free to do what they want and be as mean as they can without facing any dire consequence because of the internet.
Journalists were not that good at explaining that IPs exist and those people who mocked the girl and told her to take her life will eventually be caught.
My father, like the majority of Italian people now gets the idea that ask.fm is a Wild West of anonymity where you can actually say whatever you want. Certainly, it's not that. Yet, it's not a place that "fosters" creativity.
Sam's essay went too quickly towards condemning anonymity, but it started by attacking a different kind of anonymity--that of small groups. Secret might have problems not simply because the messages are anonymous, but because they are anonymous between people who know each other and can act on that information. In 4chan participants likely will never meet--in Secret they already have.
If you want every possible opinion on something whether it be the most popular opinions or the least popular opinion and everything in-between then anonymity is the way to go. Preferably without internet aliases for a true representation of unfiltered opinions.
I think Chris makes a great counter-argument, however, isn't it possible that anonymity can breed both meanness and creativity? I don't mean just creatively-cruel-pranks, but that what anonymity breeds is dependent on the community, and to an extent, how that community is moderated. HackerNews allows anonymity, but I think it'd be a much different place for discussion if it weren't for the mod policies in effect.
If you're going to have anonymity, you need to find a workable substitute. Early BBSes were often pseudonymous, but they were also gardens carefully tended by their operators. HN's self-moderation and karma tracking provide a similar effect here. Quora has a functional mix of mostly real names with optional anonymity on a per-post basis plus user voting and heavy moderation to enforce a "be nice, be respectful" tone.
Another good example is John Scalzi, who moderates his blog comments using the "Mallet of Loving Correction". His comment policy is a great example, but it clearly takes a lot of thoughtful gardening on his part to keep a pseudonymous comments section from descending into something pretty ugly: http://whatever.scalzi.com/about/site-disclaimer-and-comment...
Another good example in this regard is Quora. They cover an incredibly wide range of topics and viewpoints. But they're pretty insistent on respectful behavior.
I think that focus, respectful behavior, is exactly what makes for good real-world discussions. Because on-line fora break the sort of continuous, subtle social signals that help guide real-world discussions, I think we need to be especially disciplined in pursuing that respect.
It's fine to be so closed off in your personal space, but the intellectual air can get a bit musty.
In particular, I think a lot of my fellow white males who charge into topics of sexism and racism do so without significant respect for the lived experience of participants or the large amount of existing discussion. It is easy for them to see a ban on that behavior as intolerance of their opinion.
One blogger I'm fond of recently quoted this bit: "The more foreign the idea, the more relational groundwork you need to do before you can broach that topic." [1] He was quoting a Christian pastor who is talking about how to introduce the notion of human evolution to Christians who are (incorrectly) hostile to it. But it applies anywhere: jumping in and expecting people to instantly listen to your views is in itself a behavior, and a lot of communities find it disrespectful. That it isn't intended that way doesn't really matter; part of being respectful to people is caring about whether your friendly intentions are matched by the impact they have on your audience.
[1] http://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2014/02/10/why-youn...
In the meantime, you might think upon respect a little. It turns out it's not just a far-left thing. If a liberal walks into the middle of a conservative talk and starts shouting slogans, people in the audience aren't just going to say, "Hey, tell us more, stranger, about your novel views." They're going to shout him down and throw him out, because his behavior is disrespectful to the existing audience and dialog.
The difference between you and that liberal is that the liberal will know that he's protesting, not trying to participate in a discussion.
I understand you want it to be magically different for you online. Which, hey, it's nice to have unrealistic dreams sometimes: it adds some spice to life. But if you actually want to start influencing other people's views, rather than just have the satisfaction of vomiting your notions and upsetting people you didn't really like anyhow, then you're going to have to work on on demonstrating respect for the people and the existing discussion, something they were building before you turned up.
On the other, when somebody says that he strongly disagrees with the notion that anonymity breeds meanness and his positive example is 4chan, I'm gobsmacked. We must have such different standards for what qualifies as meanness that I'm not sure we're the same species.
You also have to remember though that most of 4chan is not /b/. It gives a misleading representation to the majority of the site.
