2 ms·

> You can be pseudonymous to google but known to your friends, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. That's all good in theory but it's basically im

by esrauch 15y ago

> You can be pseudonymous to google but known to your friends, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. That's all good in theory but it's basically impossible in practice. You have to specifically get someones username in meatspace to be able to start following them on twitter; that probably works for your close friends but not at all for acquaintances. There are a couple of dozen people on Google+ and Facebook that follow me and vice versa that I have some interaction with that I never would have just gone up to and said "Send me your google+ username" in real life. It just doesn't scale well at all; you have to memorize the mapping from username to actual name for your entire social graph. I have no desire to learn two names for each person, one actual name and one that looks like "0x12". If I have an old friend named Pete Smith that I haven't interacted with in a while that is among the 200 people I am following on twitter, it's impossible for me to go look at his recent tweets or at-tweet to him something awesome that reminds me of old times, because I have no idea what his username is. His name is Pete Smith, that's what I always called him and that's what everyone calls him, why is he using a new name that potentially doesn't even map to something that people would identify as a name. There was a time where I knew my friend's username on a forum was some insane misspelling of Obsolete Oaf, and it was just literally impossible for me to type it because it was something like Obs0le7e 0af. I even knew my friends username was (in one sense) and I still didn't know it well enough to type it in to search. There is enormous value to me in having people's names online be discoverable and searchable by the name that I actually know them by. Google+, Facebook and LinkedIn provide enormous value to me, tumblr and twitter provide almost none, and I don't think that is a coincidence. Your experiences may differ, twitter and tumblr are both obviously very popular. I'm really not saying that you are wrong if you want to use those services, I do think you are wrong to act like a company is evil because it is providing a service that isn't what you want to use.

deleted 15y ago
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frossie 15y ago
you have to memorize the mapping from username to actual name for your entire social graph Well, what can I say - in the cases where I know both wallet name and online identity for somebody, not only can I remember both, but if anything the pseudonym is easier. I mean, I can type Skud right off, but I have to go check how many Rs are in Kirrily (Kirilly? Kiriley?). Also in my experience, if you slip and call someone by their nick in real life, they aren't offended. Unless you are writing them a job reference, it doesn't seem to be much of a problem. And let's don't forget than in some cases an online persona's personality really is quite different from the meatspace one. In cases where this happens, a different name is almost a necessity. Who knows what the Macalope is like in real life? It doesn't matter, it has a name and a persona it the space that it operates in.
vidarh 15y ago
You are making a lot of assumptions. First of all, lots of us have friends or acquaintances we have never met in "meatspace". In many cases we do only know them by pseudonyms. Pseudonyms we now can't use if we wish to connect to them on Google+ I started out in the C64 demo scene, and though I never released anything of significance, there were at least at one point more people that knew me by my pseudonym than by my real name. I don't use mine any more, but many do. For a lot of those people, being able to be searchable by their pseudonym is important if they are to connect to friends, and in many cases, it may be detrimental for them to have their pseudonym tied to their real name. Conversely many people very intentionally do not want to be searchable. Google is free to operate with whatever rules they want within the law, but it is pretty infuriating when on one side they've shown they in some ways understand the social graph far better than facebook ("friendships" are NOT in any way symmetrical in real life, and we're usually very careful about what we share with whom), while in other ways totally failing to grasp that pseudonymity is also a massive part of human culture: We don't carry around giant posters with a bunch of personal information tied to our full name. We often intentionally don't give our last names out. We often choose to either share about ourselves or let someone know our "real" identity. Failing to grasp this is one thing. Continuing to boneheadedly refusing to acknowledge the problem and fixing it is another. It shows that Google understands the social graph far less than what the initial rollout of Google+ seemed to indicate.
- esrauch 15y ago
  That is all well and good, I hope you can realize that the vast majority of people were not part of the C64 demo scene, and the vast majority of people meet new people strictly in meatspace (except perhaps online dating, which is for the purpose of meeting people in meetspace). To say that a website with even 40 million users should be catering to the extremely tiny (and apparently extremely vocal) minority of people who want to share things with people without sharing their name with those people is egotistical at best. I honestly think that it is you don't understand that you are almost certainly in the minuscule minority of people who have a pseudonymous social graph, and that it is only to the detriment of most people to have screennames instead of real names on a social network. I honestly believe there are more blind Americans then people who have any significant portion of their social graph as pseudonymous, you are acting it's absurd that Google isn't catering to the C64 demo scene. There are probably dozens of design choices that are preventing blind people from using Google+ how they would want it, but somehow that isn't making front page news, why not? > We don't carry around giant posters with a bunch of personal information tied to our full name. And on Google+ you get to choose who can see any part of your profile except for your name. There is no giant poster of personal information that is public unless that is exactly what you choose that you want. > Conversely many people very intentionally do not want to be searchable. On both facebook and Google+ you can set yourself not to be searchable in general; that is a completely different issue that being able to find someon you personally know among the list of your friends, or seeing a comment on one of your posts and having no idea who it is because the person is going by a completely random noun rather than what you actually call them.
pessimizer 15y ago
Depends on your definition of close friends, and your definition of acquaintances. If acquaintances include the boyfriend of someone you somewhat knew in high school, then my use of a pseudonym that I had never used before worked for acquaintances while using facebook. What it didn't work for was people who simply had my name but didn't know any of my friends and/or were not specifically invited by me in facebook or real life to become my friend. If you were looking for a guy who had my real name on facebook, you were out of luck. If you noticed one of your friends having a conversation with me, and asked who I was and knew me/recognized who I was due to the content of the conversation/recognized me as likely someone you might want to know based on your sampling of my adjacent nodes and my public content, you would have been able to find me. >"There is enormous value to me in having people's names online be discoverable and searchable by the name that I actually know them by." Not everybody wants to be discoverable in the same way. I may not want you to be able to find me just because you know my name. Maybe I want to avoid old one night stands/people I did drugs with/people I was in prison with/the obsessed schizophrenic who lives in my building and rely on my current network of friends and serendipity to populate my friend list. I think the most important question is whether you are tolerant or intolerant towards that - noting that even if you do require real names, you won't be able to find mine anyway, because I won't be there. That question addressed to google or facebook is: "Are you still interested in me as a customer if you can't track me after I've left your system?" If the answer if "No," you may not be evil, but you're certainly creepy.

