7 ms·

Stable pseudonyms create a more civil environment than real names: study (2021)

205 points by cubefox 3y ago

MrYellowP 3y ago
[flagged]
- LoganDark 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
nuc1e0n 3y ago
Obviously everyone should aim to be civil online, but at the same time if someone does become abusive when you're speaking anonymously online I would suggest you shouldn't take offence easily. There are many radically differing views in the world so we need to become adept at navigating them courteously, but also firmly and with conviction.
- chowells 3y ago
  What's the correct response to "justify your existence" from someone listing their location as the next town over and with a profile pic showing themself holding multiple guns?
  - godshatter 3y ago
    Nothing, probably. Unless you're really into guns and want to know how well they like their Glock 17.
- nuc1e0n 3y ago
  Also, without the verbal intonation of speech it can be quite difficult to not misinterpret the emotional sentiment of what's written online. It's for that reason emojis were invented and are useful.
  - S04dKHzrKT 3y ago
    Key & Peele have a good comedy sketch covering that. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=naleynXS7yo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=naleynXS7yo (NSFW language)
    - nuc1e0n 3y ago
      That's a hilarious sketch. Thanks for sharing :D
- vacuity 3y ago
  And remember that, sometimes, leaving a conversation is the best thing you can do for yourself.
  - nuc1e0n 3y ago
    Yeah. If you don't like a response don't respond back to it. On the internet there's no requirement to.
neonate 3y ago
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/jopp.12149 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/jopp.12149 https://sci-hub.se/https://doi.org/10.1111/jopp.12149 https://sci-hub.se/https://doi.org/10.1111/jopp.12149
n9 3y ago
I worked at Huffpost through all three of these phases in a technical capacity adjacent to comments and moderation, as director of technical operations and eventually as head of engineering. This study has significant questions to answer about their methods and assumptions that is summed up here: "Second, we know that HuffPo used both manual and algorithmic moderation in all three phases, but we do not know how the policies changed under the different identificatory regimes." Given whay I know about Huffpo's moderation system and their statement that they don't have understanding of them I'd say that nothing reported in this study should be considered valid for a few reasons. One is that Huffpost used many different systems of moderations following many changing standards throughout their days as a big news site (#3 in the US at one point) and the biggest news-based community, which they were for several years. They started with no moderation, then human moderation with evolving standards and practices that were overseen by a brilliant community team. Then they bought Julia in 2010(? ish) which was a very early machine learning moderation system that was trained on millions of human made moderation decisions before launch and whose training and internals were constantly updated and improved for years. Julia was dropped for Facebook comments later on, at which point Facebook did most of the basica moderation but was still assited by human moderators. My first critique of this analysis is that the authors have no data or understanding of the moderation actions that resulted in suppression of comments or users. How can an analysis make any claims without this data? So far as they know the comment-flow was more hostile during the periods they observe as more civil, but there were just far more comments suppressed. Just one of dozens of other internal details of the operation that would invalidate their conclusions would be that Huffpost quiet-deleted comments for a significant period of time -- meaning that you could post, and you would see your posts in context when you were logged in but no one else would see them. They also silent-banned users. This and other details of implementation create a great deal of complexity and secondary effects. I can attest that moderation was very, very active and that lots and lots of comments were moderated down and out of the comment threads... again indicating significantly less civility than any retrospective analysis would be able to discern without all the data. I also find it interesting that this study chose Huffpost for the analysis. At the site's hights of success and profit the comment threads were the reason for their SEO dominance and were considered to be the most important secret sauce. Huffpost moderation was the best in the business by a long measure. With the methodology presented it would make sense to me to say that Huffpost would appear to be the most civil of the big sites of the time. So it is interesting that this study focuses singly on Huffpost and reports that their theories indicate this differential. While the authors do cover some of this in their section on Limitations, they don't cover near enough to justify their results... instead this reads as another cherry-picking study where authors had a theory and found a dataset that confirmed it while being unaware of fundamental reasons why that dataset was an outlier, making it impossible for them to build in the needed controls in their methods.
precompute 3y ago
