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Anonymity is important because it allows you to have discussions purely based on the arguments and opinions, without the bias of who youre talking to. I often

• oxfordmale 5y ago
  I can see the pros and cons of anonymity. However, personally I would delete a lot of my social media accounts if they forced me to disclose my identity. The case of Monika at Stackoverflow suggest you have to be really careful when using your full name, even on reputable sites. Data miners would also absolutely love it and governments are powerless to act on abuse as many of these companies are outside an enforceable jurisdiction.
  • kodah 5y ago
    In case anyone else didn't know the story of Monica Cellio at StackOverflow it's a good one: https://cellio.medium.com/dear-stack-overflow-we-need-to-talk-13bf3f90204f https://cellio.medium.com/dear-stack-overflow-we-need-to-tal...
    • HWR_14 5y ago
      That doesn't seem to tell the story of Monica Cellio, but be a story written by her. One maddeningly vague, unless I want to start digging through tweets to uncover all the things she is alluding to.
    • oxfordmale 5y ago
      The important part is that Stack Exchange mentioned Monica Celio by name in a press release in a manner that was perceived to be defamatory by Monica. The original disagreement was about the CoC. That disagreement/misunderstanding should have been handled in private, there was no need to throw her under the bus
• vincnetas 5y ago
  but it also has a dark side that you can pretend to have deep and meaningful discussion and push your agenda and abuse naive person on the other side of conversation.
  • formerly_proven 5y ago
    How does a mandatory profile picture help with this?
• kordlessagain 5y ago
  With AI, you'll never meet them and know what they look like.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• Kafkish 5y ago
  I just discussed this with a bunch of my friends. If you're having a high level technical exchange with somebody that you don't know, then you find out that that other person is a female, you're really impressed, that a girl will be that good at this very technical topic. If, OTOH, you find out that that other person is a black guy (assuming you're white), you go through one of two reactions: If you're opinion of blacks is low, then you're really impressed. If you don't particularly like blacks (read: racist), then you're disappointed, and slightly pissed off - that that other guy knows more than you do, or know so much about a very technical topic, when he belongs to a group that you've been told are not very bright. Humans are interesting creatures in this regards. That's why the right to remain anonymous online should be a given.
  • bell-cot 5y ago
    My reaction is to say that people should have the choice of being either (1)anonymous or (2)nasty when on-line. Not both. (Non-anonymous and nice obviously being allowed.) Too bad that seems impossible to effectively implement at scale.
    • WarOnPrivacy 5y ago
      > Too bad that seems impossible to effectively implement at scale That is the problem. It's an unsolvable problem for the near+ future - unless we shift so much power from the public to the powerful that they can silence the public on a whim.
    • AnthonyMouse 5y ago
      > Too bad that seems impossible to effectively implement at scale. There are technical solutions to this. The old one was called hashcash, which a predecessor to cryptocurrency. To get an account you would have to do something like $5 in electricity worth of computation one time, which you can do without giving anyone your name. But then if you do something foolish and get banned, it'll cost you another $5 (or however much is necessary to provide a sufficient deterrent) to get a new account. Obviously now you could just have them pay (or mine for you) a small amount of cryptocurrency, which would then go to offset the cost of banning the spammers who still try their luck.
• majormajor 5y ago
  Anonymity can enable that but it also enables far nastier things. There are pros and cons. Simply pointing out pros is not enough to win the day.
  • AndrewUnmuted 5y ago
    It should be enough to win the day. There is nothing other than anonymity than can provide the pro put forth by the OP. On the other hand, the "cons," you are making non-specific reference towards are achievable by any number of strategies and are a common facet of everyday life.
  • JasonFruit 5y ago
    When the conversation starts with, "Let's ban anonymous accounts!", then enumerating points in favor of anonymous accounts is the right response.
    • ethanbond 5y ago
      The conversation didn’t start with that. The conversation started with widespread abuse online originating from anonymous accounts. Communities without abuse problems never even float the idea of banning anonymity. One reason being it’s extremely expensive to do that if not effectively impossible.