by esrauch 15y ago

deleted 15y ago

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frossie 15y ago

you have to memorize the mapping from username to actual name for your entire social graph Well, what can I say - in the cases where I know both wallet name and online identity for somebody, not only can I remember both, but if anything the pseudonym is easier. I mean, I can type Skud right off, but I have to go check how many Rs are in Kirrily (Kirilly? Kiriley?). Also in my experience, if you slip and call someone by their nick in real life, they aren't offended. Unless you are writing them a job reference, it doesn't seem to be much of a problem. And let's don't forget than in some cases an online persona's personality really is quite different from the meatspace one. In cases where this happens, a different name is almost a necessity. Who knows what the Macalope is like in real life? It doesn't matter, it has a name and a persona it the space that it operates in.

vidarh 15y ago

You are making a lot of assumptions. First of all, lots of us have friends or acquaintances we have never met in "meatspace". In many cases we do only know them by pseudonyms. Pseudonyms we now can't use if we wish to connect to them on Google+ I started out in the C64 demo scene, and though I never released anything of significance, there were at least at one point more people that knew me by my pseudonym than by my real name. I don't use mine any more, but many do. For a lot of those people, being able to be searchable by their pseudonym is important if they are to connect to friends, and in many cases, it may be detrimental for them to have their pseudonym tied to their real name. Conversely many people very intentionally do not want to be searchable. Google is free to operate with whatever rules they want within the law, but it is pretty infuriating when on one side they've shown they in some ways understand the social graph far better than facebook ("friendships" are NOT in any way symmetrical in real life, and we're usually very careful about what we share with whom), while in other ways totally failing to grasp that pseudonymity is also a massive part of human culture: We don't carry around giant posters with a bunch of personal information tied to our full name. We often intentionally don't give our last names out. We often choose to either share about ourselves or let someone know our "real" identity. Failing to grasp this is one thing. Continuing to boneheadedly refusing to acknowledge the problem and fixing it is another. It shows that Google understands the social graph far less than what the initial rollout of Google+ seemed to indicate.

esrauch 15y ago
That is all well and good, I hope you can realize that the vast majority of people were not part of the C64 demo scene, and the vast majority of people meet new people strictly in meatspace (except perhaps online dating, which is for the purpose of meeting people in meetspace). To say that a website with even 40 million users should be catering to the extremely tiny (and apparently extremely vocal) minority of people who want to share things with people without sharing their name with those people is egotistical at best. I honestly think that it is you don't understand that you are almost certainly in the minuscule minority of people who have a pseudonymous social graph, and that it is only to the detriment of most people to have screennames instead of real names on a social network. I honestly believe there are more blind Americans then people who have any significant portion of their social graph as pseudonymous, you are acting it's absurd that Google isn't catering to the C64 demo scene. There are probably dozens of design choices that are preventing blind people from using Google+ how they would want it, but somehow that isn't making front page news, why not? > We don't carry around giant posters with a bunch of personal information tied to our full name. And on Google+ you get to choose who can see any part of your profile except for your name. There is no giant poster of personal information that is public unless that is exactly what you choose that you want. > Conversely many people very intentionally do not want to be searchable. On both facebook and Google+ you can set yourself not to be searchable in general; that is a completely different issue that being able to find someon you personally know among the list of your friends, or seeing a comment on one of your posts and having no idea who it is because the person is going by a completely random noun rather than what you actually call them.

pessimizer 15y ago

Depends on your definition of close friends, and your definition of acquaintances. If acquaintances include the boyfriend of someone you somewhat knew in high school, then my use of a pseudonym that I had never used before worked for acquaintances while using facebook. What it didn't work for was people who simply had my name but didn't know any of my friends and/or were not specifically invited by me in facebook or real life to become my friend. If you were looking for a guy who had my real name on facebook, you were out of luck. If you noticed one of your friends having a conversation with me, and asked who I was and knew me/recognized who I was due to the content of the conversation/recognized me as likely someone you might want to know based on your sampling of my adjacent nodes and my public content, you would have been able to find me. >"There is enormous value to me in having people's names online be discoverable and searchable by the name that I actually know them by." Not everybody wants to be discoverable in the same way. I may not want you to be able to find me just because you know my name. Maybe I want to avoid old one night stands/people I did drugs with/people I was in prison with/the obsessed schizophrenic who lives in my building and rely on my current network of friends and serendipity to populate my friend list. I think the most important question is whether you are tolerant or intolerant towards that - noting that even if you do require real names, you won't be able to find mine anyway, because I won't be there. That question addressed to google or facebook is: "Are you still interested in me as a customer if you can't track me after I've left your system?" If the answer if "No," you may not be evil, but you're certainly creepy.