The internet is moving towards the "real world", so the new people think it's the platform that matters and not the people. The truth is, the internet isn't really for content consumption, it's for meeting and talking to people and making friends. The further away we move from that, the more dystopian tech will become.
Nostromos 3y ago
Very interesting. I'd always felt that real-name policies made for more civil but less vibrant and dynamic discussion. Moderation seems to be the key for any platform that allows for pseudonyms but the idea of stable pseudonyms makes intuitive sense. n9 does make some excellent points about this study. So what does this boil down to? Moderate heavily and put up barriers to discourage bad actors, which is what everyone knows and is kinda boring.
- temp51723 3y ago
  Real names seems like it'd make people - in general - feel the need to save face more than a pseudonym.
- eitland 3y ago
  This very website should be proof enough that real names are absolutely not necessary for civil discussion. I think we even get better discussions when the shy and thoughtful are allowed to speak.
  - CaptainFever 3y ago
    Additionally, the marginalized value anonymity, especially in countries where their marginalization is criminalized.
- GaryNumanVevo 3y ago
  Nextdoor is a good counter argument here
  - krapp 3y ago
    We've known that since the halcyon days of USENET when everyone put their real name and university emails in their signatures. We also know it because it doesn't work on Facebook, and it didn't work when Google decided they needed to do a Facebook and they forced everyone's G+ account to merge with Youtube. People who feel entitled to their opinion and lack empathy will absolutely, with their whole chest, be an asshole and sign their John Hancock to it. The truth is, you can't engineer civility. Anonymity? Look at 4chan. Make people pay? Now the assholes believe they've purchased the privilege to do whatever they like. Even Hacker News, a platform moderated to within an inch of its life, with both real-name and pseudonymous accounts, only tends to be civil within a small window of circumstance. Everywhere else it's as likely as not to be a dumpster fire.
everdrive 3y ago
It's been years, and people are still confused about what causes online hostility. This study seems to be a good step in the right direction. A number of people believe that anonymity alone is to blame, and this just incorrect. People are even more hostile in cars, where the salient points seem to be: - Lack of direct proximity (ie, you're not face-to-face with someone.) - Inability to read body language cues correctly. (again, not face-to-face) - Probably something to do with the inherently competitive nature of driving. (eg, many people see being "behind" as losing and being in "front" as winning) In any case, people are immediately identifiable and culpable in a vehicle -- there are cameras everywhere, and everyone has a mandated government ID on the car. Twitter seems to be another obvious example. People are horrible all over the platform, but many of the worst people aren't anonymous whatsoever. It seems to be the format more than the anonymity.
- loceng 3y ago
  There can be 1000s, if not 1,000,000s of paid shills by bad actors present online media - whether industrial complexes or domestic-foreign enemies being paid to cause problems, to be divisive - to divide and conquer; and what % will be AI bots that can have their own unique personalities and behaviour? I think we're going to have to be very careful-intentional in the near future of who we decide to interact with, though an ideological mob won't likely particularly care if they're being manipulated by nefarious actors who aim to weaponized a mob.
  - everdrive 3y ago
    This is a good point that I hadn't considered. How can you trust mutual cooperation over time if you can't be sure you're even talking to a person? And crucially, if the ratio of malicious actors drowns out the cooperators, it may not matter how altruistically the remaining cooperators act.
    - causal 3y ago
      Doesn't even need to drown out cooperators - one in a hundred interactions can be enough to ruin your day.
imzadi 3y ago
I think a lot of the more thoughtful commenters probably stop commenting when their real name becomes involved. Even if what they are saying is not inflammatory, there is always a chance of making a misstep or just having a bad opinion without fully understanding it. In the modern age, everything is forever. There's no room to evolve. If you say the wrong thing now, you're stuck with it, even if your actual beliefs change and grow, the fragment left behind is what remains reality. The only people who want to openly comment under their real name are people who don't care or who are already intentionally inflammatory.
- mattxxx 3y ago
  Agreed here. Using a real name is a deal breaker for a lot of people, and as a result you lose their contributions, which hypothetically could be more informed.
- supertrope 3y ago
  Mark Zuckerberg touted real name comments as the solution to online trolling and bad behavior. Of course he means Facebook profiles to be that identifier. Plenty of local news websites comment sections are clogged with flaming by people who are not deterred by having their meatspace name attached to their comments. There’s a lot of spam from FB comments too.
  - sideshowb 3y ago
    Conveniently, real names are more valuable to advertisers, I presume
- tech_ken 3y ago
