3 ms·

It's harder but not impossible. An email can be on a domain with anonymized WHOIS and a burner phone paid for with cash bought at a place without surveillance c

by sverige 10y ago

It's harder but not impossible. An email can be on a domain with anonymized WHOIS and a burner phone paid for with cash bought at a place without surveillance cameras. Hell, I do that sometimes and I'm not even doing anything criminal.

ori_b 10y ago
That's kind of missing the point. For casual communities, it's easier to just not post. I don't care enough about posting that awesome recipe for brussel sprouts with bacon lardons to go through the effort of setting up a custom domain so I can sign up for an anonymized facebook account so that I don't have to worry if it will show up in my family member's news feeds. I barely care enough to tweak facebook settings to keep it hidden. I also don't necessarily want to share who I am, where I work, what my other hobbies are, and so on to the world, which means that in the absence of a good anonymous forum implies that I'd prefer to keep my posts restricted to a more private audience, so I don't necessarily feel like posting with my facebook account. As the weakly anonymous communities are dying or shrinking, the separation of "who I am" and "what I do" makes it more difficult to share the interesting things I know publicly without exposing my real world identity. Since I don't care much, the post doesn't happen, and I move on with my day. And the internet is a little bit poorer for it. I suspect that lots of little dyanmics and frictions like this are what's killing the 'old way Americans used the internet'. It's theoretically possible to fight this. But for almost all casual content, the friction is just not worth overcoming.
- Supi-lee 10y ago
  Basically the internet is selecting for the people who are the opposite of you. Their voices, ideas and influence is being amplified. Unfortunate.
PhasmaFelis 10y ago
It doesn't need to be impossible for Big Brother to win. It just needs to be hard enough that it's not worthwhile for the vast majority of citizens. (And both of the things you mentioned are things that would take hours or days to hunt down and figure out for the average internet user. A privacy mechanism that isn't really, really easy to use is--in terms of the global internet and its citizens--worthless.)

by sverige 10y ago

ori_b 10y ago

That's kind of missing the point. For casual communities, it's easier to just not post. I don't care enough about posting that awesome recipe for brussel sprouts with bacon lardons to go through the effort of setting up a custom domain so I can sign up for an anonymized facebook account so that I don't have to worry if it will show up in my family member's news feeds. I barely care enough to tweak facebook settings to keep it hidden. I also don't necessarily want to share who I am, where I work, what my other hobbies are, and so on to the world, which means that in the absence of a good anonymous forum implies that I'd prefer to keep my posts restricted to a more private audience, so I don't necessarily feel like posting with my facebook account. As the weakly anonymous communities are dying or shrinking, the separation of "who I am" and "what I do" makes it more difficult to share the interesting things I know publicly without exposing my real world identity. Since I don't care much, the post doesn't happen, and I move on with my day. And the internet is a little bit poorer for it. I suspect that lots of little dyanmics and frictions like this are what's killing the 'old way Americans used the internet'. It's theoretically possible to fight this. But for almost all casual content, the friction is just not worth overcoming.

Supi-lee 10y ago
Basically the internet is selecting for the people who are the opposite of you. Their voices, ideas and influence is being amplified. Unfortunate.

PhasmaFelis 10y ago

It doesn't need to be impossible for Big Brother to win. It just needs to be hard enough that it's not worthwhile for the vast majority of citizens. (And both of the things you mentioned are things that would take hours or days to hunt down and figure out for the average internet user. A privacy mechanism that isn't really, really easy to use is--in terms of the global internet and its citizens--worthless.)