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Anonymous social apps fail because anonymity removes meaning, enables meanness
- ashark 10y agoDeclickbaited: Anonymous Social Networking Apps Fail Because Anonymity Removes Meaning, Enables Meanness (and the apps focused on by the article are Secret and Yik Yak)
- oblio 10y ago> Enables Meanness Now that's an understatement, if I ever saw one. I'd call it more of a "stand underneath a waterfall of sewage".
- ashark 10y agoArticle used the word "meanness" so I did too. Which is, of course, not remotely a "hidden" rule, and may be one of the best known rules of the Internet. Penny Arcade gave it a name, years ago: The Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory. So the headline's not just uselessly hiding info to be clickbait, it's lying.
- dang 10y agoOk, we'll use that! Shortened to fit 80 chars.
- lawless123 10y agoDidn't someone get arrested for making threats via Yik Yak? it's psuedo-anonymous .
- kefka 10y agoAnd I look at these 'apps' and I think: "Usenet did it better, and semi-anonymous, and ubiquitous."
- golergka 10y agoHonest question: why did these app try to remove abusive content? Did they actually see a correlation between abuse and users leaving the app?
- Veen 10y agoThe thesis here seems to be that social media is only worthwhile so long as it fulfills the attention-seeking impulse of people like the author. I may be unusual but I avoid Facebook precisely because I don't want that sort of attention directed at my brain farts and the ephemeral detritus of my everyday life. When I make something worthwhile and of substance, that's different, but I won't be putting it on Facebook.
- epalmer 10y agoVeen Not sure why you are downvoted. Your comments resonate. I do FB however.
- lvoudour 10y ago>I may be unusual but I avoid Facebook precisely because I don't want that sort of attention directed at my brain farts and the ephemeral detritus of my everyday life. >When I make something worthwhile and of substance, that's different, but I won't be putting it on Facebook. I agree with your comment and I share your feeling, but I don't think this approach can/should be the norm. I find that attention-seeking is so fundamental to human nature, that most people have to spend a LOT of energy to suppress it and I don't know if it's worth the trouble (is it that detrimental ?) The only successful anonymous social media out there are used for trolling/venting/shocking/expressing extremely unpopular opinions - things that people absolutely don't want to take any credit for.
- M_Grey 10y agoAbsolutely this. Facebook is almost entirely, if not entirely, empty of anything I care about. After a while it just starts to look like a ton of people all pointing out, "Hey, look! I have an asshole!" "Whoa really? Look at my asshole!" "Nice asshole, here's mine on the beach..." HN can be totally anonymous, but good luck being mean here! The issue is how you moderate your forum, the competence with which you do it, and the kind of people you draw. Having a name doesn't change behavior as much as people would like to think. We're not suddenly turning into beasts because of the internet, we're just connected to every last beast out there. They always existed, but they use to have to do things like slip pamphlets in the pages of library books, or shout at people on the street. Now they have the internet, and a lot of people seem to think that it's not just a new medium for them, but a new species. It is not a new species, or a new behavioral profile.
- jlebrech 10y agothey went downhill when they asked users to come up with a handle.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- CM30 10y agoSo how come more general anonymous forums work? Because while parts of 4chan and other similar sites are topic based, the likes of /b/ are just a general free for all. Why do people continue posting there if it's anonymous and generalised? Why are the general discussion sections of anonymous imageboards the most popular part of said sites?
- stagbeetle 10y ago> Why are the general discussion sections of anonymous imageboards the most popular part of said sites? It appeals to a wider audience than any specific board and provides novelty.
- flyingfences 10y agoI think that anonymity works for discussion of topics, which I consider separate from the notion of social networks. Social networks are made to be social - their entire purpose is, at its root, the discussion of people. They're all about what I did, what you're doing, what "he's* planning to do. Take the names off of that and it's pointless. I wouldn't consider 4chan, most of reddit, etc. to be social networks. They're not for discussion of people; they're for discussion of topics. I think that anonymity helps in those cases because it completely removes people from the discussion. All of the identity politics, the virtue signalling, the reputation whoring, and a good bit of the circlejerking disappears. When you anonymize the participants, all that's left is a discussion of the actual topic at hand. I think that's why such anonymous discussion boards work so well and continue to draw users. Also, I wouldn't say that /b/ is "generalized" - it's random, but not generalized. The board as a whole does not have a set topic (besides "whatever doesn't fit in other boards"), but each of the threads does have a topic. People come to the board to find interesting threads, not because they find the board itself, as a whole, interesting.