  > Even if what they are saying is not inflammatory, there is always a chance of making a misstep or just having a bad opinion without fully understanding it. In the modern age, everything is forever. There's no room to evolve. Is this actually true or is it just something people say? I feel like there's plenty of room for people to grow or change their beliefs these days, it seems like every other day someone in power or in the spotlight says something like "oh that was something I used to believe but I've changed since" and that's kind of the end of it. Rarely do I feel like someone is entirely blacklisted for some opinion they held in their past but no longer hold, unless that past behavior was either abusive or straight up mean. Maybe I'm just not tuned in enough though.
tech_ken 3y ago
No real control for the changing population you might expect under each sign-up regime? Seems like in the first case sign-ups are super frictionless, so heavy trolling is expected. Second phase has some mild friction, so results make sense. But in the third de-anonymized phase I would assume that any FB user can comment basically by default, so presumably the circle of discourse is at its widest point. In a world where someone needs to care enough to make an account to comment presumably the quality of post is higher than when any random passerby can leave their thoughts?
boomlinde 3y ago
It seems to me like the second phase might have introduced a slight barrier to entry (that of having to register a name) that was removed again in phase 3 (which I assume made the comment sections immediately available to anyone logged into a Facebook account).
kmeisthax 3y ago
>In the third phase, the commenting system was outsourced to Facebook This seems to be an apples-and-oranges comparison, no? Or at the very least, there's a confounding factor here: how difficult it is to start commenting. The average Internet user is far more likely to have a Facebook account than a HuffPo[0] account. Furthermore, Facebook does very little moderation. This means that in both the totally anonymous and Facebook real-name eras, commenting is just a matter of clicking a button to proceed, rather than registering an account, validating an e-mail, etc. Furthermore, when you run your own comment section you can build your own moderation tools which Facebook might lack. You also have the ability to restrict signups - even if you're using Facebook as an ID provider (e.g. those "Login with Facebook" buttons). If HuffPo gets a bunch of media attention they can shut off registration and the comment section will consist entirely of people who already got in before the huge crush of spammers. Or they could heavily moderate comments posted around a specific time if they built a tool for that. I'd like to know what would happen if, say, you had your own account system, but usernames were hidden from other commenters. Moderators could of course see and ban whole accounts if needed. I have a feeling it'd perform similarly to psuedonymity. [0] I had to fight the urge to call it HuffPuff.
avgcorrection 3y ago
I can’t express how unreasonable it is to demand real identities in internet discussions. You can chit-chat with your mouth among a group of people and be mostly fine. You don’t have to weigh every word. At worst what you say will be spread in a small radius, becoming ever less reliable for every level of hearsay. But on the internet? That’s potentially omnipresent and forever. People have different personas in real life. While going under the same name. It’s how people operate.
jokoon 3y ago
I just think people should be accountable for their online behavior. It's not very hard to do. If people are accountable for what they say, act and do in public, the same rule should apply on public forums. Anonymity is good, as long as you don't abuse it, and it's being used for good reasons. Maybe I don't have a thick skin, but honestly, toxicity is not a feature of the internet, it is a problem, and everybody knows that the internet is generally a cesspool where you can't trust anybody. That's not good. It's not only up to media companies to sanitize their platforms, it's also up to the law to set better standards. It doesn't have to be like that. The worst things are, the more people will want a china-style social score. I'm pro free speech, but free speech cannot exist out of nothing, there is a certain set of condition required for free speech to work well.
- richrichie 3y ago
  Free speech is absolute, unconditional. Otherwise, it is a misnomer. Free speech is priceless. Its value is better appreciated if you are born into free speech and lose it entirely. The “thick skin” we need is of the kind that absorbs all kind of speech - the one we like and do not like.
tithe 3y ago
Isn't this why HN attributes "karma" to a username?
nonrandomstring 3y ago
A few earlier morsels from my refs [0..2] [0] Greenstadt, Rachel, "What is the value of anonymous communication?", 32C3 Chaos Computer Congress, December 2015 [1] Poole Chris .M, "The case for anonymity online", TED, February 2010 [2] Knott-Craig, Alan, "The power of anonymity", TEDx Cape Town, February 2012
smrtinsert 3y ago
I've heard from several FB moderators that prevent brand new accounts from participating until after a certain amount of time does wonder, especially if the community rules are well drawn. That will foster growth, and the fear of having to re-earn a voice keeps things civil.

