9 ms·

Hacker News and pseudonymity

85 points by bootload 16y ago

bootload 16y ago
Response to "Some Tips to Improve the Civility on Hacker News" ~ http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1400867 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1400867
alextgordon 16y ago
And how exactly would you "verify" someone's name anyway? Ask them to scan in their passport? I doubt many, least of all here, would transmit sensitive documents to a website just so they could register an account.
- gizmo 16y ago
  Typically via creditcard. Pay a symbolic amount (e.g. $5) to create an account, allow at most 1 account per credit card. I don't like the idea of verified accounts either, but if that's the price we have to pay to keep our discussions civilized I'm okay with it.
  - younata 16y ago
    Personally, I'm of the opinion that we downvote comments that aren't civilized. I think that has proven to work fairly well.
    - jasonlotito 16y ago
      Flag uncivil comments. Downvotes should be applied to comments that don't add anything to a discussion. Never downvote because you disagree. If you respond to a comment, upvote the previous comment, as whatever it said sparked you to add something, which is hopefully constructive. That's my take on comments, flags, and upvotes.
  - asdflkj 16y ago
    There's already a place that does that--Something Awful. And it is, indeed, awful.
  - Natsu 16y ago
    > Typically via creditcard. Pay a symbolic amount (e.g. $5) to create an account, allow at most 1 account per credit card. That might work on a normal website, but people around here are likely smarter than that. It's not hard to make "extra" credit card numbers/accounts. Here's one amusing account of how it can be done: http://www.zug.com/pranks/credit/mj-credit-card/index.html http://www.zug.com/pranks/credit/mj-credit-card/index.html Incidentally, I would also like to note that they were dumb for blurring the credit card number in that picture. The blur is probably guessable (people have managed similar reversals in the past). Hopefully they canceled that card a long time ago, but they shouldn't have obscured information like that when they could have eliminated it.
  - MichaelSalib 16y ago
    Given how many good discussion forums there are on the web and how easy it is to start a new one (freehackernews.com anyone?), do you really think that people will pull out their credit cards? This proposal is based on the same mistaken assumption that newspapers make: a failure to realize that in a world where there are tons of free alternatives, adding an entry charge is a bad idea.
  - joubert 16y ago
    I can walk into a Duane Reade and buy an Amex gift card that will probably get around this technique.
  - alextgordon 16y ago
    What if they don't have a credit card? Not everybody on HN is from a western country where everyone can get a card when they're 13. Also, many credit cards don't have the person's full name but their initials and surname, which is useless for googling (or is the full name accessible when processing?).
- jasonlotito 16y ago
  You don't need to "verify" yourself. I think you are taking it a bit extreme. After all, both you and I have been able to identify ourselves well enough that we can be found out.
by 16y ago
I restate a previous comment I made on the subject which agrees with this position. This article http://www.computorney.com/anonarticle.htm http://www.computorney.com/anonarticle.htm concludes that "anonymity in cyberspace is a fundamental underpinning of democracy". In 1995 the Supreme Court struck down an Ohio law that required the disclosure of personal identity on political literature. http://lcs.www.media.mit.edu/people/foner/Essays/Civil-Liberties/Project/supreme-court-upholds-anonymity.html http://lcs.www.media.mit.edu/people/foner/Essays/Civil-Liber...
- billswift 16y ago
  But that is a political point (which I agree with by the way) that has no bearing on whether it would be beneficial for HN or any other particular forum to ban anonymity.
TomOfTTB 16y ago
As crazy as it sounds I’d actually like to make the case for a lack of civility. Civility is an artificial construct designed to preserve personal relationships. You want to say ‘X’ but instead you say ‘Y’ because your relationship with the person in the conversation is as important to you as the ideas being exchanged. But HN isn’t necessarily like that. HN is supposed to be about the ideas themselves. So as long as someone’s expressing actual ideas (as opposed to ad hominem insults) I’m not sure I see the need for civility. Moreover there’s a reason not to have it. When I post on HN I’m trying to convince people to adopt my opinion. Knowing how passionate people are about the opinions that oppose mine is a helpful in formulating a strategy to defend my own thoughts. It’s an indicator of not only how ingrained the opposing ideas are but also tends to give insight on whether the opposing ideas are based on rationality or emotion. So the vitriol actually serves a purpose that civility does not. I realize a lack of civility can chase some people away and that’s probably the only good argument for it. But if we all just got over it and accepted the internet as an uncivilized place I think we’d be taking a step forward in the exchange of ideas.
- frossie 16y ago
  The problem with vitriol is that it becomes performance art. A review trashing a movie is a lot more entertaining than a civil one; but people can forget that the real issue is how to see a good movie. Why should I be more likely to adopt your opinion because you are driven to anger to express it? I don't know you. Your anger holds no reference point for me and therefore is of little value. Your best way to convince me is to make sense. Exchange of ideas is hardly incompatible with civil discourse.
  - dejb 16y ago
    In the case of HN I don't see a problem with vitriol being rewarded more than politeness. Generally it seems there is already a strong bias towards civility in terms of voting. Just as insults don't add to the discussion neither does apologising for merely disagreeing with a point of view.
- asdflkj 16y ago
  "When I post on HN I’m trying to convince people to adopt my opinion." That might be your problem right there. When I post on HN, I try to move the discussion closer to truth, which is often not the opinion I started with.
mtkd 16y ago
I anticipate these very same arguments will be used very soon by western governments.
c00p3r 16y ago