      • KingMachiavelli 5y ago
        Then don't use those platforms? If you need a community that is going to be prone to abuse problems then make your own platform. Politicians and government offices should know better than to be using a commercial social media as their primary platform especially when it's not even based in your own country.
        • ethanbond 5y ago
          FWIW I agree governments should not ban anonymity, but that’s a position I’d hold regardless of whether it impacts abuse at all.
• Larrikin 5y ago
  As someone who was a long time user of 4chan and that believed this once before, I now adamantly disagree that total anonymity leads to better discussion and believe that 4chan and the like are ultimately failed experiments. With total anonymity you end up with trolls or people who are just seriously misinformed arguing vigorously. You can spend the time and present arguments to possibly convince an actual reasonable person. It gets tiresome over time posting the same basic information. Most of the boards on there end up with a good baseline of information for their topics over years, but for anyone slightly knowledgeable it is tiresome to move topics to that eventual baseline and especially to move them past it. That same information can usually be collected from less toxic sources in a few months as opposed to years that the collective takes. Every once in a while you'll get a fresh expert that hasn't gotten tired of posting the same information, but I stopped years ago bothering to share any information I had. It's always an up hill battle and the posts will be gone in a few hours or, at best, days But trolls end up dominating. If you waste your time writing informed sourced posts about anything (slavery is bad, the Holocaust happened, Earth isn't flat, etc) all that will happen is the person will eventually just criticize basic grammar mistakes, insult you, and post the same garbage in a new thread. If you make the mistake of arguing with organized trolls, you'll get link bombed with shit sources and barely tangentially related long sources that suck up your time before you realize that they don't present any facts that are actually relevant to the discussion. Even 4chan knows this. The business board has measures in place to inform readers when a poster is the same person. Real names are not needed online to have good discussion. But it's absolutely needed for posters to have repercussions for past posts. True anonymity leads to shallow discussion and trolls.
  • echelon 5y ago
    You need anonymity with reputational score. Satoshi Nakamoto. Associate anonymous posts with an optional pubkey signing. Have tooling that can filter out bad actor signatures and highlight the ones you care about. Have your interest graph and peer graph suggest new public keys to follow. Identities can remain private.
    • WarOnPrivacy 5y ago
• EGreg 5y ago
  The more I questioned why we need profile pics or real names, or even usernames online, the more I realized ... we don't. They are just vectors for deanonymizing people across sites. Will I remember "lionkor" among thousands of other HN posters and think about your previous posts? No. But I can click and see your other posts, if the site lets me have that feature. And more importantly, your REPUTATION tells me how many people have upvoted your content that you produce. That's what's relevant. I could also maybe see how strongly you support certain positions (tags/badges) in your profile. It's the latter (reputations and badges) which can serve as a filter for people to set up if they want to ignore trolls and sybil accounts: https://xkcd.com/810/ https://xkcd.com/810/ Similarly we don't need human-readable URLs, we could do perfectly fine with hashes and no politics about domain names. The domain name system is just a glorified search engine, and URLs are only useful for landing on the homepage of a site ... anything longer becomes increasingly hard to verbally communicate, and if we're doing it non-verbally then we may as well send a non-readable URL (e.g. via a link or QR code or a javascript variable).
  • lionkor 5y ago
    > how many people have upvoted your content that you produce This is what I wish I said! It's about what you say, not who you are, everything else will just be used for bias and "cancelling". I hang out on IRCs a fair bit, and those are almost perfect for this. Maybe if instead of usernames it would just be numbers, that'd be perfect. Simple and effective exchange of ideas, without any bias as to "who is this", "what do they look like", etc.
• ivan_gammel 5y ago
  What you are talking about is not anonymity, it is identity protection. There are many pre-digital examples of what it could be: witness protection programs, confidentiality of journalist sources etc. They are all established, well regulated and with lots of precedents of analysis of those practices in courts. Full anonymity can and should be banned, but we need to develop some sort of new professional privilege to protect digital identity, where you can speak as Jane Doe, but someone knows who you truly are. Whether it is an independent identity platform, a notary keeping an encryption key, a government agency or anyone else who can be hold accountable, that can be discussed and established not just in a law of a single country, but ideally in an international treaty.