The meanest things are those with a grain of truth in them, a mirror for someone's imperfections.
Thus, it follows that a community which enables blatant and rough honesty will be perceived as "meaner".
I was gonna go look for some lovey dovey thread to cite as evidence, but instead I found a thread full of guys trying to build a physical version of their imaginary chinese-cartoon girlfriends. https://archive.foolz.us/a/thread/101944946/
I literally can't imagine this happening anywhere other than on 4chan.
> /b/ seems to be a "honey pot" for the more negative behaviors on 4chan.
Double bingo!
Between this and the movie "Her", where's the "waifu" (virtual girlfriend) startup?
Setting aside 4chan, which I don't know well, look at newspaper comments. People positively compete to be giant assholes. They practice being mean. I think there's a big difference between people having the potential for meanness within them and indulging that in a way that magnifies and sharpens it.
There are definitely contexts where people will talk honestly about the assholish thoughts and feelings we all have. E.g., I might tell a friend, "Man, I know that Bob means well, but I really can't stand him some times." That's honesty.
But for me to go and tell Bob, "Leave me alone you half-wit inbred nose-picker," that goes beyond honest to mean because I'm acting with clear disregard for hurting other people. And if I create a context where it's ok for people to be mean like that, I think it really is creating more meanness.
People compete to be giant assholes under their own names. Facebook logins with picture and all.
Nobody is suggesting that meanness first entered the world with computer-mediated anonymity. They're just asking whether it increases the frequency, depth, and persistence of it.
You start by saying that 4chan isn't a good example of anonymity being a good example of not-meaness.
Then you say you don't know 4chan very well.
Then you give the example of commentors on newspaper articles competing to be giant arseholes. But often newspaper comments are not anonymous.
I feel like the sands are shifting.
Meanness in online comments is important because some people think real names stops it. Look at HN where the expectation is that people should behave like assholes, and often use real world identifiable IDs, and yet has many examples of mean comments.
4chan has produced some startling examples of meanness and is widely know for it. It is also widely know for its anonymity. So when somebody denies that anonymity breeds meanness and uses 4chan as an example, I think they have to clearly address that conflict. To point out that conflict, I don't think I have to be an expert on 4chan.
When I gave the example of newspaper comments, I should have been more specific: the sites I had in mind were ones that were pseudonymous. Since we were talking about anonymity and behavior, I thought that was obvious from context, but rereading it now I could see that getting missed. Sorry for the confusion.
In an anonymous context, there is no you and no Bob, just alternating post-sources. The same person may be both you and Bob, putting on a Punch and Judy show.
From ephemerality, it follows that anything mean A and B post cannot long endure. Were C & D to post something mean about a 3rd party in the same thread, it would push the mean postings of A & B into /dev/null. Were E & F to post something mean about a 4th party in a new thread, it would push the entire thread about the 3rd party into /dev/null.
Aren't they both right? 4chan has a lot of honest, mean, creative, offensive discourse.
This is especially true of the boards with topics, which tend to have smaller communities than the random board, allowing for more effective meme propogation. For example, a recent tweet [1] by musician Lorde ended with the words "o i am laffin" which has since become a sort of alternative to "lol" on 4chan's music board (especially when a given thread is about Lorde herself). It became a meme not because karma reinforced its popularity and not because moot or any other admin endorsed it, but because enough anonymous people thought that it was funny that they ALL want to keep posting it for no good reason.
moot mentions snapchat in the article, which I think is related in a fundamental way to what has made 4chan successful. I've had snapchat since June, and the way I use it with my friends is to share small jokes and the tiny frustrations of modern life. This is stuff that is amusing enough that I want a few people to see what I've written once, but not so funny that I think it should exist for eternity online. But it's always been more about the jokes for my friends and me than about security.
Apparently I'm not alone. When news got out about the snapchat leaks[2], many people thought that this would be a damaging blow to Snapchat. These were people who I assume don't use snapchat very frequently. To me, it never mattered that the photos leaked, because there's so much noise in the snapchats that it'd be difficult, I am thinking, to use the data maliciously. The worst thing is that the database of snapchat ids leaked, so people can spam snaps to people they don't know. But this is not a problem that is difficult to deal with.
