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When I argued that anonymity was a major factor contributing to vitriolic comments on the Internet[1], I took a lot of heat for it. Sample comment from Hacker N

When I argued that anonymity was a major factor contributing to vitriolic comments on the Internet[1], I took a lot of heat for it. Sample comment from Hacker News[2]: "It's darkly amusing how people pretend this is about anonymity. As if there had never been a sexist jerk who had a name. ..." I have to say that the results of this experiment make me feel vindicated. On another note, multiple commenters here say that they won't be using Facebook comments because they don't want to spam their friends' feeds. Apparently they missed the checkbox right underneath the comment box that says "Post to Facebook"? [1] http://33bits.org/2010/08/30/women-in-tech-how-anonymity-contributes-to-the-problem/ http://33bits.org/2010/08/30/women-in-tech-how-anonymity-con... [2] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1647760 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1647760

Alex3917 16y ago
It's not just anonymity, it's anonymity coupled with a lack of consequences. The ideal solution would be to make users sign in through their Facebook page, but then let them comment under whatever pseudonym they wanted. That way commenters could have anonymity, but abusive users could still be permanently banned.
- KeithMajhor 16y ago
  What stops them from making more facebook accounts?
  - Alex3917 16y ago
    Minimum account age, minimum number of friends, need to have your account vetted the first time you post, need to be friends with certain people or within two degrees of certain people, etc. Essentially it's extremely difficult to create a new Facebook persona and have it look at all authentic. Not impossible, but at least 250x more difficult than creating a new GMail account.
  - kgermino 16y ago
    What stops them from making fake Facebook accounts now?
    - phlux 16y ago
      Facebook stops people. I have never, nor shall I ever, maintained an account on Facebook. This means that I will forever opt out of commenting on TC articles.
      - spullara 16y ago
        You can use a yahoo account as well which is essentially anonymous.
        phlux 16y ago
        What year are you in 1998? I let my Yahoo account die over half a decade ago. :)
        spullara 16y ago
        Takes 5 minutes to make one. Don't even need an email address.
      - jerhewet 16y ago
        This, to the power of infinity. I don't have a Facebook account, or a Twitter account, or any other "social networking" account -- and I never will. IM(NSH)O the massive drop in comments on TechCrunch is an indicator of how many people don't have (and don't want) an account on Facebook.
        rue 16y ago
        I don't see why you should decide to never have a social account. Personally, I don't trust Facebook, so I don't use it. Twitter, on the other hand, I've found useful both to follow people I know or know of in the context of a hobby &c., and as a microblog for myself.
  - bl4k 16y ago
    You effectively outsource spam and troll blocking to Facebook. They allow test profiles (I have around 4) - but they know who you really are. Fake accounts get shut down very quickly, they have a mechanism that seems to detect those accounts very quickly.
    - RK 16y ago
      One data point: I've had the same fake account with a laughably fake name for more than 2 years and only one friend.
      - JonnieCache 16y ago
        There are a number of accounts we created for inanimate objects while at uni which are still around. They all have a certain amount of friends and photos though. We also used to create fake people using photos from stock art libraries and try to create realistic social lives for them, with our aim being that our real friends would eventually start enquiring after the fake people as if they knew them. We were pretty bored.
    - redstron 16y ago
      Fake accounts get shut down very quickly I have encountered numerous fake profiles that have survived for months/years. Many of these represent businesses that should really be pages. Others are accounts that are used on hate groups/pages exclusively and have highly offensive fake names. The worst example I've seen was a vicious cyberbullying profile that Facebook allowed to accumulate hundreds of friends, under an obviously fake name, despite a large number of abuse reports.
- randomwalker 16y ago
