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4chan founder: Mark Zuckerberg is “totally wrong” about online identity
- mapu 16y agoThe title of this article is very misleading.
- pknight 16y agois it? Didn't mislead me...
- burgerbrain 16y agoYeah, I just read this article and I must say the headline is actually refreshingly accurate and non-sensational, which seems to be getting pretty rare in these days of techcrunch style "journalism".
- jon_dahl 16y agoYep. I was there, and he did say this (amongst other things) during his talk. Good talk, all in all. 4chan is a refreshing change from VC backed, liquidation-event-directed online communities. Not that 4chan is a Facebook replacement by any means, but it's helpful to remember that an enormous part of what's interesting on the internet is open-source, non-profit, or not profit-motivated.
- BoppreH 16y agowhat's interesting on the internet is open-source, non-profit, or not profit-motivated You forgot "balls-to-the-wall crazy". An unusual environment is more likely to advocate creativity, from where most of the interesting things spark.
- generalk 16y ago4chan as a whole is not "balls-to-the-wall crazy." Several of their boards are, but as a whole that's not necessarily the case.
- BoppreH 16y agoTrue. But I still think it's appropriate because a) when talking about 4chan people don't think of the sane boards and b) the crazy boards hold a great chunk of the traffic (majority?), even if they are outnumbered (not that you need many of them). Regardless of what we think, 4chan and /b/ are synonymous in most places. And there's a good reason, I don't think international press is interested in the Animals, Traditional Games or Literature boards.
- DarkShikari 16y agoIt's interesting to contrast the Japanese style of online identity (which inspired 4chan) and the style that Zuckerberg is trying to promote. Millions of Japanese have profiles on sites like Pixiv (popular art site with ~15m images) or Nico Nico Douga (popular video site with ~15m videos). They create art, videos, etc, and upload them under a name. Many of these people earn money off their work, publishing doujinshi at Comiket, creating art and promotional videos for commercial games, and so forth. But there's no attempt to ensure that these are real names. Typically they're aliases. Even their most popular social networking site, Mixi, works the same way. To the Japanese, there's absolutely no reason why "my life as a doujin artist" and, say, "my life as a software engineer", should be given the same name. Interestingly enough, this is how it often seems to have worked in the West as well... prior to Facebook.
- kmfrk 16y agoInteresting. Is this a privacy concern or just something intrinsic people do in Japan online?
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- bane 16y ago(somebody stop me if I'm completely off-base) It's been my observation that Japanese culture appears to be more accepting of and comfortable with people putting on personas to suit a particular mileu than in the west. In the West we strongly equate what a person is wearing and their behavior at that moment with their overall identity. It's been my observation that in Japan a person may put on a persona like one might put on a costume and it be perfectly acceptable. There's exceptions of course but nothing is more disconcerting to me as a westerner, watching an interview with a Japanese Rock and Roller or Rapper, expecting them to have the FU attitude I'm used to seeing during the interview and instead see them behave with politeness, nicely bowing at the right moments and talking politely to everyone. It's actually quite refreshing in a sense to see this and I think it can encourage experimentation as it prevents people from getting too wrapped up with a persona they are building right now and drop it and try something else that suits their fancy.
- thrwaway 16y agothis is very true, in the sense that in high school i was a very shy person that other people picked upon. on coming to college [in a different area from where i went to hs], people were from different places, and i didn't have a background as that insert random/weird label here kid, and as a result being my authentic self, i made nice friends, and no one really cared about what i was or was not in the past.
- w1ntermute 16y agoThis is actually an issue now for new college students, because of Facebook. People form an opinion of you from your Facebook profile (and thus your social interactions with your high school Facebook friends) long before you meet them face-to-face.
- kenjackson 16y agoKind of weird that the founder of 4chan really seems to get this a lot more than Zuckerberg, founder of the largest online community in the US (world?).
- burgerbrain 16y agoActually, I think it makes a lot of sense. 4chan's appeal is the anonyminity, and facebook depends on having accurate data on people to mine and sell.
- stcredzero 16y agoNot only that, but there's also value in close social distance and the change in behavior it brings.
- hcack 16y agoWhile it's representative, moot doesn't have $50bn to lose. His principles are less likely to be marketing than Zuck's.
- nyellin 16y agoI founded a startup with dsebrow and jsebrow to try and address this issue. We let users have private and anonymous conversations with their friends and colleagues, with a twist: you can see who is part of a conversation, but you can't see who made individual comments. In other words, you can have anonymous conversations with people who you respect. The trolls can't comment, because participation is invite-only. There is a demo at http://freeversation.com/about/ http://freeversation.com/about/ but please don't excessively promote it or repost it to HN yet. We're not quite ready to go live. (Until this discussion hit the homepage, we weren't planning on allowing the public to access Freeversation.com until later this week.) We will be applying for YCombinator.
- stcredzero 16y agoWere you thinking of Plato's Republic when you wrote this?
- nyellin 16y agoNo, do you mind explaining? Sorry if I am missing the obvious. It is late and I am tired.
- stcredzero 16y agoI'm referring to his idea that a perfect legislature could be formed if there was a way to make the representatives forget who they were while they were debating and voting. Then they'd have no choice but to vote for the common interest and not their own.
- TheEzEzz 16y agoWhat would happen if Senate votes weren't made public? It would decrease accountability of senators to constituents, sure, but would it also decrease the power of special interest groups?
- 16y ago
- dangoldin 16y agoTechnology Review also had an interview with him where he brings up the same points: http://www.technologyreview.com/web/25997/ http://www.technologyreview.com/web/25997/ I'm not sure if a subscription is required though.
- frou_dh 16y agoIf you've thought about this subject yourself then you can create your own mix and don't need Poole or Zuckerberg to lay down the law.
