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> It could be a malicious Alice. I don't care if I talk with Alice or with Bob, I'm only interested in what "Alice" or "Bob" have to say, i.e. what they actual

> It could be a malicious Alice. I don't care if I talk with Alice or with Bob, I'm only interested in what "Alice" or "Bob" have to say, i.e. what they actually write down/share, I'm not at all interested in their identities. Because of that the coming apart of the whole blue-checkmark thing is really great, as it changes us all back to "Alice" and "Bob" and, hopefully, in so doing it will put the impetus back on what we are actually saying and not on our Alice-ness or Bob-ness.

dragontamer 4y ago
You ever talk on 4chan? Fully anonymous just leads to people building tons of fake accounts. You could be talking to 20x people, but they're all Bob who is just obsessed with proving his point and making it look like his point is popular. A degree of identify verification, to mitigate bots, spammers, mass posters, and other such issues is at minimum for discussion on today's internet.
- paganel 4y ago
  > You ever talk on 4chan? Why would I do that? > You could be talking to 20x people, but they're all Bob who is just obsessed with proving If Bob goes full Pessoa and creates 20 different heteronomies I'm all for it, but unfortunately that never quite happens and you get the gist of Bob1, Bob2... Bob20 being all the same person pretty fast. > and other such issues is at minimum for discussion on today's internet. This place seems to function decently well, at least for now, and I didn't even have to give them my email address.
  - dragontamer 4y ago
    > Why would I do that? Because its fully anonymous chat/discussion. I'm wondering if you have experience with anonymous chat where identities don't matter. Unlike you, I have experienced it back in the day. So I think I have a thing to say or two about anonymous chat, the tactics that occur on those forums and how meme culture spreads, how the community uses memes to "defend" themselves and establish a group identity, etc. etc. If you don't care about identities, you'll likely build a system that turns into 4chan (or something like it). That's all I'm saying. When you say things like: > I'm not at all interested in their identities. Well, that reminds me of 4chan. That's all. If you really didn't care, there's a forum out there that works like that. I do suggest you try it out for a bit and figure out why its culture is the way it is. > This place seems to function decently well Because moderators like @dang come around here and ban accounts that engage in these activities. Mastodon allows for the servers to "ban" other individuals or even servers that are misbehaving, so its not fully anonymous or unmoderated. Its not as trusted as a central server though (like Twitter was). Hard to see where everything will end up.
    - paganel 4y ago
      I have not been active on chat groups for 20 years now, give or take, but I have been an anonymous user of both this website and of reddit for 15 years now, with varying levels of success. Were these 2 websites to ask me for my real identity I would just ditch them (even though, if one looks close enough, one can get to my real name by following some links to my projects I posted some time ago) > If you really didn't care, there's a forum out there that works like that I'm not really interested in the identity of people posting here, the same goes for reddit. As I said, I have been quite happy with this state of things for 15 years now. They might decide to change it going forward, but, then again, there's always other anonymous forums somewhere on the web. Related to this, interesting how things have changed compared to, when was it?, 2012-2014?, i.e. when Google was pushing for the "real identity" stuff for their Google+ users. I remember the backlash from back then, almost none of it has remained.
- idlewords 4y ago
  You're arguing this on a discussion forum that works just fine without identity verification (since it relies on long-term reputation for pseudonymous accounts).
  - dragontamer 4y ago
    This discussion site has moderators actively patrolling for throwaway accounts, and uses shadow-banning to discourage them from messing up our discussions. We need those kinds of assurances to have decent discussions on any site today. I'm not 100% sure if Tumblr has it or how Twitter worked either. But identity is important. Maybe not the _SPECIFIC_ identity of who you or I am. But enough of an identity to say that you (or I) am not double-making accounts, astroturfing opinions or the like.
    - idlewords 4y ago
      That's what I mean by long-term pseudonymous accounts. My point is that persistent identity (which we are both talking about here) is not the same as verified identity. As long as there's a way to build reputation on the site, readers can distinguish newbie accounts and impostors from long-running community members. You don't need a mechanism to check anyone's ID.

dragontamer 4y ago

You ever talk on 4chan? Fully anonymous just leads to people building tons of fake accounts. You could be talking to 20x people, but they're all Bob who is just obsessed with proving his point and making it look like his point is popular. A degree of identify verification, to mitigate bots, spammers, mass posters, and other such issues is at minimum for discussion on today's internet.

paganel 4y ago
> You ever talk on 4chan? Why would I do that? > You could be talking to 20x people, but they're all Bob who is just obsessed with proving If Bob goes full Pessoa and creates 20 different heteronomies I'm all for it, but unfortunately that never quite happens and you get the gist of Bob1, Bob2... Bob20 being all the same person pretty fast. > and other such issues is at minimum for discussion on today's internet. This place seems to function decently well, at least for now, and I didn't even have to give them my email address.
- dragontamer 4y ago
  > Why would I do that? Because its fully anonymous chat/discussion. I'm wondering if you have experience with anonymous chat where identities don't matter. Unlike you, I have experienced it back in the day. So I think I have a thing to say or two about anonymous chat, the tactics that occur on those forums and how meme culture spreads, how the community uses memes to "defend" themselves and establish a group identity, etc. etc. If you don't care about identities, you'll likely build a system that turns into 4chan (or something like it). That's all I'm saying. When you say things like: > I'm not at all interested in their identities. Well, that reminds me of 4chan. That's all. If you really didn't care, there's a forum out there that works like that. I do suggest you try it out for a bit and figure out why its culture is the way it is. > This place seems to function decently well Because moderators like @dang come around here and ban accounts that engage in these activities. Mastodon allows for the servers to "ban" other individuals or even servers that are misbehaving, so its not fully anonymous or unmoderated. Its not as trusted as a central server though (like Twitter was). Hard to see where everything will end up.
  - paganel 4y ago
    I have not been active on chat groups for 20 years now, give or take, but I have been an anonymous user of both this website and of reddit for 15 years now, with varying levels of success. Were these 2 websites to ask me for my real identity I would just ditch them (even though, if one looks close enough, one can get to my real name by following some links to my projects I posted some time ago) > If you really didn't care, there's a forum out there that works like that I'm not really interested in the identity of people posting here, the same goes for reddit. As I said, I have been quite happy with this state of things for 15 years now. They might decide to change it going forward, but, then again, there's always other anonymous forums somewhere on the web. Related to this, interesting how things have changed compared to, when was it?, 2012-2014?, i.e. when Google was pushing for the "real identity" stuff for their Google+ users. I remember the backlash from back then, almost none of it has remained.
idlewords 4y ago
You're arguing this on a discussion forum that works just fine without identity verification (since it relies on long-term reputation for pseudonymous accounts).
- dragontamer 4y ago
  This discussion site has moderators actively patrolling for throwaway accounts, and uses shadow-banning to discourage them from messing up our discussions. We need those kinds of assurances to have decent discussions on any site today. I'm not 100% sure if Tumblr has it or how Twitter worked either. But identity is important. Maybe not the _SPECIFIC_ identity of who you or I am. But enough of an identity to say that you (or I) am not double-making accounts, astroturfing opinions or the like.
  - idlewords 4y ago
    That's what I mean by long-term pseudonymous accounts. My point is that persistent identity (which we are both talking about here) is not the same as verified identity. As long as there's a way to build reputation on the site, readers can distinguish newbie accounts and impostors from long-running community members. You don't need a mechanism to check anyone's ID.