- grillvogel 10y ago4chan consistently features some of the worst posts you'll ever see, as well as the most brilliant things you'll ever read or see on the internet. no other site can replicate this, and for many, those diamonds are worth putting up with the garbage
- transfire 10y agoSo you start out believing in free expression, then special interests hammer you in main stream media and you cave. Your business falls apart. And we end up with a self-inflicted nanny state that squashes dissension and reality, and prevents people from actually evolving.
- yarrel 10y agoReal Names do not solve this, though. From the WELL through YouTube to Twitter, people will be mean under their irl identities. And there are real social costs to removing anonymity, which disproportionately fall on precisely the kind of people you'd want to stop meanness against.
- darawk 10y agoWhat about 4chan? That's pretty successful.
- Jeaye 10y agoObligatory link to The Real Name Fallacy: https://blog.coralproject.net/the-real-name-fallacy/ https://blog.coralproject.net/the-real-name-fallacy/ A great deal of research has been done on this, since back in the Usenet days.
- devopsproject 10y agoOr you could just look at facebook comments
- diyseguy 10y agoIf this were true, then Usenet would never have been a success. It only died because Google bought DejaNews and then killed it.
- throwaway420 10y ago> Without names attached, people’s words become either mean — or meaningless. The complete opposite is true. The true meanlessness in society is the bland echo chamber on places like Facebook where everybody parrots the politically correct ideas they're told to say by the corporate media. With real names and identities attached, most people are usually pressured away from saying any idea that goes outside of the narrow 3 x 5 Card of Official Approved Public Opinion. Real names and identities create an echo chamber of political correctness and trying your damnedest NOT to offend anybody lest you ruin your social or career prospects. Sure, some people trickle in truth sometimes, but enough people are silenced so that people who hold normal opinions are made to feel like they're the minority. As far as meanness goes, sure freedom sometimes gives people the ability to say dumb things, but there's no way to curb that without restricting freedom. But honestly, the true meanness in society is not people telling the truth and leading them down a road to ruin. To give a very minor example: you're not supposed to say the truth about fat people because we have a body acceptance movement that has declared that everybody fat is beautiful and no choices are unhealthy. Wishing that something was the case doesn't make it so and denying reality and "not being mean" leads to people destroying their lives. The real mean thing in this case is to stay silent and deny reality and not tell the truth.
- GrinningFool 10y ago> With real names and identities attached, most people are usually pressured away from saying any idea that goes outside of the narrow 3 x 5 Card of Official Approved Public Opinion. I'm just wondering if you've looked at any hot topic that uses disqus or facebook for comments? People aren't exactly reluctant to speak their minds, with their real names attached
- jameskegel 10y agoa small subset does not justify the norm.
- throwaway420 10y agoSure, out of a population of a billion on Facebook, if even .1% speak their minds that's still a lot of people. That doesn't really negate my point that most people are silenced most of the time. Also, who those people are is important. The smartest folks who have careers and a social reputation at stake are going to be less likely to contribute. The people who might be more willing to speak their mind on Facebook might not be the sharpest knives in the drawer. Autism and craziness aside, if you want to discuss real ideas online you go to places like 4chan. You see memes and ideas created there pop up elsewhere on the internet days later.
- wheelerwj 10y agothe author has never heard of 4chan?
- decasteve 10y agoThe most valuable online communities, newsgroups, forums, etc, that I've been taking part in over the past 23 years have been pseudoanonymous. In the 1990s, we were attached to our handles/aliases/pseudonyms. We would become known by these online names, separate from our "real" identity, but they did have meaning. People knew you online by that identity. You could stop using that pseudonym but you would lose the connection to your community built up on that name.