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Public identification discourages dishonesty and rude behavior, but it also discourages unpopular views, political dissent, whistle-blowing and other valuable s
by xiaoma 17y ago
Public identification discourages dishonesty and rude behavior, but it also discourages unpopular views, political dissent, whistle-blowing and other valuable speech. On the balance, the positives of public ID outweigh the negatives on some sorts of sites, such as LinkedIn, but it would be a grave mistake to assume the same would be true on every sort of forum.
- _delirium 17y agoIn fact, you might take LinkedIn and Facebook as good counterexamples: do we want an internet where the only discussion is the kind of conscious-of-being-public pablum you get at Facebook and LinkedIn? There's plenty of things that go into discussions working versus not working, but I don't think real names have much to do with it. If anything, my impression is that real names are usually a net negative, outside a very narrow range of sites intended to foster IRL activity. It doesn't even require being particularly politically controversial to stifle participation if real names were attached--- the threshold at which it has a chilling effect is far lower than "gay-rights activist in Saudi Arabia"; people quickly start dropping out of discussions if their name would be associated with them at a much lower threshold of, basically, anything they wouldn't want their mother or boss to see.