205 points by cubefox 3y ago

MrYellowP 3y ago

[flagged]

LoganDark 3y ago
[flagged]
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

nuc1e0n 3y ago

Obviously everyone should aim to be civil online, but at the same time if someone does become abusive when you're speaking anonymously online I would suggest you shouldn't take offence easily. There are many radically differing views in the world so we need to become adept at navigating them courteously, but also firmly and with conviction.

chowells 3y ago
What's the correct response to "justify your existence" from someone listing their location as the next town over and with a profile pic showing themself holding multiple guns?
- godshatter 3y ago
  Nothing, probably. Unless you're really into guns and want to know how well they like their Glock 17.
nuc1e0n 3y ago
Also, without the verbal intonation of speech it can be quite difficult to not misinterpret the emotional sentiment of what's written online. It's for that reason emojis were invented and are useful.
- S04dKHzrKT 3y ago
  Key & Peele have a good comedy sketch covering that. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=naleynXS7yo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=naleynXS7yo (NSFW language)
  - nuc1e0n 3y ago
    That's a hilarious sketch. Thanks for sharing :D
vacuity 3y ago
And remember that, sometimes, leaving a conversation is the best thing you can do for yourself.
- nuc1e0n 3y ago
  Yeah. If you don't like a response don't respond back to it. On the internet there's no requirement to.

neonate 3y ago

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/jopp.12149 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/jopp.12149 https://sci-hub.se/https://doi.org/10.1111/jopp.12149 https://sci-hub.se/https://doi.org/10.1111/jopp.12149

n9 3y ago

I worked at Huffpost through all three of these phases in a technical capacity adjacent to comments and moderation, as director of technical operations and eventually as head of engineering. This study has significant questions to answer about their methods and assumptions that is summed up here: "Second, we know that HuffPo used both manual and algorithmic moderation in all three phases, but we do not know how the policies changed under the different identificatory regimes." Given whay I know about Huffpo's moderation system and their statement that they don't have understanding of them I'd say that nothing reported in this study should be considered valid for a few reasons. One is that Huffpost used many different systems of moderations following many changing standards throughout their days as a big news site (#3 in the US at one point) and the biggest news-based community, which they were for several years. They started with no moderation, then human moderation with evolving standards and practices that were overseen by a brilliant community team. Then they bought Julia in 2010(? ish) which was a very early machine learning moderation system that was trained on millions of human made moderation decisions before launch and whose training and internals were constantly updated and improved for years. Julia was dropped for Facebook comments later on, at which point Facebook did most of the basica moderation but was still assited by human moderators. My first critique of this analysis is that the authors have no data or understanding of the moderation actions that resulted in suppression of comments or users. How can an analysis make any claims without this data? So far as they know the comment-flow was more hostile during the periods they observe as more civil, but there were just far more comments suppressed. Just one of dozens of other internal details of the operation that would invalidate their conclusions would be that Huffpost quiet-deleted comments for a significant period of time -- meaning that you could post, and you would see your posts in context when you were logged in but no one else would see them. They also silent-banned users. This and other details of implementation create a great deal of complexity and secondary effects. I can attest that moderation was very, very active and that lots and lots of comments were moderated down and out of the comment threads... again indicating significantly less civility than any retrospective analysis would be able to discern without all the data. I also find it interesting that this study chose Huffpost for the analysis. At the site's hights of success and profit the comment threads were the reason for their SEO dominance and were considered to be the most important secret sauce. Huffpost moderation was the best in the business by a long measure. With the methodology presented it would make sense to me to say that Huffpost would appear to be the most civil of the big sites of the time. So it is interesting that this study focuses singly on Huffpost and reports that their theories indicate this differential. While the authors do cover some of this in their section on Limitations, they don't cover near enough to justify their results... instead this reads as another cherry-picking study where authors had a theory and found a dataset that confirmed it while being unaware of fundamental reasons why that dataset was an outlier, making it impossible for them to build in the needed controls in their methods.

precompute 3y ago

The internet is moving towards the "real world", so the new people think it's the platform that matters and not the people. The truth is, the internet isn't really for content consumption, it's for meeting and talking to people and making friends. The further away we move from that, the more dystopian tech will become.

