8 ms·

I was going to write at length about my concerns on this topic, and then I decided not to. Because it's entirely possible that one day many years from now, a pr

• bottled_poe 9y ago
  Future employer can blow me.
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  • DougN7 9y ago
    I understand the sentiment, but future you might be pissed at your current cavalier attitude.
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    • agumonkey 9y ago
      If the situation reach that toxic point it's time to revolve.
  • kirykl 9y ago
    "Thank you for applying to ProfitCorp. While you have excellent credentials and passed all levels of interviews, your web sentiment analysis score does not meet the threshold for hire. Best of luck in future endeavors"
    • qwtel 9y ago
      > your web sentiment analysis score does not meet the threshold for hire except you would be lucky if one well-meaning employee would tell you the above sentence off the record in violation of every contract he/she singed with ProfitCorp. more likely, your life would be a mysterious series of surprise rejections with no or spurious reasons, the latter being especially insidious, since it would lead you to to believe there are aspects of your resume that need improvement, when in reality the missing piece is a "postitive comment generator" to flood every relevant online community with comments like "awesome", "let my know when it is finished" and "we should definitely have lunch sometime". EDIT: okay i'm being sarcastic again, so in the spirit of improving my web sentiment analysis score, the points i wanted to make are * these systems are invisible * once you know about them, they can be gamed
      • dsfyu404ed 9y ago
        >these systems are invisible * once you know about them, they can be gamed Like listing the full stack of every product you ever worked on in white 2pt font in your resume to pass naive keyword filters and pasting in irrelevant blocks of tags on craigslist
      • mncharity 9y ago
        Over the winter, I used a Trader Joe's padded/insulated bag for my laptop. Partially open, because of a broken zipper. It took me a while to realize that the uptick in friendly conversations with drugstore workers, and the onset of being stalked in my local supermarket, was likely because I now matched some shoplifting profile. It's been a useful reminder of privilege. Though it seemed unfortunate to be wasting people's time. But here's summer, and sometimes not carrying a laptop at all. And it appears my supermarket, of more than a decade, has retained state. And given they certainly have my card information, I have to wonder how far that state has propagated. So when choosing a laptop bag, or breaking a zipper, or paying cash, or spotting a possible misunderstanding, you have to wonder, can you really afford to appear different than the norm? You might be significantly impacted, before (or never) realizing what happened. And thus you get to share in that joy of racial discrimination, pervasive uncertainty. Did the cab really not see me, or choose to not see me? Why did X happen to me, what's going on here? And yet, the concept of "nudge" has public policy value. Doing noisy profiling, and helping people do the right things. There's an old line, that the internet is creating a global village. But villages are extremely diverse. From warm and fuzzy, to amazingly toxic. There are tremendous social benefits to "everyone knows you". I just wish I saw more thoughtful discussion of the roles of anonymity, and on aiming us away from toxic.
  • imron 9y ago
    Best of luck with your future endeavours James.
    • wolco 9y ago
      James can use my future business where we create fake social media profiles targeted to specific employment. It will work so well it will make James seem like the perfect candidate.
  • smacktoward 9y ago
    Just wait, eventually that will be part of the job interview too: https://youtu.be/bcaVSTsYyOI?t=49s https://youtu.be/bcaVSTsYyOI?t=49s
• api 9y ago
  I sometimes worry that old HN comments will bother me in the future. HN doesn't allow you to scrub your history. But ultimately I say fuck this. Maybe it'll be for my own good, ensuring that future employers and partners will not be the kinds of people who would care about such things. Might be a great moron filter. Maybe an antidote to this phenomenon is for us to collectively go punk on it. If everyone trolls nobody trolls.
  • batbomb 9y ago
    I've cycled through 3 nick names over 8 years for this reason. Not that I'm ashamed of what I wrote or its untraceable, but I am a bit paranoid overall and prefer privacy anyway.
• fictioncircle 9y ago
  And this is why we need online anonymity, to be perfectly honest. Its too dangerous to be honest under you real name and has been for years. Its alot like Roko's basilisk that way. Once you know the capability exists, you have to destroy it or help it. There isn't really any middle ground.
  • imron 9y ago
    > Roko's basilisk Curiosity killed the cat. Now I have to decide whether to destroy it or help it..
  • Bartweiss 9y ago
    > Its alot like Roko's basilisk that way. Once you know the capability exists, you have to destroy it or help it. I sort of wish Roko's hadn't played out as such a joke, because the general sentiment is actually a really under-appreciated one. There are all kinds of settings where the best outcomes are gained by either preventing a thing or enabling it - and succeeding. Revolutions seem like the obvious case, where the highest payoffs accrue to the vanguard revolutionaries (if they win) or the establishment (if they win). Various doomsday cults in fiction also count, where people produce a bad outcome on the logic that if someone else does it first, that would be even worse. It's actually really nice to have the idea of something which is sensible to restrain, right up until it gets out of control and turns on the people who restrained it.
• captainmuon 9y ago
  I've been saying this for a while: We as a society have to stop taking everything that is said on the internet so fucking seriously. You shouldn't have to think everything perfectly though that you write. It's OK to say something dumb, or even offensive. It's not great, but no big deal either. I don't want to live in a world where we have to polish and double-check every thought that leaves our minds. It used to be that a written statement was something important, with gravitas, with thought and meaning put into it. You rarely sat down and wrote a letter or a book. But the vast majority of utterances on the net are not like that, so we shouldn't treat them so. We shouldn't apply yesterdays standards to them. ---- Actually, I believe this will be all moot in a few years. With the rise of AI, and the continuing increase in storage and bandwidth, we might reach a "one million monkeys with typewriters" scenario. There will be every possible utterance and every possible embarrasing photo of everyone on the net. It will be trivially possible to fake your voice and image. (Unless we enter the cryptpocalypse in which everything is signed...) This is currently an odd period of time, in which we can create data, but can hardly fake it. There is authencity, proof of authorship. We can hold people responsible for how they behave and what they think. Before that was, and after it will be, just hearsay. It sounds super scary, but to be honest I find the thought quite liberating.
