9 ms·

Surprisingly Good Evidence That Real Name Policies Fail To Improve Comments

115 points by iProject 14y ago

masklinn 14y ago
> YouTube has joined a growing list of social media companies who think that forcing users to use their real names will make comment sections less of a trolling wasteland Do they?
- _delirium 14y ago
  I agree that that's probably not YouTube's main goal. They rolled out the real-names policy at the same time for video uploads, which I think is probably really what they want to tie to real names.
lysium 14y ago
I never thought that real name are required to reduce the amount of trolling, but to ease tracking of individual users. Of course, the latter cannot be stated publicly, so the first is given as a reason.
- antidoh 14y ago
  Yes, exactly. It's not about comments, or civility, of fine dining. It's about selling real people behind real names to real advertisers because real money is at stake.
ThomPete 14y ago
Real names in themselves solves nothing. It's when what you write gets broadcasted to people you know, it starts to have an effect. But IMHO nothing beats a strong debate culture with strong pre-emptive moderation, clear rules and an intelligent crowd.
- marvin 14y ago
  I've seen ridiculously hostile and inappropriate comments posted with full name and photo (using the Facebook comment system). As a particularly dramatic example, which was so bad it was almost art, we had a debate in a Norwegian newspaper about what to do with the traveling Romani people who put up their tents everywhere. One commenter said: "Why not put Anders Behring Breivik on the case? He cleaned up a camping site in an hour", referring to the Utøya massacre where 69 camping teenagers were killed. If someone's able to post that with their full name and photo, I don't really think there's any hope of solving the comment problem without old-fashioned moderation.
  - tomjen3 14y ago
    Social norms are different in different groups. I have told people that what they wrote could be considered racists and gotten a reply back that they wanted to be clear that they were racists, quite proud of it, and that I was an idiot for not seeing the muslim thread (in a discussion that was not at all related to terror). I have seen the same people belate others for questioning that we should throw all muslims out and arguing that every single muslim was a terrorist ala The Norwegian terrorist.
  - slurgfest 14y ago
    I would have initially read that comment as a sardonic remark on the European conception of Romani as needing to be "cleaned up," but I'm not aware of all the cultural issues.
  - rossjudson 14y ago
    Freedom of speech means that they're able to post crap like that. It also means that the poster will deal with the consequences.
    - marvin 14y ago
      Of course, I'd defend people's right to say stuff like this. And in a twisted way, it was really funny. But it doesn't make for very good discussion.
the1 14y ago
For a couple of years, I used my real full name as an id. That didn't stop me from trolling. But, when people stopped replying to my comments, I stopped trolling. Just my experience.
ahi 14y ago
So we really are that dumb? A little depressing knowing people aren't ashamed by their ignorance.
franzus 14y ago
> I think people hide behind anonymity and they feel like they can say whatever they want behind closed doors. God forbid people could freely say what they think. This obviously has to be prevented or our civilisation might collapse. I'm strictly pro anonymity. If prude people don't like something they read on the internet they probably shouldn't read it ... or visit the internet at all.
- praxulus 14y ago
  Some people want to be able to have the same kinds of social interactions they have in the real world, but with the convenience of the internet. We've gone thousands of years with certain social norms (e.g. not being anonymous most of the time), and so far replicating those social interactions faithfully online has been difficult. There's nothing wrong with free speech unrestrained by social expectations, but there's similarly nothing wrong with wanting to avoid that sometimes. Why should you get the internet all to yourself?
  - morsch 14y ago
    Some people on both sides of this argument feel that their way of doing things should be the only way of doing things. This causes even the moderates of each side to resent their opponents, and not without reason: if either side pushes for either technical or legislative means to implement their vision, the step from feasible to all-encompassing is small.
  - rsheridan6 14y ago
    We've also gone thousands of years without having everything we said recorded for all time for anyone to hear whenever they want.
  - franzus 14y ago
    Yeah, and the music industry wants us to pay for plastic discs. Things have changed and people who want to force down some old model of social interaction on the internet are dinosaurs who couldn't differentiate a paradigm shift from a potato - just like said music labels with their shiny plastic discs.
acabal 14y ago
My site, Scribophile, requires that people sign up with a "pen name", which has to sound like a real name. You don't have to use your actual real name, just something that sounds like it could be a real name. The idea wasn't to prevent trolling or bad comments--I spent enough time banning trolls and cleaning the forums every day to know that it wouldn't have helped anyway--but to add an air of credibility and, dare I say it, professionalism to the environment. I've found that people interact more intimately when they're talking to "Bob Smith" instead of "cyberwulf555". People can picture themselves talking to a "Bob", but they can't picture a generic alphanumeric handle as well. It makes people more confident in building lasting relationships. In that respect, the policy has been a complete success.
- _delirium 14y ago
  I haven't found that latter part to be true in communities I've participated in, but it does really depend on the people and topics. In many technical communities, there's a tendency for people who use their real names to go in the opposite direction, and use versions that sound like handles! Initials are a popular way of handle-ifying a name (pg, RMS). You can recover that they refer to real names, but in terms of social norms, few people here address 'pg' as 'Paul'. Another one is to use an 8-char version of your name, akin to a username that might've once been assigned on a Unix system, like someone named Richard Stallman going by 'rstallma'. (For my part, I use two depending on the situation. This one is the pseudonymous version, and I have another handle that is related to my real name for situations where that seems warranted.)