Point is, moot is right about nobody in silicon valley really understanding the value of anonymity. While the Mr. Altman was discussing the negative face of people shedding their identity (e.g. people with bones to pick doing so anonymously in public) he didn't see the positive benefits that moot describes. Perhaps a gossip app is not the best place to see creativity blossom on the internet.
I want to relay one last anecdote from my time on 4chan:
4chan has an advice board (/adv/[3]) that is as anonymous as the rest of 4chan[4]. On this board, people ask for advice. Often it's relationship problems, even more often it's the problems of sad men who like girls but have no idea how to transition from that point to a relationship with one of them. If Mr. Altman's hypothesis that "Anonymity breads meanness"[5] were true, one would expect this board to be full of people just trolling depressed neets. While that does happen from time to time, more often than not it's full of people genuinely trying to help these people that they don't know and have never met. They expect nothing in return, but they are a fully anonymous community that just tries to help people who feel they don't have anywhere better to ask for help.
Maybe anonymity isn't so bad.
[1] https://twitter.com/lordemusic/status/430186358930292736
[2] http://www.cbsnews.com/news/46-million-snapchat-usernames-ph...
[3] http://boards.4chan.org/adv/ (probably NSFW)
[4] there are actually different levels of anonymity on 4chan, but, for the most part, everybody is more or less completely anonymous with each post.
Trolling on 4chan has been elevated to such an art-form that it takes more energy to successfully troll than basically anywhere else on the internet. And that's saying something.
The problem is that very few other platforms can keep that anonymous relationship equal in all cases, and that's where the real problems start. The power relationship becomes unbalanced and the equation tips in favour of bad behaviour.
Take twitter as the classic case. A lot of feminist writers will use semi-anonymous accounts because of the level of vitriol that is commonly thrown at them. Then some particularly nasty individual doxxes their account and the level of personally abusive and physically threatening messages increases dramatically.
I don't think you need anonymity to make trolling lose its flavor, I have used plenty of forums over the years where there were persistent identities but the sophisticated (compared to twitter users) forum members just didn't take the bait and trolling attempts usually just fell flat.
I love anonymous conversation but this sentence makes me think you've not tried to debate these things on 4chan too often.
- Do you think we have better discussions because we don't have to use our real names?
- How would using real names affect the discussion here?
- Does the anonymity here go far enough? For example if someone manages to tie our real identity to our HN username their is no way of changing the HN username.
Now, imagine if everything they can say after they become "former" that position (so I'm not necessarily talking about leaking classified information here), could be said anonymously much earlier while they still have that job and know everything what's going on at the time.
Anonymity is powerful, and not just in oppressive countries where the usefulness of anonymity should be obvious, but also in countries where you may want to tell a "truth" about something, without fearing for your financial situation or your career.
Let's imagine Tim Cook had an opinion about what is going on between Palestine and Israel, and let's imagine it's a damn good one, since he's a pretty smart guy, and that opinion could even provide a big insight into the debate, and it would be very useful for the debate. I don't need to tell you that he wouldn't want to give that opinion under his real name on HN. That would create a media-firestorm, and could potentially get Apple, the company, in trouble, too, over his personal opinions.
I think these are just a few of the reasons why anonymity is important, and more should be explored. Anonymity is important for humanity, and it should never be killed or banned, whether by NSA or by companies like Google and Facebook.
I tend to hold 15-year-old moot's mindset; I just don't see the appeal of participating in anonymous discussion. I will read it (I'll unabashedly lurk SA, 4chan & reddit) but rarely feel the need to chime in without having a tie to my identity. Perhaps it is discounting the power of ideas, but identity is approximately ONE HALF of any communication in my mind; I always want to consider the source, so I don't have much to say without BEING the source. Short of discussions of philosophy or existential beliefs, the source identity is always important to me in evaluating ideas.
Having said that, I've learned a great deal from anonymous users here on HN and each of the forums named above.