  • hpoe 5y ago
    So two points: First you advocate special people should get special protections for being in a special job, I am sure that will work out real well. Second all of these arguments seem to suggest just letting the government know you identity as some sort of compromise, but what about when it is the government I am trying to avoid, sure someone can dox me, or can tell my employer to fire me, but only the government can arrest me and execute me if they determine I've done something to upset someone powerful enough within the government. Sure the government can eventually track me down with their resources, but anything that makes it harder is better.
    • ivan_gammel 5y ago
      I did not say „special people“. The confidentiality privilege applies to the keepers of the information about identity, not to the people who own the identity - that could be anyone. If some government wants to control what you say online, they will make sure you do not have any anonymity at all, like China does with Uigurs by forcing them to use devices with pre-installed tracking software. Many countries do not have technical capabilities to do so, but this also means that main beneficiaries of anonymity there are radical political and criminal groups rather than ordinary people, which may not even have good access to the Internet.
• naravara 5y ago
  > Anonymity is important because it allows you to have discussions purely based on the arguments and opinions, without the bias of who youre talking to. I often find myself having a wonderfully deep discussion with someone online, and when I eventually find out what they look like (etc), I often realize that they dont look as friendly, educated, etc as they are. Yes and no. Anonymity also prompts people to make lots of assumptions about you based on what and how you say things that may not hold and may even distort how the messages are received. For example, I'm an ethnic minority but if I break from certain aspects of identarian political dogma it is generally assumed that I am White. Women who deviate from a certain line on gender issues are, similarly, often assumed to be male unless they indicate otherwise. On issues where a person's lived experiences stemming from their identity might matter, the assumption of there being a 'default' identity ends up kind of polarizing perspectives and eliding nuances and potential middle-ground on a host of issues. Put another way, it has been said that "on the internet nobody knows you're a dog." But not everyone defines themselves by their "dogness" to the same extent, nor does being a "dog" mean the same thing to all dogs. But since we assume everyone is a default template until they loudly and proudly fly an identifying marker, the only voices who speak for the dogs will be the doggiest of the doggy, the people whose identity as dogs is the most important thing to them in that moment. Bringing that back to a concrete example, I remember when I first made the switch from Windows to Macintosh in the early aughts (in the peak of the Switch ad era). Initially making the switch was kind of a revelation. I had really just never experienced a computer that was well designed before nor technology that put this much attention towards--what I would later learn to refer to as--UI/UX. I could not stop evangelizing this to everyone who would listen because, to me, it was new and super cool and I was just really really enthusiastic about it. This happened often enough that Apple fanatics online got a reputation for being over-exuberant and kind of deluded. But the thing is, after a few years I just stopped posting about Apple stuff because I had grown into having more balanced and nuanced perspectives on computing. But the assumption in a place like Slashdot back then was that you're a Linux or Windows guy unless you state otherwise. Thus only the newly converted, over-excited Apple fanboys are taken as representative of Mac users and the ones with mellower perspectives are drowned out. With computing platforms it's all rather frivolous and probably doesn't matter. But when it comes to social or political issues, this dynamic can have real effects on what we think of as an authentically [group] opinion and who gets to speak for whom. I think it has a tendency to foster a certain essentialist way of looking at the world that is rife with ecological fallacies.
• worrycue 5y ago
  > Anonymity is important because it allows you to have discussions purely based on the arguments and opinions, without the bias of who youre talking to. Unfortunately often we do rely on the other person’s reputation, giving us information as to their possible biases and an initial estimate of their level of competence on the subject matter, in order to assign the appropriate weight to their opinions - especially when it comes to topics outside our scope of expertise. With anonymity we often put everyone on the same level thus won’t be able to properly weigh varying opinions and filter out opinions that are the least likely to be of value.