Pseudonyms are good for a various reasons. Most of people, for example, are biased towards foreign names or a certain nations, even if they don't aware of it. Also, some people may be biased towards their own natives (because of remarkable combination of ignorance, selfishness and nationalism) or whatever, and a nickname helps them to feel like a some sort of a different person. Everyone are playing their games anyway. =) And, last but not least, exposing real names in a content which will be indexed by google is not a good idea for various reasons. Someone may don't like to show up or broadcast his presence on a certain site.
ugh 16y ago
You know those discussions you sometimes have in the evening with friends? Confidentiality is implied when having them. Google makes it hard to make that happen on the web as soon as your real name is attached. You need anonymity if you want to make that happen. That’s my case for anonymity.
- jasonlotito 16y ago
  How does that apply to a place like HN? What's the common case for anonymity here? Sure, I'll accept the occasional exception, but what's the benefit for anonymity?
  - ugh 16y ago
    I don’t want everyone I know to be able to search for my name and find everything I ever wrote. Just as none of my friends knows every discussion I ever had with everyone.
    - jasonlotito 16y ago
      That's understandable, but doesn't benefit HN. It's purely a selfish reason, and I don't think it brings any public benefit with it. Besides, these are public forums, not private emails. How does it benefit the public? Finally, while it's a little point, HN has a pretty restrictive robots.txt file.
      - MichaelSalib 16y ago
        It benefits HN because it makes people willing to comment here. People like ugh who do want to their discussion comments tied to their real name on google for all eternity will not participate at HN if they can't use a pseudonym. An HN without ugh and the many pseudonymous commenters like him would be a much poorer HN. Discussion forums are subject to network effects where the value of the forum increases with the square of the number of commenters.
        16y ago
fleitz 16y ago
"A site which requires real/verified names is automatically flagging itself as a potentially/probably unsafe space for women, or for anyone else at risk of harassment, violence, job discrimination, and the like." Facebook seems to be doing fine with pseudo requiring real names. I haven't seen any data indicating that Facebook has increased the number of victims of violence. I know it's not popular to think this way but statistically you're far more likely to be victimized by someone you know rather than random person from the internets. Most people who have the resources to fly across the country to victimize someone have better things to do with their life. However, I still worry about Jay and Silent Bob showing up at my door at any moment. The problem is that guy gets beat up by forum poster is far more newsworthy than guy gets beat up at bar. And thus we optimize our risk profile around the uncommon.
- mattdw 16y ago
  > Facebook seems to be doing fine with pseudo requiring real names. I haven't seen any data indicating that Facebook has increased the number of victims of violence. Of course, Facebook gives everyone access controls - and witness the fuss when the boundary shifts between private and public. I would assume the piece you quote above is referring to public and/or open online spaces. And yes, you are more likely to be victimized by someone you're acquainted with - but that doesn't mean they'll already know the information now tied to your real name. (See also current problems with adopted kids being contacted on Facebook by birth parents who, in many cases, are legally supposed to have no contact with them.)
drtse4 16y ago
Sorry if i'm going a "bit" off-topic, see disclaimer at the end. Remove pseudonyms to improve accountability and quality of comments... it doesn't work that way on the internet, anyone could use a fake name and the only one that care about accountability are the one that have been treated harshly (in their opinion). No correlation to quality exists imo. And i agree, using pseudonyms is the only way to maintain confidentiality when for example you want what you say to remain inside a certain community. In my case, while i have no problem with the HNers knowing who i am (and would be also quite happy to meet some of you), i don't see why someone googling my name should know that i post here, none of their business. Disclaimer: I skipped the original "scary job hoppers/HN lack of civility/untested ideas to improve civility" querelle, because not being american i don't have a clear view of the job market there and discussion about lack of civility turn out to be pretty useless usually ("it's the internet,baby." it's usually the conclusion). Now i've spent 20 min or so reading marks' posts and some comment here... What i can add 10 days or so later? Not much :) Generalizing in that way/posting useless rant will always attract a lot of angry comments, it's correct and it's also to be expected. And no, there is definately no loack of civility on HN. Philk sums it up in a good way in his post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1401113 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1401113
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
Jun8 16y ago
I thought I was getting the raw end when people downvoted like crazy my posts about Facebook, sort of defending them in the latest privacy debacle. People send personal hate mails on HN?
brianwillis 16y ago
Since switching to using my real name on Hacker News my comments have: 1) Gone down in quantity. 2) Taken longer to write, as I think harder before pressing the "add comment" button. 3) Become more "sterile" for lack of a better word. 4) Frequently been abandoned. There's two sides to this argument. On one hand, I'm reluctant to express half-formed opinions that could potentially make for interesting discussion, because I don't always want to be judged against those opinions for the rest of my life. On the other, is the wisdom of XKCD 137 (http://xkcd.com/137/ http://xkcd.com/137/).
RiderOfGiraffes 16y ago
Much of the discussion here is about how you should be judged by what you write, not how you write it. I thought I'd mention an experiment I ran across a while ago. http://neil.fraser.name/news/2005/08/20/ http://neil.fraser.name/news/2005/08/20/
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]