I think that the people that comprise them are what give online communities their culture; anonymity does not cause the meanness in these communities, the acceptance or encouragement of meanness by the community causes that meanness. anonymity allows users to remove their filters right quickly; it is the communities that encourage or discourage particular communication patterns.
Anonymous or not, you'll get down-voted and poo-poo'd on HN if you are overtly negative and 'mean' (particularly true when contrasted to other online forums). This is not a function of anonymity; it's a function of HN'ers having an aversion towards these behaviors as a whole.
We have had many people post candid accounts under throwaways. Some have been informative, some have been mean and hateful. We can take the good with the bad. Some people can post their accounts of sexual or physical abuse, time in jail, unpopular/politically damaging opinions, etc.
>- Do you think we have better discussions because we don't have to use our real names?
Yes. More people are freer to participate. People who don't want to be Googleable for example. People are more free to speak their minds rather than say "could this hurt my career?" or "if the authorities in my country read this, am I going to get in trouble?"
When you use your real identity, your actions carry risk with them, so you tend to bring your actions towards the population mean. If you choose to dress in an outlandish way in New York, you might wear a pink sweater and orange jeans. At Burning Man, where your real identity has been shed temporarily, you may wear a toga or nothing at all.
The dirty look you give someone in "real life" might become an unspeakably rude comment in an anonymous forum. But the funny dance you invented to go along with a Daft Punk song might be something you choose to share with the whole world under the veil of anonymity.
When something changes the variance of a human behavior without changing the mean, you'll never be able to come to agreement on whether it's "good" or "bad" -- it's just different.
moot understands that identity is "prismatic", but he misses one of the consequences of this, which is that one of the fundamental components of identity is how we are related to by others. Who we share as is a function of who we are seen as. Anonymity strips away this latter part to provide a blank slate. That's what makes the experience "raw".
Because the filters on your speech are derived from who you care about hearing you speak. If my mother is in the room, I'm not going to talk about the crime in my neighborhood, because it would worry her unnecessarily. But that's also something I'd be willing to discuss publicly under my real name with a home address attached. It's not a function of "am I anonymous"; it's a function of expected consequences.
Talking about anonymity and ephemerality obfuscates the issue. It's a simplified model easily understood by a software hacker, making it so that FOAF networks don't need to be included into solutions. One of the simplest ways to understand Google+'s early advantage over Facebook was that, if you were about to comment on a post to a limited group, you were explicitly told you who could see what you were about to say. It wasn't enough, but it was an order of magnitude better. (Yes, for the record, the real name thing was dumb.)
When we post on HN, we have certain expectations of our audience, and we often feel betrayed and indignant when commenters fail to meet them.
Anonymity and ephemerality aren't wrong. They're reasonable defaults for many situations. They're also good ways to sidestep harder questions, like how to accurately parse a name or portray an identity, when you do want to do that.
(P.S. This comment turned out as a really shitty piece of writing. Sorry for the scattered incoherency.)
Traditional internet forums are anonymous and static. Snapchat flips that around.
Yeah, not so much. If there weren't things like screenshots, perhaps. A browse through Reddit's seedier parts proves this ephemerality a lie.
The author (moot) should revise the text as Snapchat is clearly ephemeral but not anonymous.
I don't think that Snapchat is the future, but it does make me think that the ideas around it are what will make Facebook lost to younger generations.
Being anonymous is not important to most people. If it were, news website comments would be more palatable where real identities are required--far from the case.
Interesting thoughts about anonymity not being important to most people, and the future of social networking, though. I'd never thought about it that way before, but it seems compelling.
Snapchat only really delivers on its promise because of the kind of user-hostile DRM Stallman and his ilk have been screaming warnings about for years.
Its children and derivatives cannot reasonably exist in a future in which end users have real control over their computers.
One big counterpoint to this I can see is ask.fm. People are given total anonymity and they use it to berate and bully others (I believe it's also lead to several suicides). Anonymity can work great if the community is good. Here on HN I think it works pretty well. On ask.fm it clearly worked horribly but only because the community using it used it that way.
In the end I think it's all down to the people using the service and anonymity or true identity plays only a very small role.
Edit: and the downsides of anonymity can been seen below in '784927489234's comment.
