3 ms·
>No more anonymous trolls, less disinformation/fewer manipulative botnets shaping public discourse, less aggressive behaviour in online games. This assumption
by dexen 5y ago
>No more anonymous trolls, less disinformation/fewer manipulative botnets shaping public discourse, less aggressive behaviour in online games.
This assumption was tested extensively by several platforms, and it failed miserably all the way. You can still witness it yourself, on Facebook, where almost everybody posts under their own name and photo - and yet trolling, brigading, mass reporting, flamewars, and all other continue in force. Even worse, you'll find plenty of bot accounts on places like Twitter, with perfectly fine name and picture, while insightful and dissenting content is delivered by anonymous, or ironically branded, accounts.
The correct solution is to stop trying to shoehorn our preconceived notions from offline life to online activities - and to reminding individual users that power is in their hands. The solution to Eternal September is to teach and integrate newcomers - and sometimes to also gatekeep - rather than trying to become a campus police of sorts. The much different nature - the vastly larger scale - of the internet makes it entirely unsuitable to govern by offline intuition.