- SeanDav 14y ago
  I joined your site a short while ago and was quite surprised at your "pen name" policy, but surprised in a positive way. I also think that anything that helps take away some of the anonymity of interacting on online forums will lead to an overall increase in posting quality and less flaming/trolling.
- darklajid 14y ago
  May I ask what the (estimated if needed) average age of your registered users is?
- 14y ago
kmfrk 14y ago
People write a lot of vitriol on Facebook and in Facebook comments. I guess you can be hopeful, but experience shows that it doesn't exactly stop the stupidity entirely.
quacker 14y ago
From a linked article: According to a study by the KCC, malicious comments accounted for 13.9 percent of all messages posted on Internet threads in 2007 but decreased only 0.9 percentage points in 2008, a year after the regulation went into force.[1] And from a glance at the CMU paper: Our findings suggest that the enhanced identification process shows significant effects on reducing uninhibited behaviors at the aggregate level, but there is no significant impact regarding a particular user’s behavioral shift.[2] These actually indicate an improvement in general, and in fact the first reason listed in for scrapping the real-name registration was that it increased "cyber hacking" rather than the ineffectiveness of using real names.[1] I haven't read through the paper, but I'm interested in the contexts where changes occur. For example, if HN and reddit and YouTube all switched to real-name logins, which site would have the most improvement? Are sites that discuss primarily controversial topics more likely to resist improvements in comment quality after a switch to real-name login? (These are rhetorical.) 1: http://english.chosun.com/site/data/html_dir/2011/12/30/2011123001526.html http://english.chosun.com/site/data/html_dir/2011/12/30/2011... 2: http://www.computer.org/csdl/proceedings/hicss/2012/4525/00/4525d041-abs.html http://www.computer.org/csdl/proceedings/hicss/2012/4525/00/...
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
ThomPete 14y ago
The best way to improve comments is to charge for your service. well.com have probably some of the most amazing discussions I have ever been part of. Sadly the website is slowly waning. But there are great great discussions in there and all of them well behaved even when it gets heated. You own your words
paulsutter 14y ago
Most Koreans have the surnames Kim, Park, or Lee. I once tried searching for the names of Korean friends on a Korean social network. Every name I tried had a huge number of matches, and I was unable to find anyone by name. Of course I do agree that moderation is important anywhere. Forcing users to identify themselves may have an adverse selection bias. People with anything to lose may comment much less, and the trolls may be proud of their provocative opinions.
- john_flintstone 14y ago
  I once tried searching for my friend John Smith on Facebook, and there he was, right at the top. Good thing westerners have such distinctive names.
  - bokonist 14y ago
    In Korea ~50% of the population has one of the three most popular surnames (Park, Lee or Kim). There are only about 250 surnames in use ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_name http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_name ). In the U.S. a bit less than 3% of the population has one of the three most popular surnames (Smith, Johnson or Williams) and there are over ten thousand names in common use ( http://www.census.gov/genealogy/www/data/1990surnames/dist.all.last http://www.census.gov/genealogy/www/data/1990surnames/dist.a... ). So yes, your sarcasm aside, American names are an order of magnitude more distinctive.
    - kineticflow 14y ago
      >So yes, your sarcasm aside, American names are an order of magnitude more distinctive. I wouldn't be so quick to say that. Your data is only based on last names. Yes, it is true that Korean last names are an order of magnitude less distinctive than American ones. However, you failed to consider the entire name. While American names are chosen from a handful of common first names (e.g., John, Megan...), Korean first names are much more complex and less likely to collide with others [1] - at least not as much as English names. Additionally, the Korean law mandates that websites collect people's social security number, not just "real names", so if I were to sue an online commenter for defamation, the court just needs to pick up the phone, call the site administrator, match the user account with SSN, and SSN with whatever the government has. So distinctiveness of names don't really have any meaning in this context. Also note that when you register for a website, you can't simply enter a SSN that passes the parity test; in addition to that, the SSN you entered goes through a service provided by the government that matches the entered SSN and name with actual data from financial institutions. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_name http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_name
yaix 14y ago
Real name means: (a) lawyers will make more money suing people for ever bad word they write (b) you will have problems all your life for some puberty-influenced shit you wrote when 16 (c) that people who worry about their real-life reputation do not speak up when they should. This real name wave is the worst thing happening to web culture since aol was invented.
- cbr 14y ago
  You will probably have (b) even without real names. Pseudonymity is hard enough that as we get better at interpreting this data I suspect most will be connected back to offline identities. Relying on the identity separation we have now to persist is asking for trouble.
  - mechanical_fish 14y ago
    For social purposes you usually don't need the kind of anonymity that would fool a government agency, or a private investigator, or even the Googlebot. You need plausible deniability and relative obscurity. When someone goes looking for the most embarrassing thing you ever wrote, they often find it. But we treat them the way we'd treat someone who hired a private detective: If they don't have a good reason, we conclude that they're creepy and rude.