Nostromos 3y ago

Very interesting. I'd always felt that real-name policies made for more civil but less vibrant and dynamic discussion. Moderation seems to be the key for any platform that allows for pseudonyms but the idea of stable pseudonyms makes intuitive sense. n9 does make some excellent points about this study. So what does this boil down to? Moderate heavily and put up barriers to discourage bad actors, which is what everyone knows and is kinda boring.

temp51723 3y ago
Real names seems like it'd make people - in general - feel the need to save face more than a pseudonym.
eitland 3y ago
This very website should be proof enough that real names are absolutely not necessary for civil discussion. I think we even get better discussions when the shy and thoughtful are allowed to speak.
- CaptainFever 3y ago
  Additionally, the marginalized value anonymity, especially in countries where their marginalization is criminalized.
GaryNumanVevo 3y ago
Nextdoor is a good counter argument here
- krapp 3y ago
  We've known that since the halcyon days of USENET when everyone put their real name and university emails in their signatures. We also know it because it doesn't work on Facebook, and it didn't work when Google decided they needed to do a Facebook and they forced everyone's G+ account to merge with Youtube. People who feel entitled to their opinion and lack empathy will absolutely, with their whole chest, be an asshole and sign their John Hancock to it. The truth is, you can't engineer civility. Anonymity? Look at 4chan. Make people pay? Now the assholes believe they've purchased the privilege to do whatever they like. Even Hacker News, a platform moderated to within an inch of its life, with both real-name and pseudonymous accounts, only tends to be civil within a small window of circumstance. Everywhere else it's as likely as not to be a dumpster fire.

everdrive 3y ago

It's been years, and people are still confused about what causes online hostility. This study seems to be a good step in the right direction. A number of people believe that anonymity alone is to blame, and this just incorrect. People are even more hostile in cars, where the salient points seem to be: - Lack of direct proximity (ie, you're not face-to-face with someone.) - Inability to read body language cues correctly. (again, not face-to-face) - Probably something to do with the inherently competitive nature of driving. (eg, many people see being "behind" as losing and being in "front" as winning) In any case, people are immediately identifiable and culpable in a vehicle -- there are cameras everywhere, and everyone has a mandated government ID on the car. Twitter seems to be another obvious example. People are horrible all over the platform, but many of the worst people aren't anonymous whatsoever. It seems to be the format more than the anonymity.

loceng 3y ago
There can be 1000s, if not 1,000,000s of paid shills by bad actors present online media - whether industrial complexes or domestic-foreign enemies being paid to cause problems, to be divisive - to divide and conquer; and what % will be AI bots that can have their own unique personalities and behaviour? I think we're going to have to be very careful-intentional in the near future of who we decide to interact with, though an ideological mob won't likely particularly care if they're being manipulated by nefarious actors who aim to weaponized a mob.
- everdrive 3y ago
  This is a good point that I hadn't considered. How can you trust mutual cooperation over time if you can't be sure you're even talking to a person? And crucially, if the ratio of malicious actors drowns out the cooperators, it may not matter how altruistically the remaining cooperators act.
  - causal 3y ago
    Doesn't even need to drown out cooperators - one in a hundred interactions can be enough to ruin your day.

imzadi 3y ago

I think a lot of the more thoughtful commenters probably stop commenting when their real name becomes involved. Even if what they are saying is not inflammatory, there is always a chance of making a misstep or just having a bad opinion without fully understanding it. In the modern age, everything is forever. There's no room to evolve. If you say the wrong thing now, you're stuck with it, even if your actual beliefs change and grow, the fragment left behind is what remains reality. The only people who want to openly comment under their real name are people who don't care or who are already intentionally inflammatory.

mattxxx 3y ago
Agreed here. Using a real name is a deal breaker for a lot of people, and as a result you lose their contributions, which hypothetically could be more informed.
supertrope 3y ago
Mark Zuckerberg touted real name comments as the solution to online trolling and bad behavior. Of course he means Facebook profiles to be that identifier. Plenty of local news websites comment sections are clogged with flaming by people who are not deterred by having their meatspace name attached to their comments. There’s a lot of spam from FB comments too.
- sideshowb 3y ago
  Conveniently, real names are more valuable to advertisers, I presume
tech_ken 3y ago
> Even if what they are saying is not inflammatory, there is always a chance of making a misstep or just having a bad opinion without fully understanding it. In the modern age, everything is forever. There's no room to evolve. Is this actually true or is it just something people say? I feel like there's plenty of room for people to grow or change their beliefs these days, it seems like every other day someone in power or in the spotlight says something like "oh that was something I used to believe but I've changed since" and that's kind of the end of it. Rarely do I feel like someone is entirely blacklisted for some opinion they held in their past but no longer hold, unless that past behavior was either abusive or straight up mean. Maybe I'm just not tuned in enough though.

