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They can only archive your public posts. Maybe if people were afraid their posts might be read in the future and tied to them they’d stop shitposting so much an

They can only archive your public posts. Maybe if people were afraid their posts might be read in the future and tied to them they’d stop shitposting so much and only post content they’d be proud of. Internet social media is full of some the most vile verbal diarrhea to come out of the human species, enabled by actual anonymity or beliefs in obscurity that others won’t find what they said. It’s reached a head now with all of this radicalization leading to neofascist terrorism and what’s being asked is for all online platforms to start censoring shitposting. I’d say this removes the primary social feedback mechanism that has existed in human culture: the fear of tit for tat repercussions in the future based on past bad behavior. Perhaps there’s something to be said about holding people To their words. I’ve been in the internet posting since 1986, I’ve said some crazy shit during my teenage years as a dick headed devotee of Ayn Rand, but I don’t want to delete them, I don’t think it’s honest or brave. There are legit reasons for anonymity like violence of course but this isn’t the norm. We need to find ways to promote and protect people who need anonymity while also not encouraging the worst human behavior and abuse online as it seems the alternatives are either self censorship based civility or actual censorship and I prefer The former.

metildaa 8y ago
A lack of anonimity has not notably improved the discourse on YouTube, if anything the real name policy has silenced many that would push back against the verbal diarrhoea, as the person who wrote said insane post might easily hunt you down now.
- cromwellian 8y ago
  YouTube is pseudonymous, most people don’t use real names But point taken. It seems like ultimately this ends up with most platforms shutting down comments or curating everything which is a damn shame place to end up from the internet I started on, but maybe that was a false sample being mostly academics and geeks in the 80s and early 90s.
syshum 8y ago
Anonymity and Free Speech go hand in hand, you can not have one with out the other. If you are in the US, then you should understand that Anonymous Speech was the bed rock foundation of this nation, most of the discourse around the constitution was done via anonymous pseudonyms. The Reality is "Real Names Policies" promote extremism, it does not reduce it. Real Names Policies further create eco chambers, Group isolation, and destroy discourse. This idea that Anonymous Speech is the cause of extremist is plainly false given that most of the violent extremists post for abhorrent beliefs under their real identities. Most Anonymous speakers are actually centrists want to engage in debate with out fear of retribution by the extremist on both sides. To remove that, is to remove the rational voices and only allow the extremist to yell at each other
- cromwellian 8y ago
  I used to believe that with all my heart until I started reading 4chan, now between that, deepfakes, and the imminent arrival of GPT-2 bots, I’m really fearful of the future of online publishing. We’re going to end up with defacto censorship because most if not all platforms will be threatened into it. Fundamentally it seems online discussion for human beings has serious bugs. Self policing used to work in the early internet but it seems the volume has overwhelmed most self policing systems.
  - syshum 8y ago
    I believe we are seeing the end of Free Speech as well That however does not change my statement, If we regulate away Anonymous speech we regulate away Free Speech There is no getting around that fact, so we are going to destroy free speech while claiming we are "protecting it"
    - cromwellian 8y ago
      Well, that’s if you consider free speech to be hate speech. The kind of behavior I’m talking about is people posting explicitly racist memes or incitement to violence. Even today, a flood of racist caricatures of Andrew Yang are Flooding from 4chan onto YouTube, instagram, and twitter from maga trolls. The reason why censorship is coming is because the trolls have ruined a good thing. We can tolerate nazi marches and extremists as long as it is off in a small discredited corner. But when the fascists start running bots and troll armies flooding forums, making it hard to trust anything, speech has already been censored by sheer lowering of signal to noise. If I can drown you out with online armies, I don’t need the platforms to censor you, I just need to overwhelm you and make people feel reading the comments is useless and I will have achieved my mission. The left might be destroying speech in academia, but on the open internet it is decidedly the alt-right and radicals that are endangering free speech.
ocdtrekkie 8y ago
To be honest, I'd be much more comfortable keeping my history public in a world without your employer. I'm much less worried about individuals seeing my history than giant adtech behemoths. I'm largely proud of my internet commentary, and apart from some embarrassing fanboyism of Google back about a decade ago, mostly stand by what I've said. That being said, while I generally post publicly, with some mind what I say is public, over the span of many years, the tidbits you leave online reveal much more about you than perhaps you intended when you said them. Aggregate data is concerning to me, more than someone having a clip of me gushing over being a Glass Explorer. While I share some of your concerns on quality of discourse, I actually think anonymity can help with discourse in some ways. For instance, posting without a real name, gender, or race, entirely removes attacks or judgments based on your physical traits, and tends to lead people to converse on actual merit or argument alone.
- cromwellian 8y ago
  >I'm much less worried about individuals seeing my history than giant adtech behemoths. Point is, if you publish something at a publicly accessible URL, anyone, any organization, any individual, can crawl it, archive it, transform it, make it findable, make it accessible. That is the whole value proposition of the internet and it's the whole value proposition of public publishing. It's why hopefully, future archaeologists and anthropologists can read what kind of people we were the same way we dig up dead cultures and read their published works, their letters, and their creations. There's a danger in the empherality and bit-rot of our current digital culture in that it can be erased from history. I have pointed you at my pre-Google blogs before, so you know my position on this has nothing to do with my employer. I am for distributed, decentralized publishing, and permissionless reuse, and I'm a copyright minimalist. Before G+, there was USENET, there was LISTSERV, there were BBSes, as an enormous treasure trove of conversations going back decades on the internet and online world. Being able to archive and find those conversations is of enormous historical importance. Aggregation is already a fact of life, and there are numerous websites already that you can use to look up your criminal history, job history, social media history, financial history, household history, and education history combined in a centralized report, all in ways that are far scarier and less accountable than big tech. I don't necessarily like it either, but it is a natural consequence of network bandwidth and computation becoming cheaper -- it's democratizing surveillance. It's like getting angry about cameras everywhere. When the cost of cameras falls to near zero, and the cost of bandwidth (5g) is cheap and plentiful, there's going to be a natural gradient, decentralized, of wide spread surveillance and live video sharing AND processing. I might suggest widening your view a little bit beyond Google towards the fundamental economic changes taking place that will make it very hard to avoid surveillance, even if you don't use any big tech company products.