- rbarooah 16y agoSorry - downvoted when I meant to upvote.
- gs8 16y agoAnonymous web is perfect, communities are able to filter out trolls on there on. If some one wants to have a single identity they are able to do that in an anonymous web. But the reverse can't be done. Zuckerberg benefits financially from a single identity web and that is why he likes it.
- stcredzero 16y ago“The cost of failure is really high when you’re contributing as yourself,” Poole said. So Mark Zuckerberg is "totally wrong?" This makes me knit my eyebrows. Just because putting your real identity out there can have good uses doesn't make anonymity "wrong." Neither does the utility of anonymity make real identity wrong. Clearly these are both useful. The presence of hordes of anonymous least common denominator users can have detrimental effects too. Sometimes, there is a place for close social distance and the good behavior it brings. Sometimes there's a place for freewheeling anonymity and the frankness and creativity it enables. Neither is "wrong."
- bbgm 16y agoAgreed, they both have their place, although I am biased heavily in favor of using personas that link to your real identity. If FB allowed anonymity, I would be using it. It's for my connections and those alone.
- bbgm 16y agoAnd that should be I wouldn't be using this. Notice it too late to change
- kkowalczyk 16y agoWhat if they are both right? Facebook model is phenomenally successful, clearly Zuckerberg must be right. 4chan model is phenomenally successful, clearly Poole must be right. The only issue I see here is our polarizing attitude and insistence that one must be better than the other. It's not a zero sum game. We have both because they target different, non-overlapping scenarios and we have hundreds of other, smaller communities, each with different rules. We don't discuss it when people who like bitter chocolate claim that those who like sweet chocolate are "totally wrong". I think we have enough space on our servers for both Facebook and 4chan.
- noibl 16y agoOnly one of those people is making moral judgements against people who use pseudonyms ("an example of a lack of integrity") and making phenomenal amounts of money out of marginalising the practice.
- joe_the_user 16y agoFacebook hasn't marginalized the practice terribly much - at least half my FB friends are also using aliases.
- Raphael_Amiard 16y agoYou can use alias, but the friction to do so, and also to eventually change alias, is considerably higher than on most sites. All in all, you are not supposed to do that on facebook, even if plenty of people do it, and that does make quite a difference.
- ddol 16y ago"Non-overlapping"? 25.822 * 10^-6 of Facebook users (1 in ~43,000) use canv.as[1] [1] https://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=176245562391022 https://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=17624556239...
- burgerbrain 16y ago
- daimyoyo 16y agoHe's right you know. Where would we be without Rickrolling and LOL cats? </sarcasm>
- statictype 16y agoIt's like the saying "It's difficult to make someone understand something when his job depends on him not understanding it". Facebook's popularity is driven by attaching your real life to an online identity. 4Chan's success is driven by total anonymity. That the two founders have diametrically opposing views on anonymity is not really surprising. There's certainly merit to both view points.
- ryusage 16y agoI think you're misunderstanding Poole's stance on this. Zuckerberg seems to be pushing for a huge reduction in anonymity - maybe to the point of removing it altogether. That is definately because it would benefit him directly. Poole, though, is just saying that it would be a mistake to assume there's no value to anonymity. He's clearly not saying that everything should be anonymous, since, as pointed out in the article, he's also creating a new site that utilizes FB profiles.
- tomp 16y agoWhile I don't support Mark's ideas and Facebooks' politics about privacy, I really don't get it when people say that you can't manage who sees your FB content. Facebook has for a long time supported Friend Lists. All my photos (and the ones I'm tagged in), except the profile pictures, are only visible to a very small circle of friends. I could do the same thing for status updates if I wanted.
- lreeves 16y agoTwo examples as to why people say it's hard to control access to your content of the top of my heard are a) by default applications that your friends install can access your content. b) Facebook has several times changed their privacy defaults without informing the users, causing reams of older content to be visable to "friends of friends" as opposed to just friends. Unless you check the privacy and application settings approximately every three months then it's easy to get burned when a site upgrade gets rolled out and the "recommended" settings are applied to your account.
- gnosis 16y agoAnother huge privacy hole is that Facebook itself knows who your friends are. That's one of the main reasons I quit using it years ago.
- reustle 16y agoYet he used facebook connect to sign up for his latest project, canv.as?
- ryusage 16y agoMy impression from the article was not that Poole thinks Facebook is evil, or that anonymity is always better than a clear identity. His point was simply that it would be a mistake to eliminate anonymity from the internet entirely. Both systems have valuable benefits. From that standpoint, I don't see any contradiction in the choice for his new project.
- stretchwithme 16y agoMaybe a mix of anonymity and clear identity would work best. Let people have 2 profiles, one anonymous and one not, with behaviors clearly owned by the profile used. They can use the anonymous profile when they feel it might be helpful. But give people the ability to eventual discover who someone is if they have consistently bad behavior over time and when many more people share that opinion than oppose it.
- thatusertwo 16y agoMark Zuckerberg's opinions should make most conspiracy theorist think Big Brother is closer then we think.
- danssig 16y agoExcept that Zuckerberg's "opinions" happen to directly correlate with what makes him the most money (through advertising). Big Brother may benefit from his greed though.
- thatusertwo 16y agoThey say money is the root of all evil.
- RiderOfGiraffes 16y agoNope, that's a mis-quotation. Money is itself not the root of all evil, it's the love of money. Look it up: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Root_of_all_evil http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Root_of_all_evil
- digitaltothem 16y agoWhat I especially like about this model is the following: "content becomes more important than the creator, which is unlike virtually any other online community. Rather than prioritizing the most valued and experienced users..." This is the foundation of creating value.