85 points by bootload 16y ago

Response to "Some Tips to Improve the Civility on Hacker News" ~ http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1400867 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1400867

alextgordon 16y ago

And how exactly would you "verify" someone's name anyway? Ask them to scan in their passport? I doubt many, least of all here, would transmit sensitive documents to a website just so they could register an account.

gizmo 16y ago
Typically via creditcard. Pay a symbolic amount (e.g. $5) to create an account, allow at most 1 account per credit card. I don't like the idea of verified accounts either, but if that's the price we have to pay to keep our discussions civilized I'm okay with it.
- younata 16y ago
  Personally, I'm of the opinion that we downvote comments that aren't civilized. I think that has proven to work fairly well.
  - jasonlotito 16y ago
    Flag uncivil comments. Downvotes should be applied to comments that don't add anything to a discussion. Never downvote because you disagree. If you respond to a comment, upvote the previous comment, as whatever it said sparked you to add something, which is hopefully constructive. That's my take on comments, flags, and upvotes.
- asdflkj 16y ago
  There's already a place that does that--Something Awful. And it is, indeed, awful.
- Natsu 16y ago
  > Typically via creditcard. Pay a symbolic amount (e.g. $5) to create an account, allow at most 1 account per credit card. That might work on a normal website, but people around here are likely smarter than that. It's not hard to make "extra" credit card numbers/accounts. Here's one amusing account of how it can be done: http://www.zug.com/pranks/credit/mj-credit-card/index.html http://www.zug.com/pranks/credit/mj-credit-card/index.html Incidentally, I would also like to note that they were dumb for blurring the credit card number in that picture. The blur is probably guessable (people have managed similar reversals in the past). Hopefully they canceled that card a long time ago, but they shouldn't have obscured information like that when they could have eliminated it.
- MichaelSalib 16y ago
  Given how many good discussion forums there are on the web and how easy it is to start a new one (freehackernews.com anyone?), do you really think that people will pull out their credit cards? This proposal is based on the same mistaken assumption that newspapers make: a failure to realize that in a world where there are tons of free alternatives, adding an entry charge is a bad idea.
- joubert 16y ago
  I can walk into a Duane Reade and buy an Amex gift card that will probably get around this technique.
- alextgordon 16y ago
  What if they don't have a credit card? Not everybody on HN is from a western country where everyone can get a card when they're 13. Also, many credit cards don't have the person's full name but their initials and surname, which is useless for googling (or is the full name accessible when processing?).
jasonlotito 16y ago
You don't need to "verify" yourself. I think you are taking it a bit extreme. After all, both you and I have been able to identify ourselves well enough that we can be found out.