metildaa 8y ago

A lack of anonimity has not notably improved the discourse on YouTube, if anything the real name policy has silenced many that would push back against the verbal diarrhoea, as the person who wrote said insane post might easily hunt you down now.

cromwellian 8y ago
YouTube is pseudonymous, most people don’t use real names But point taken. It seems like ultimately this ends up with most platforms shutting down comments or curating everything which is a damn shame place to end up from the internet I started on, but maybe that was a false sample being mostly academics and geeks in the 80s and early 90s.

syshum 8y ago

Anonymity and Free Speech go hand in hand, you can not have one with out the other. If you are in the US, then you should understand that Anonymous Speech was the bed rock foundation of this nation, most of the discourse around the constitution was done via anonymous pseudonyms. The Reality is "Real Names Policies" promote extremism, it does not reduce it. Real Names Policies further create eco chambers, Group isolation, and destroy discourse. This idea that Anonymous Speech is the cause of extremist is plainly false given that most of the violent extremists post for abhorrent beliefs under their real identities. Most Anonymous speakers are actually centrists want to engage in debate with out fear of retribution by the extremist on both sides. To remove that, is to remove the rational voices and only allow the extremist to yell at each other

cromwellian 8y ago
I used to believe that with all my heart until I started reading 4chan, now between that, deepfakes, and the imminent arrival of GPT-2 bots, I’m really fearful of the future of online publishing. We’re going to end up with defacto censorship because most if not all platforms will be threatened into it. Fundamentally it seems online discussion for human beings has serious bugs. Self policing used to work in the early internet but it seems the volume has overwhelmed most self policing systems.
- syshum 8y ago
  I believe we are seeing the end of Free Speech as well That however does not change my statement, If we regulate away Anonymous speech we regulate away Free Speech There is no getting around that fact, so we are going to destroy free speech while claiming we are "protecting it"
  - cromwellian 8y ago
    Well, that’s if you consider free speech to be hate speech. The kind of behavior I’m talking about is people posting explicitly racist memes or incitement to violence. Even today, a flood of racist caricatures of Andrew Yang are Flooding from 4chan onto YouTube, instagram, and twitter from maga trolls. The reason why censorship is coming is because the trolls have ruined a good thing. We can tolerate nazi marches and extremists as long as it is off in a small discredited corner. But when the fascists start running bots and troll armies flooding forums, making it hard to trust anything, speech has already been censored by sheer lowering of signal to noise. If I can drown you out with online armies, I don’t need the platforms to censor you, I just need to overwhelm you and make people feel reading the comments is useless and I will have achieved my mission. The left might be destroying speech in academia, but on the open internet it is decidedly the alt-right and radicals that are endangering free speech.

ocdtrekkie 8y ago

To be honest, I'd be much more comfortable keeping my history public in a world without your employer. I'm much less worried about individuals seeing my history than giant adtech behemoths. I'm largely proud of my internet commentary, and apart from some embarrassing fanboyism of Google back about a decade ago, mostly stand by what I've said. That being said, while I generally post publicly, with some mind what I say is public, over the span of many years, the tidbits you leave online reveal much more about you than perhaps you intended when you said them. Aggregate data is concerning to me, more than someone having a clip of me gushing over being a Glass Explorer. While I share some of your concerns on quality of discourse, I actually think anonymity can help with discourse in some ways. For instance, posting without a real name, gender, or race, entirely removes attacks or judgments based on your physical traits, and tends to lead people to converse on actual merit or argument alone.

cromwellian 8y ago
>I'm much less worried about individuals seeing my history than giant adtech behemoths. Point is, if you publish something at a publicly accessible URL, anyone, any organization, any individual, can crawl it, archive it, transform it, make it findable, make it accessible. That is the whole value proposition of the internet and it's the whole value proposition of public publishing. It's why hopefully, future archaeologists and anthropologists can read what kind of people we were the same way we dig up dead cultures and read their published works, their letters, and their creations. There's a danger in the empherality and bit-rot of our current digital culture in that it can be erased from history. I have pointed you at my pre-Google blogs before, so you know my position on this has nothing to do with my employer. I am for distributed, decentralized publishing, and permissionless reuse, and I'm a copyright minimalist. Before G+, there was USENET, there was LISTSERV, there were BBSes, as an enormous treasure trove of conversations going back decades on the internet and online world. Being able to archive and find those conversations is of enormous historical importance. Aggregation is already a fact of life, and there are numerous websites already that you can use to look up your criminal history, job history, social media history, financial history, household history, and education history combined in a centralized report, all in ways that are far scarier and less accountable than big tech. I don't necessarily like it either, but it is a natural consequence of network bandwidth and computation becoming cheaper -- it's democratizing surveillance. It's like getting angry about cameras everywhere. When the cost of cameras falls to near zero, and the cost of bandwidth (5g) is cheap and plentiful, there's going to be a natural gradient, decentralized, of wide spread surveillance and live video sharing AND processing. I might suggest widening your view a little bit beyond Google towards the fundamental economic changes taking place that will make it very hard to avoid surveillance, even if you don't use any big tech company products.