  That does seem to be an excellent middle ground. The pseudonymity would eliminate the element self-censorship that the Techcrunch article seems to be hinting at, while the threat of banning combined with the high cost of creating a new Facebook account would (hopefully) still suffice to keep the discussion reasonably civil. As a cryptography researcher I've come across numerous cumbersome anonymous reputation systems, but it didn't occur to me that Facebook is in a position to roll one out right now with a minor change if they chose to. The caveat, of course, is that it is centralized and controlled by FB. Whether they have the incentive to implement it is an entirely different question.
  - Alex3917 16y ago
    "As a cryptography researcher I've come across numerous cumbersome anonymous reputation systems" What's the best one you've come across? The only way I was ever able to dream up was basically requiring an iris scan to create a new account, but then not connecting the iris data to the account, just using it to ensure the user couldn't create a second account. This may actually be feasible now that every laptop has a built in camera and the patents have finally expired, but at the time I wanted to create this it wasn't yet possible from a business perspective.
protomyth 16y ago
I am not really convined, given facebook's past behaivor that any comment I make won't make it back to my facebook feed based on some new privacy change. Also, using facebook for login to third-party websites is not something I want to encourage.
- leon_ 16y ago
  Yes, this is my concern too. I had no problems with giving Disqus access to my twitter account. But I won't use facebook comments.
phlux 16y ago
What about me? I simply don't want to have a facebook account for any reason whatsoever. I wanted to comment on the TC piece about Shed Simove -- but I must have an FB account to comment on TC? Fark that. Certainly killing trolls is a good thing -- but to make user interaction 100% dependent on FB is retarded. I choose to have absolutely zero of my online presence traverse FB servers, so I simply opt out of using them altogether. I am not seeking to hide my identity, I am just choosing to stay clear of anything FB.
- spullara 16y ago
  You can use a yahoo account as well. Did anyone in this thread try it?
dman 16y ago
Anonymity is not just a major factor in vitriolic comments - its also a factor in being able to comment at all. Ive seen on multiple occasions someone offer something really insightful on Slashdot as an Anonymous Coward saying something like - "My Employer probably woudlnt want be discussing this publicly". In the absence of anonymity current paranoia about "Intellectual Property", NDA's and employee tracking will ensure that a lot of things worth saying will remain unsaid.
- mlinsey 16y ago
  Agreed. I also think that Slashdot's policy of starting Anonymous comments at less karma can give most of the benefits of both sides; it would probably work even better if anonymous comments started at say -5 karma. That way, stuff that had to be anonymous but was really useful content could get voted up, but most of the anonymous internet dickwads (to borrow Penny Arcade's terminology) would stay relatively hidden from view.
  - tomjen3 16y ago
    If you have a user with good karma, Anonymous Coward comments on ./ doesn't get less karma (at least they didn't back when I was using it).
  - rue 16y ago
    For the purposes of this discussion, there's very little difference between joesomenick and Anonymous Coward.
- yuhong 16y ago
  Yea, I know. If I was posting them, I'd check with the employer as to if it is true and why.
Helianthus16 16y ago
There is an intellectual purity that is maintained through anonymity. I don't have to be consistent with my previous posts or any future posts I might want to make. I don't have to worry about what people will think of me. Heck, I don't even have to be _nice_. But because I care about my post, I do have to try to be right. And because all of those other constraints are gone, each post exists independently. A system that thinks vitriol shouldn't be _allowed_, that it should be actively fought instead of ignored, isn't taking the right tack. Systems that allow anonymity and provide filtering for what the community views as trash are the right balance, because I get damn angry at things sometimes--we all do, there are a lot of things to be angry about-- and if I cross the line of decorum then at least I have the freedom to cross it (through semi-anonymity), just as y'all have the freedom to downvote me.
- olalonde 16y ago
  HN users aren't by definition anonymous as long as they value their HN identity (I'd say most do). Their "real life" identity might not be known but as long as they value their HN persona, they will try to remain respectable and responsible as their reputation is at stake. This is very different from the situation at TC where no one has a permanent identity.