- flogic 14y ago
  Also it tends to shut up exactly the disadvantaged people we want to here from. Personally, I use my real name, but I'm a white heterosexual male. Change any of those and I might not feel so comfortable giving random strangers the means to find me. My fiancee for instance avoids using her real name like the plague of death.
  - mynameishere 14y ago
    I use a fake name specifically because I'm a white heterosexual male. You don't seem to understand which views are verboten and punishable in this modern age.
djt 14y ago
The irony is that Techcrunch started using Facebook Comments to decrease the amount of trolls. http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/06/techcrunch-facebook-comments/ http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/06/techcrunch-facebook-comment...
rocky1138 14y ago
Isn't there a culture difference between Korea and America/Canada/England/France/Russia? Perhaps there are more variables at stake here than just whether or not it's a person's real name. It's neat that this didn't work in Korea, but that doesn't mean it won't work elsewhere.
- rrbrambley 14y ago
  Yeah, what this study doesn't acknowledge (or at least via TechCrunch's perspective) is that the culture (and more broadly, the country) in which the website visitors live (in the offline world) would probably contribute to how they present themselves to an online community. I would imagine that people might go as far as to speak in a way that they think will reflect on themselves positively in the physical "real" world, if they care about their reputation in their physical community. However, if you live in a rural community, you might not care as much, because your reputation online does not necessarily transfer to the real world and affect relationships with people you see on a daily basis.
mindslight 14y ago
You know what would actually improve comments? A browser extension that posted Markov chain generated trolling, recognized such comments from other instances, and then removed the auto-generated comments and their replies. Most "trolling" is just unintrospective but earnest people arguing at other morons. Trap them in a honeypot.
- mokus 14y ago
  Serious question - how do you stop the trolls from running that extension too?
Sami_Lehtinen 14y ago
I think real names do make difference. It makes you effectively self censor, because every comment is a statement with your name with it. Do you often troll you boss or clients / customers?
- rossjudson 14y ago
  This is where Slashdot's "anonymous coward" really starts to shine. Sure, you can post anonymously, but ac can get filtered out very quickly. Anonymous should mean anonymous, not pseudonym-anonymous.
Produce 14y ago
So the Google ecosystem was a bad idea after all. I knew it. First they lure you in with a slick web mail client and a couple of gigabytes of storage. Then they buy up a bunch of companies, including YouTube. Then they link your Google and YouTube accounts together. And now your Google identity is suddenly your YouTube identity which is linked to your real name. I didn't ask or sign up for the vast majority of this!
- jkn 14y ago
  I don't really use YouTube so I can't say, but is there anything preventing you from keeping separate accounts on Gmail and YouTube, something that makes it less convenient than if these websites were run independently of one another?
  - pi18n 14y ago
    It seems that Google will log you in across all of their services if you log into one. So to use separate names, you would have to be logging in and out whenever you switch services.
    - reddit_clone 14y ago
      Or use multiple browsers.
      - jkn 14y ago
        Or use incognito windows. But yeah I see how that makes it less convenient.
stcredzero 14y ago
> In 2007, South Korea temporarily mandated that all websites with over 100,000 viewers require real names, but scraped [sic] it after it was found to be ineffective... In other news, TC editors still found to be ineffective.
dhughes 14y ago
Damn, I'm going to have to change my username to rocketboy2354.
milesskorpen 14y ago
They buried it, but: "Further analysis by Carnegie Mellon’s Daegon Cho and Alessandro Acquisti, found that ... the policy reduced swearing and “anti-normative” behavior at the aggregate level by as much as 30% ..." Seems pretty compelling (and positive) to me.
- WiseWeasel 14y ago
  But at what cost? /dramatic
- freshhawk 14y ago
  Oh well, if there's less swearing in youtube comments then it's clearly worth it. Plus, with more real names then we have less of that uppity anti-establishment talk. That stuff is so annoying when it drowns out my stream of pictures of cats and plates of food. And history clearly shows us that the only times important works were published pseudonymously those works were attacking their betters and upsetting the status quo. Like these hooligans: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pseudonyms_used_in_the_American_constitutional_debates http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pseudonyms_used_in_the_...
  - sunir 14y ago
    I do not feel worried that we will miss out on the next revolution because its manifesto can no longer be written in a YouTube comment. As long as free expression is legal and there is a free market, there will be an outlet for free, anonymous expression. It just doesn't have to be every single one. I do think it is reasonable to wonder if real names on YouTube is too restrictive. Yet in the same vein it is ludicrous to confuse the issue with the extreme worry that the US constitution could not be debated in YouTube videos--possibly arguing if LMFAO's Party Rock Anthem should be our bro-national bro-anthem.
    - freshhawk 14y ago
      Did you really think I was worried that the next constitution wouldn't be debated in youtube comments or was that just to set up your LMFAO joke (which I laughed at)? I'll speak more plainly just in case it was the former: Anonymous speech being widespread and common instead of just "available" is extremely important for a healthy society. Anyone who thinks that removing anonymity is good because it cuts down on curse words is an idiot. Anyone who doesn't own stock or work for the big players is acting against their own interests for supporting those trying to win the current fight to be the first online identity monopoly, especially since they are both trying to tie them to real names. Youtube is a great example when using hyperbole because it has famously stupid comments that will not be improved by a reduction in curse words. The other paragraphs were not necessarily about youtube just because it was mentioned in a sarcastic opening comment.