  • Pigo 9y ago
    I completely agree, and it's the very reason social media holds no interest for me anymore. I think people have forgotten what it used to be like on Myspace and the early days of Facebook. Social media was about self expression and finding out where the party is, now it's a finely tuned marketing platform for grandmothers.
    • captainmuon 9y ago
      > Social media was about self expression and finding out where the party is Exactly! My next project is going to be something like that. Based on the fediverse/Mastodon, but firstly about self-expression, connecting with real friends, meeting people. You curate your own home page, share what you want to share, you are invited to interact with strangers. No social media bs. Trying to capture the feeling of local / university social networks pre facebook, or the feeling of myspace.
• pitt1980 9y ago
  Seems like there's an interesting analogy between keeping a startup in stealth mode and keeping your ideas in stealth mode I see it pretty often here, the start up idea in stealth mode mocked (reasonably I think) the advantage of getting feedback on you idea far out weighs the potential disadvantage getting your idea stolen seems like something similar might be going on here, lots of people worry about something they say being used against them later, but theirs a cost to that when you put your ideas in a public place, and expose them to smart people, those critiques sharpen your ideas and give you useful feedback if you're not actively trying to troll people, and legitimately trying to make your points in good faith its probably highly unlikely that the potential downsides will outweigh the positives from improving your ideas by getting feedback on them
  • mLuby 9y ago
    The difference is you can dissolve your stealth startup if the feedback is negative enough and form another startup around a different idea. You can't easily "dissolve" your personal identity if things go south. You'll forever be "that stupid person who say X online" to search engines forever. Unless someone's working on a stealth startup to fix this…
• jcadam 9y ago
  Definitely. I pretty much keep silent on political/social issues online these days. It's just not worth the risk of being targeted for personal/professional destruction by the internet social outrage machine (Fortunately, we still have secret ballots here in the US, so at least some form of political speech can be engaged in safely).
  • e9 9y ago
    Sort of, political parties have profiles for most voters based on their public profiles etc, they compile all info and predict your stand on various issues and when those databases leak..... and they do: https://www.upguard.com/breaches/the-rnc-files https://www.upguard.com/breaches/the-rnc-files you are no longer protected, your best bet is to not have public facing anything at this point in time
• deleted 9y ago
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• sr2 9y ago
  > It's entirely possible that one day many years from now, a prospective employer/insurer/whatever finds such a comment and flags me for it This is why you should use pseudonyms and strive for anonymity. It's trivial to signup to Hackernews under an assumed name, or handle, and start venting on contentious issues. Hackernews might shadow-ban your throwaway account, so you might have to lurk moar and share some interesting links before you can comment without being censored. I know from experience. Last time I checked, HN has no strict policy on multiple accounts and you can do this very easily. In terms of OPSEC, you obviously shouldn't contaminate your real iden with your anon iden, or contaminate your anon idens with other anon idens. You should also deliberately alter the stylometry of your writing so nobody can link two pieces of text to each other. Anonymouth[0] is my favorite tool for doing just that. [0]: https://github.com/psal/anonymouth https://github.com/psal/anonymouth
  • _jal 9y ago
    What you say is all true, but unfortunately misses the point of the article and discussion. Also, just a note, but you have some interesting tells in your text. 'anon iden' is a phrase I don't recall seeing, at least not very often. You used "it's" correctly, another signal, along with the 'moar' spelling, and a few other shorthand phrases. You might want to start thinking about methods for scrubbing your text if you're actually interested in drawing a line between your personae and you. https://github.com/evllabs/JGAAP https://github.com/evllabs/JGAAP
    • wolco 9y ago
      He might have already and the personality you see may not be tied to reality
      • JetSpiegel 9y ago
        Our maybe he's counting on that and that's his real persona. Anonception.
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• zebrafish 9y ago
  The uniqueness and diversity of individuals will soon be lost as everyone is forced to adopt the socially acceptable opinion or risk being exiled. Think about how many revolutionary ideas started on the fringes of society. Astronomy, America, Civil Rights. The techno-utopia is always portrayed as some society where open mindedness and diversity are embraced. This is the paradox of modern political correctness. If the hivemind of society rejects you and your ideas, it is in fact not open at all.
  • barfbuttface 9y ago
    This is likely not going to get through to you because the hivemind blocked my account, but: It's financially inexpensive to change the minds of people in the techno-utopia. Couple upvotes here, couple shadowbans there.
• erikpukinskis 9y ago
  I think the antidote to this is to be willing to go down with the ship of Truth. If you are saying something that you believe is true, that you believe is as kind as possible, then when you are pilloried, you will be forced to retreat back into the arms of other people who recognize truth and kindness when they see it. If you neglect the truth, and instead traffic in half truths and innuendos... in the off chance you are pilloried anyway, where will you retreat to? The world is full of second chances. You may lose your chance at becoming a senator, or a university professor, or somesuch. But there's mostly always another opportunity somewhere. In the internet age, you can eke out a living off of a motley crew of diffuse patrons more easily than ever. You don't need to please everyone the way Walter Kronkite did. You just need to please your core following. If you accept that you have no entitlement to any particular space or industry or position then it becomes much easier to accept that things might go sideways. It's not the end of the world. Just the end of your story in one slice of it. ... says someone who just wrote a post this morning on HN about the notion that whiteness and masculinity could be associated with brain damage. I may come to regret it. But I think it's worth it, to put up my sail and allow it to be pushed closer to truth.