by 16y ago

I restate a previous comment I made on the subject which agrees with this position. This article http://www.computorney.com/anonarticle.htm http://www.computorney.com/anonarticle.htm concludes that "anonymity in cyberspace is a fundamental underpinning of democracy". In 1995 the Supreme Court struck down an Ohio law that required the disclosure of personal identity on political literature. http://lcs.www.media.mit.edu/people/foner/Essays/Civil-Liberties/Project/supreme-court-upholds-anonymity.html http://lcs.www.media.mit.edu/people/foner/Essays/Civil-Liber...

billswift 16y ago
But that is a political point (which I agree with by the way) that has no bearing on whether it would be beneficial for HN or any other particular forum to ban anonymity.

TomOfTTB 16y ago

As crazy as it sounds I’d actually like to make the case for a lack of civility. Civility is an artificial construct designed to preserve personal relationships. You want to say ‘X’ but instead you say ‘Y’ because your relationship with the person in the conversation is as important to you as the ideas being exchanged. But HN isn’t necessarily like that. HN is supposed to be about the ideas themselves. So as long as someone’s expressing actual ideas (as opposed to ad hominem insults) I’m not sure I see the need for civility. Moreover there’s a reason not to have it. When I post on HN I’m trying to convince people to adopt my opinion. Knowing how passionate people are about the opinions that oppose mine is a helpful in formulating a strategy to defend my own thoughts. It’s an indicator of not only how ingrained the opposing ideas are but also tends to give insight on whether the opposing ideas are based on rationality or emotion. So the vitriol actually serves a purpose that civility does not. I realize a lack of civility can chase some people away and that’s probably the only good argument for it. But if we all just got over it and accepted the internet as an uncivilized place I think we’d be taking a step forward in the exchange of ideas.

frossie 16y ago
The problem with vitriol is that it becomes performance art. A review trashing a movie is a lot more entertaining than a civil one; but people can forget that the real issue is how to see a good movie. Why should I be more likely to adopt your opinion because you are driven to anger to express it? I don't know you. Your anger holds no reference point for me and therefore is of little value. Your best way to convince me is to make sense. Exchange of ideas is hardly incompatible with civil discourse.
- dejb 16y ago
  In the case of HN I don't see a problem with vitriol being rewarded more than politeness. Generally it seems there is already a strong bias towards civility in terms of voting. Just as insults don't add to the discussion neither does apologising for merely disagreeing with a point of view.
asdflkj 16y ago
"When I post on HN I’m trying to convince people to adopt my opinion." That might be your problem right there. When I post on HN, I try to move the discussion closer to truth, which is often not the opinion I started with.

mtkd 16y ago

I anticipate these very same arguments will be used very soon by western governments.

c00p3r 16y ago

Pseudonyms are good for a various reasons. Most of people, for example, are biased towards foreign names or a certain nations, even if they don't aware of it. Also, some people may be biased towards their own natives (because of remarkable combination of ignorance, selfishness and nationalism) or whatever, and a nickname helps them to feel like a some sort of a different person. Everyone are playing their games anyway. =) And, last but not least, exposing real names in a content which will be indexed by google is not a good idea for various reasons. Someone may don't like to show up or broadcast his presence on a certain site.

ugh 16y ago

You know those discussions you sometimes have in the evening with friends? Confidentiality is implied when having them. Google makes it hard to make that happen on the web as soon as your real name is attached. You need anonymity if you want to make that happen. That’s my case for anonymity.