JumpCrisscross 14y ago
For "surprisingly good evidence" the TechCrunch article blatantly ignores the findings of the Carnegie Mellon study linked to [1]. TL;DR the study found "that the proportion of negative postings has decreased on the pseudonym-based forum after the law; whereas, the law was not influential on the website in which real names were being revealed regardless of the law." It gives little insight into what happens when a site switches from being pseudyonym-based to real named. The Real Name Verification Law of 2007 required website owners verify the identities of users but did "not force websites to reveal [their] real names". Thus, it resulted in pseudonym-based forums that can now link to a real identity if needed and sites which always used real names but can now verify them. On the pseudonym-based forum, after switching from unlinked pseudonyms, i.e. anonymity, to linkable pseudonyms "the proportion of bad postings clearly decreased...in both short-term and long-term compared to the control group, and they are statistically significant". The switch was "not salient" on the real name board that always used real names. Plus one TechCrunch. The study readily states that the "proportions of bad postings [on the real name forum] are smaller than those [on the pseudonym-based forum]" across the board. This suggests a real name board will contain less vulgarity. If one is worried about switching from unlinked to linked pseudonyms, note that the "composition of user groups did not change over the period regardless of the law". We should also qualify articulating these findings to the United States given that "South Korea’s household broadband penetration reached 95%, which was the highest rate among those of all 57 surveyed countries" and that their political culture tends to be a mark more boisterous than we have here. [1] http://www.computer.org/csdl/proceedings/hicss/2012/4525/00/4525d041-abs.html http://www.computer.org/csdl/proceedings/hicss/2012/4525/00/...
- ChuckMcM 14y ago
  I too was surprised that they would link to a study which kinda skewers their argument. The point about how people eventually stop caring about cameras though is well taken. I can certainly believe that people will eventually get accustomed to the fact that their identity is out there and revert to their 'normal' behavior.
  - JumpCrisscross 14y ago
grandalf 14y ago
One thing I don't understand is if "real name" means that I have to use my real name or that my username must consist of a made up first name and made up last name...
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
- veeti 14y ago
  I thought that this would be a link to the comments for some random TC article.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
Of_Prometheus 14y ago
I was part of a large forum a number of years ago, before a scuffle between a group of members and the forum's leadership caused a mass exodus. Being a (minor) part of that group, the event led me to create a new forum that was less dictatorial in its approach to moderation, as well as less intent on enforcing the silly minutae that dogged the former site. Compared with the former forum, our own has a minuscule and stagnant userbase, but everyone is on a fist-name basis despite the absence of a naming policy. Our last trolling incident was over a year ago, though arguments do occur. There is always a conversation going on somewhere, and it's almost always entertaining. I think the secret to the "perfect" community is a poison pill: you have to make sure it stays small; i.e. growth, and therefore success, has to be limited. The more a community grows, the less familiar you are with everyone, and the less incentive you're going to have to be civil. Unless you're an *hole, people don't generally randomly insult people they consider to be their friends. I don't think this is exclusive to online communities, but all societies, in general, as seen in the big city/little town dynamic/trope. After a certain population level, the friendliness of the early history of your community will inevitably degenerate. (The current population of the aforementioned forum is 51, but will decline soon as I delete unused accounts.)
DanBC 14y ago
> “People behave a lot better when they have their real names down. I've read plenty of mailing lists where real names are used and people behave appallingly. See also fidonet; Usenet; some wikis; some web forums. And do they actually want a real name, or just something that sounds like a real name? "Ivor Trotts" only makes YouTube videos about bowels?
ck2 14y ago
Can you imagine in the USA if individuals were allowed to donate millions completely anonymously to political campaigns but not allowed to post a comment online without a real name by law?
dredmorbius 14y ago
Pseudonyms and anonymity are also an established part of many cultures -- for good reason. - Alma Whitten, Director of Privacy, Product and Engineering, Google http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/2011/02/freedom-to-be-who-you-want-to-be.html http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/2011/02/freedom-to-be...
Tsagadai 14y ago
Note the date for the KCC's move to scrap it (the date is today for those who didn't read the source). The real names policy has been used by the government and corporations to stifle serious discussions and criticisms in South Korea. Korea has a really strong and trivially abusable libel law, the [Cyber defamation law](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyber_defamation_law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyber_defamation_law). Basically, right now in Korea, I cannot criticise the accuracy or validity of a news article online without giving the journalist a strong case for suing me for damaging their career of ineptitude. The law is completely ambiguous and even allows political figures to sue opponents for criticising their policies. That, and as a coder the way the law was worded made it very difficult to actually comply with securely. Politicians are the last people you want to have writing a data retention policy for you.