With reference to moot's point about the incontestable equality and a systemic reverence for ideas (instead of individuals) in an anonymous community, ask.fm isn't qualified as a service using anonymity. By placing those asked questions in a different social category (as the subject of focus) than those asking the questions (as those focusing on the subject), there is a major discrepancy between the identities of both types of participants.
This is the same tired "think-of-the-children" argument about reversed song lyrics played backwards, Ozzy Osbourne, foul language, and on and on, that the PMRC lobbied against, and used as a point to provoke the parental advisory album labeling in the 80's.
The term "cyber bullying" (which is new and different) is used incorrectly as a catch-all sometimes, but really, it should be reserved for a different form of pervasive harassment that follows the victim across many different scopes of internet and telecommunications access, where ignoring activity originating from one source (a single website, the victim's e-mail inbox, or the victim's telephone number) does not provide escape from disparaging remarks.
This is not the same as one website providing anonymity or even pseudonymity.
Yeah, children are inexperienced, and thin-skinned. They don't understand the risks of providing their real information on the internet, and and don't behave with the sophistication of those that do. There's lots of things on the internet that are not for kids. LOTS.
All the more reason to inform the inexperienced to AVOID revealing their honest real-life identity, rather than encouraging rubes to engage in promiscuous full-disclosure so that advertisers and ad-driven businesses can make a buck off of "unique" impressions.
How can you have honest, unfiltered dialogue when there are barriers to entry and membership is regulated?
Hey moot, why are YouTube comments so bad? Clearly it's not just anonymity.
with 4chan you have to get over the social impact of actually browsing 4chan. Just go look at the 4chan subreddit, it's filled to the brink with people who want to consume 4chan content but are too scared to actually visit the site.
Perhaps anonymity is a red herring. Maybe the tone of discourse is a function of what kinds of people a community attracts, and how involved each user is with that community.
Anonymity online can't fully be achieved except by a small few, but the positive benefits can be simulated for many by careful operators of BBS or internet forums.
The great barrier to entry, for me, was the high risk of not only NSFW, but very weird NSFW stuff randomly popping up (even if I stay in /mu/ and /pol/) at work. Now I have a tiny screen for it.
It seems like once a community grows large enough, so do its number of assholes, but the asshole count must be absolute, not relative, since it just takes a few to ruin the fun for everyone. This is why HN seems to me less bickery than reddit right now, because it's more focussed on just one niche.
What really did it for me was the pack rape mentality that parts of reddit exhibit. I want nothing to do with a website that allows this:
http://betabeat.com/2012/08/reddit-watches-with-glee-as-camg...
Clearly moot hasn't ever been to /pol/.
On the technical side, I supposed you'd have a central recipient of $anycoin on the BBS server that would authorize a user to post when it received a given amount of $anycoin from that user. Other posters could possibly exploit this by trying to correlate the time on someone's posts with the transactions on the blockchain to find out what "wallet"/address is behind the posts. Perhaps this could be mitigated by the server introducing noise to the displayed time. I'm not sure how important this is to anonymity of the non-technical kind (one where you could subpoena the access logs from the website the discussion takes place on and where people routinely click on links).
I think many people would pay to post on an anonymous equivalent of Hacker News. Of course, the question is how you bootstrap such a community.
A more straightforward alternative (which would benefit the poor posters the most) is to offer compensation to the posters through, say, the encouragement of tipping for good posts or some sort of a redistribution mechanism [1]. I wonder how this would affect the natural self-regulation of an anonymous community in what people choose to post. One could say that it would encourage the posting of popular opinions but I think that in most anonymous communities that already happens through other means.
Another, more out-there, idea would be to algorithmically grade the posts and assign a price to each. A long, thought-post post would cost you nothing while a post consisting of just "lol" would cost a lot.
[1] E.g., a voting-based system where everyone pays to post and then whoever paid can upvote other posts in the thread. The money is redistributed among the posters in proportion to the number of votes they got once the thread no longer accepts new posts. Try to come up with exploits for this system and ways of mitigating them.
Their filter? You mean privilege and doubles.