tech_ken 3y ago

No real control for the changing population you might expect under each sign-up regime? Seems like in the first case sign-ups are super frictionless, so heavy trolling is expected. Second phase has some mild friction, so results make sense. But in the third de-anonymized phase I would assume that any FB user can comment basically by default, so presumably the circle of discourse is at its widest point. In a world where someone needs to care enough to make an account to comment presumably the quality of post is higher than when any random passerby can leave their thoughts?

boomlinde 3y ago

It seems to me like the second phase might have introduced a slight barrier to entry (that of having to register a name) that was removed again in phase 3 (which I assume made the comment sections immediately available to anyone logged into a Facebook account).

kmeisthax 3y ago

>In the third phase, the commenting system was outsourced to Facebook This seems to be an apples-and-oranges comparison, no? Or at the very least, there's a confounding factor here: how difficult it is to start commenting. The average Internet user is far more likely to have a Facebook account than a HuffPo[0] account. Furthermore, Facebook does very little moderation. This means that in both the totally anonymous and Facebook real-name eras, commenting is just a matter of clicking a button to proceed, rather than registering an account, validating an e-mail, etc. Furthermore, when you run your own comment section you can build your own moderation tools which Facebook might lack. You also have the ability to restrict signups - even if you're using Facebook as an ID provider (e.g. those "Login with Facebook" buttons). If HuffPo gets a bunch of media attention they can shut off registration and the comment section will consist entirely of people who already got in before the huge crush of spammers. Or they could heavily moderate comments posted around a specific time if they built a tool for that. I'd like to know what would happen if, say, you had your own account system, but usernames were hidden from other commenters. Moderators could of course see and ban whole accounts if needed. I have a feeling it'd perform similarly to psuedonymity. [0] I had to fight the urge to call it HuffPuff.

avgcorrection 3y ago

I can’t express how unreasonable it is to demand real identities in internet discussions. You can chit-chat with your mouth among a group of people and be mostly fine. You don’t have to weigh every word. At worst what you say will be spread in a small radius, becoming ever less reliable for every level of hearsay. But on the internet? That’s potentially omnipresent and forever. People have different personas in real life. While going under the same name. It’s how people operate.

jokoon 3y ago

I just think people should be accountable for their online behavior. It's not very hard to do. If people are accountable for what they say, act and do in public, the same rule should apply on public forums. Anonymity is good, as long as you don't abuse it, and it's being used for good reasons. Maybe I don't have a thick skin, but honestly, toxicity is not a feature of the internet, it is a problem, and everybody knows that the internet is generally a cesspool where you can't trust anybody. That's not good. It's not only up to media companies to sanitize their platforms, it's also up to the law to set better standards. It doesn't have to be like that. The worst things are, the more people will want a china-style social score. I'm pro free speech, but free speech cannot exist out of nothing, there is a certain set of condition required for free speech to work well.

richrichie 3y ago
Free speech is absolute, unconditional. Otherwise, it is a misnomer. Free speech is priceless. Its value is better appreciated if you are born into free speech and lose it entirely. The “thick skin” we need is of the kind that absorbs all kind of speech - the one we like and do not like.

tithe 3y ago

Isn't this why HN attributes "karma" to a username?

nonrandomstring 3y ago

A few earlier morsels from my refs [0..2] [0] Greenstadt, Rachel, "What is the value of anonymous communication?", 32C3 Chaos Computer Congress, December 2015 [1] Poole Chris .M, "The case for anonymity online", TED, February 2010 [2] Knott-Craig, Alan, "The power of anonymity", TEDx Cape Town, February 2012

smrtinsert 3y ago

I've heard from several FB moderators that prevent brand new accounts from participating until after a certain amount of time does wonder, especially if the community rules are well drawn. That will foster growth, and the fear of having to re-earn a voice keeps things civil.