115 points by iProject 14y ago

> YouTube has joined a growing list of social media companies who think that forcing users to use their real names will make comment sections less of a trolling wasteland Do they?

_delirium 14y ago
I agree that that's probably not YouTube's main goal. They rolled out the real-names policy at the same time for video uploads, which I think is probably really what they want to tie to real names.

lysium 14y ago

I never thought that real name are required to reduce the amount of trolling, but to ease tracking of individual users. Of course, the latter cannot be stated publicly, so the first is given as a reason.

antidoh 14y ago
Yes, exactly. It's not about comments, or civility, of fine dining. It's about selling real people behind real names to real advertisers because real money is at stake.

ThomPete 14y ago

Real names in themselves solves nothing. It's when what you write gets broadcasted to people you know, it starts to have an effect. But IMHO nothing beats a strong debate culture with strong pre-emptive moderation, clear rules and an intelligent crowd.

marvin 14y ago
I've seen ridiculously hostile and inappropriate comments posted with full name and photo (using the Facebook comment system). As a particularly dramatic example, which was so bad it was almost art, we had a debate in a Norwegian newspaper about what to do with the traveling Romani people who put up their tents everywhere. One commenter said: "Why not put Anders Behring Breivik on the case? He cleaned up a camping site in an hour", referring to the Utøya massacre where 69 camping teenagers were killed. If someone's able to post that with their full name and photo, I don't really think there's any hope of solving the comment problem without old-fashioned moderation.
- tomjen3 14y ago
  Social norms are different in different groups. I have told people that what they wrote could be considered racists and gotten a reply back that they wanted to be clear that they were racists, quite proud of it, and that I was an idiot for not seeing the muslim thread (in a discussion that was not at all related to terror). I have seen the same people belate others for questioning that we should throw all muslims out and arguing that every single muslim was a terrorist ala The Norwegian terrorist.
- slurgfest 14y ago
  I would have initially read that comment as a sardonic remark on the European conception of Romani as needing to be "cleaned up," but I'm not aware of all the cultural issues.
- rossjudson 14y ago
  Freedom of speech means that they're able to post crap like that. It also means that the poster will deal with the consequences.
  - marvin 14y ago
    Of course, I'd defend people's right to say stuff like this. And in a twisted way, it was really funny. But it doesn't make for very good discussion.