Alex3917 16y ago

It's not just anonymity, it's anonymity coupled with a lack of consequences. The ideal solution would be to make users sign in through their Facebook page, but then let them comment under whatever pseudonym they wanted. That way commenters could have anonymity, but abusive users could still be permanently banned.

KeithMajhor 16y ago
What stops them from making more facebook accounts?
- Alex3917 16y ago
  Minimum account age, minimum number of friends, need to have your account vetted the first time you post, need to be friends with certain people or within two degrees of certain people, etc. Essentially it's extremely difficult to create a new Facebook persona and have it look at all authentic. Not impossible, but at least 250x more difficult than creating a new GMail account.
- kgermino 16y ago
  What stops them from making fake Facebook accounts now?
  - phlux 16y ago
    Facebook stops people. I have never, nor shall I ever, maintained an account on Facebook. This means that I will forever opt out of commenting on TC articles.
    - spullara 16y ago
      You can use a yahoo account as well which is essentially anonymous.
      - phlux 16y ago
        What year are you in 1998? I let my Yahoo account die over half a decade ago. :)
        spullara 16y ago
        Takes 5 minutes to make one. Don't even need an email address.
    - jerhewet 16y ago
      This, to the power of infinity. I don't have a Facebook account, or a Twitter account, or any other "social networking" account -- and I never will. IM(NSH)O the massive drop in comments on TechCrunch is an indicator of how many people don't have (and don't want) an account on Facebook.
      - rue 16y ago
        I don't see why you should decide to never have a social account. Personally, I don't trust Facebook, so I don't use it. Twitter, on the other hand, I've found useful both to follow people I know or know of in the context of a hobby &c., and as a microblog for myself.
- bl4k 16y ago
  You effectively outsource spam and troll blocking to Facebook. They allow test profiles (I have around 4) - but they know who you really are. Fake accounts get shut down very quickly, they have a mechanism that seems to detect those accounts very quickly.
  - RK 16y ago
    One data point: I've had the same fake account with a laughably fake name for more than 2 years and only one friend.
    - JonnieCache 16y ago
      There are a number of accounts we created for inanimate objects while at uni which are still around. They all have a certain amount of friends and photos though. We also used to create fake people using photos from stock art libraries and try to create realistic social lives for them, with our aim being that our real friends would eventually start enquiring after the fake people as if they knew them. We were pretty bored.
  - redstron 16y ago
    Fake accounts get shut down very quickly I have encountered numerous fake profiles that have survived for months/years. Many of these represent businesses that should really be pages. Others are accounts that are used on hate groups/pages exclusively and have highly offensive fake names. The worst example I've seen was a vicious cyberbullying profile that Facebook allowed to accumulate hundreds of friends, under an obviously fake name, despite a large number of abuse reports.
randomwalker 16y ago
That does seem to be an excellent middle ground. The pseudonymity would eliminate the element self-censorship that the Techcrunch article seems to be hinting at, while the threat of banning combined with the high cost of creating a new Facebook account would (hopefully) still suffice to keep the discussion reasonably civil. As a cryptography researcher I've come across numerous cumbersome anonymous reputation systems, but it didn't occur to me that Facebook is in a position to roll one out right now with a minor change if they chose to. The caveat, of course, is that it is centralized and controlled by FB. Whether they have the incentive to implement it is an entirely different question.
- Alex3917 16y ago
  "As a cryptography researcher I've come across numerous cumbersome anonymous reputation systems" What's the best one you've come across? The only way I was ever able to dream up was basically requiring an iris scan to create a new account, but then not connecting the iris data to the account, just using it to ensure the user couldn't create a second account. This may actually be feasible now that every laptop has a built in camera and the patents have finally expired, but at the time I wanted to create this it wasn't yet possible from a business perspective.

protomyth 16y ago

I am not really convined, given facebook's past behaivor that any comment I make won't make it back to my facebook feed based on some new privacy change. Also, using facebook for login to third-party websites is not something I want to encourage.

leon_ 16y ago
Yes, this is my concern too. I had no problems with giving Disqus access to my twitter account. But I won't use facebook comments.

phlux 16y ago

What about me? I simply don't want to have a facebook account for any reason whatsoever. I wanted to comment on the TC piece about Shed Simove -- but I must have an FB account to comment on TC? Fark that. Certainly killing trolls is a good thing -- but to make user interaction 100% dependent on FB is retarded. I choose to have absolutely zero of my online presence traverse FB servers, so I simply opt out of using them altogether. I am not seeking to hide my identity, I am just choosing to stay clear of anything FB.

spullara 16y ago
You can use a yahoo account as well. Did anyone in this thread try it?

dman 16y ago

Anonymity is not just a major factor in vitriolic comments - its also a factor in being able to comment at all. Ive seen on multiple occasions someone offer something really insightful on Slashdot as an Anonymous Coward saying something like - "My Employer probably woudlnt want be discussing this publicly". In the absence of anonymity current paranoia about "Intellectual Property", NDA's and employee tracking will ensure that a lot of things worth saying will remain unsaid.

mlinsey 16y ago
Agreed. I also think that Slashdot's policy of starting Anonymous comments at less karma can give most of the benefits of both sides; it would probably work even better if anonymous comments started at say -5 karma. That way, stuff that had to be anonymous but was really useful content could get voted up, but most of the anonymous internet dickwads (to borrow Penny Arcade's terminology) would stay relatively hidden from view.
- tomjen3 16y ago
  If you have a user with good karma, Anonymous Coward comments on ./ doesn't get less karma (at least they didn't back when I was using it).
- rue 16y ago
  For the purposes of this discussion, there's very little difference between joesomenick and Anonymous Coward.
yuhong 16y ago
Yea, I know. If I was posting them, I'd check with the employer as to if it is true and why.

Helianthus16 16y ago

There is an intellectual purity that is maintained through anonymity. I don't have to be consistent with my previous posts or any future posts I might want to make. I don't have to worry about what people will think of me. Heck, I don't even have to be _nice_. But because I care about my post, I do have to try to be right. And because all of those other constraints are gone, each post exists independently. A system that thinks vitriol shouldn't be _allowed_, that it should be actively fought instead of ignored, isn't taking the right tack. Systems that allow anonymity and provide filtering for what the community views as trash are the right balance, because I get damn angry at things sometimes--we all do, there are a lot of things to be angry about-- and if I cross the line of decorum then at least I have the freedom to cross it (through semi-anonymity), just as y'all have the freedom to downvote me.

olalonde 16y ago
HN users aren't by definition anonymous as long as they value their HN identity (I'd say most do). Their "real life" identity might not be known but as long as they value their HN persona, they will try to remain respectable and responsible as their reputation is at stake. This is very different from the situation at TC where no one has a permanent identity.