jasonlotito 16y ago
How does that apply to a place like HN? What's the common case for anonymity here? Sure, I'll accept the occasional exception, but what's the benefit for anonymity?
- ugh 16y ago
  I don’t want everyone I know to be able to search for my name and find everything I ever wrote. Just as none of my friends knows every discussion I ever had with everyone.
  - jasonlotito 16y ago
    That's understandable, but doesn't benefit HN. It's purely a selfish reason, and I don't think it brings any public benefit with it. Besides, these are public forums, not private emails. How does it benefit the public? Finally, while it's a little point, HN has a pretty restrictive robots.txt file.
    - MichaelSalib 16y ago
      It benefits HN because it makes people willing to comment here. People like ugh who do want to their discussion comments tied to their real name on google for all eternity will not participate at HN if they can't use a pseudonym. An HN without ugh and the many pseudonymous commenters like him would be a much poorer HN. Discussion forums are subject to network effects where the value of the forum increases with the square of the number of commenters.
      - 16y ago

fleitz 16y ago

"A site which requires real/verified names is automatically flagging itself as a potentially/probably unsafe space for women, or for anyone else at risk of harassment, violence, job discrimination, and the like." Facebook seems to be doing fine with pseudo requiring real names. I haven't seen any data indicating that Facebook has increased the number of victims of violence. I know it's not popular to think this way but statistically you're far more likely to be victimized by someone you know rather than random person from the internets. Most people who have the resources to fly across the country to victimize someone have better things to do with their life. However, I still worry about Jay and Silent Bob showing up at my door at any moment. The problem is that guy gets beat up by forum poster is far more newsworthy than guy gets beat up at bar. And thus we optimize our risk profile around the uncommon.

mattdw 16y ago
> Facebook seems to be doing fine with pseudo requiring real names. I haven't seen any data indicating that Facebook has increased the number of victims of violence. Of course, Facebook gives everyone access controls - and witness the fuss when the boundary shifts between private and public. I would assume the piece you quote above is referring to public and/or open online spaces. And yes, you are more likely to be victimized by someone you're acquainted with - but that doesn't mean they'll already know the information now tied to your real name. (See also current problems with adopted kids being contacted on Facebook by birth parents who, in many cases, are legally supposed to have no contact with them.)

drtse4 16y ago

Sorry if i'm going a "bit" off-topic, see disclaimer at the end. Remove pseudonyms to improve accountability and quality of comments... it doesn't work that way on the internet, anyone could use a fake name and the only one that care about accountability are the one that have been treated harshly (in their opinion). No correlation to quality exists imo. And i agree, using pseudonyms is the only way to maintain confidentiality when for example you want what you say to remain inside a certain community. In my case, while i have no problem with the HNers knowing who i am (and would be also quite happy to meet some of you), i don't see why someone googling my name should know that i post here, none of their business. Disclaimer: I skipped the original "scary job hoppers/HN lack of civility/untested ideas to improve civility" querelle, because not being american i don't have a clear view of the job market there and discussion about lack of civility turn out to be pretty useless usually ("it's the internet,baby." it's usually the conclusion). Now i've spent 20 min or so reading marks' posts and some comment here... What i can add 10 days or so later? Not much :) Generalizing in that way/posting useless rant will always attract a lot of angry comments, it's correct and it's also to be expected. And no, there is definately no loack of civility on HN. Philk sums it up in a good way in his post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1401113 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1401113

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

Jun8 16y ago

I thought I was getting the raw end when people downvoted like crazy my posts about Facebook, sort of defending them in the latest privacy debacle. People send personal hate mails on HN?

brianwillis 16y ago

Since switching to using my real name on Hacker News my comments have: 1) Gone down in quantity. 2) Taken longer to write, as I think harder before pressing the "add comment" button. 3) Become more "sterile" for lack of a better word. 4) Frequently been abandoned. There's two sides to this argument. On one hand, I'm reluctant to express half-formed opinions that could potentially make for interesting discussion, because I don't always want to be judged against those opinions for the rest of my life. On the other, is the wisdom of XKCD 137 (http://xkcd.com/137/ http://xkcd.com/137/).

RiderOfGiraffes 16y ago

Much of the discussion here is about how you should be judged by what you write, not how you write it. I thought I'd mention an experiment I ran across a while ago. http://neil.fraser.name/news/2005/08/20/ http://neil.fraser.name/news/2005/08/20/

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]