the1 14y ago

For a couple of years, I used my real full name as an id. That didn't stop me from trolling. But, when people stopped replying to my comments, I stopped trolling. Just my experience.

ahi 14y ago

So we really are that dumb? A little depressing knowing people aren't ashamed by their ignorance.

franzus 14y ago

> I think people hide behind anonymity and they feel like they can say whatever they want behind closed doors. God forbid people could freely say what they think. This obviously has to be prevented or our civilisation might collapse. I'm strictly pro anonymity. If prude people don't like something they read on the internet they probably shouldn't read it ... or visit the internet at all.

praxulus 14y ago
Some people want to be able to have the same kinds of social interactions they have in the real world, but with the convenience of the internet. We've gone thousands of years with certain social norms (e.g. not being anonymous most of the time), and so far replicating those social interactions faithfully online has been difficult. There's nothing wrong with free speech unrestrained by social expectations, but there's similarly nothing wrong with wanting to avoid that sometimes. Why should you get the internet all to yourself?
- morsch 14y ago
  Some people on both sides of this argument feel that their way of doing things should be the only way of doing things. This causes even the moderates of each side to resent their opponents, and not without reason: if either side pushes for either technical or legislative means to implement their vision, the step from feasible to all-encompassing is small.
- rsheridan6 14y ago
  We've also gone thousands of years without having everything we said recorded for all time for anyone to hear whenever they want.
- franzus 14y ago
  Yeah, and the music industry wants us to pay for plastic discs. Things have changed and people who want to force down some old model of social interaction on the internet are dinosaurs who couldn't differentiate a paradigm shift from a potato - just like said music labels with their shiny plastic discs.

acabal 14y ago

My site, Scribophile, requires that people sign up with a "pen name", which has to sound like a real name. You don't have to use your actual real name, just something that sounds like it could be a real name. The idea wasn't to prevent trolling or bad comments--I spent enough time banning trolls and cleaning the forums every day to know that it wouldn't have helped anyway--but to add an air of credibility and, dare I say it, professionalism to the environment. I've found that people interact more intimately when they're talking to "Bob Smith" instead of "cyberwulf555". People can picture themselves talking to a "Bob", but they can't picture a generic alphanumeric handle as well. It makes people more confident in building lasting relationships. In that respect, the policy has been a complete success.

_delirium 14y ago
I haven't found that latter part to be true in communities I've participated in, but it does really depend on the people and topics. In many technical communities, there's a tendency for people who use their real names to go in the opposite direction, and use versions that sound like handles! Initials are a popular way of handle-ifying a name (pg, RMS). You can recover that they refer to real names, but in terms of social norms, few people here address 'pg' as 'Paul'. Another one is to use an 8-char version of your name, akin to a username that might've once been assigned on a Unix system, like someone named Richard Stallman going by 'rstallma'. (For my part, I use two depending on the situation. This one is the pseudonymous version, and I have another handle that is related to my real name for situations where that seems warranted.)
SeanDav 14y ago
I joined your site a short while ago and was quite surprised at your "pen name" policy, but surprised in a positive way. I also think that anything that helps take away some of the anonymity of interacting on online forums will lead to an overall increase in posting quality and less flaming/trolling.
darklajid 14y ago
May I ask what the (estimated if needed) average age of your registered users is?
14y ago

kmfrk 14y ago

People write a lot of vitriol on Facebook and in Facebook comments. I guess you can be hopeful, but experience shows that it doesn't exactly stop the stupidity entirely.

quacker 14y ago

From a linked article: According to a study by the KCC, malicious comments accounted for 13.9 percent of all messages posted on Internet threads in 2007 but decreased only 0.9 percentage points in 2008, a year after the regulation went into force.[1] And from a glance at the CMU paper: Our findings suggest that the enhanced identification process shows significant effects on reducing uninhibited behaviors at the aggregate level, but there is no significant impact regarding a particular user’s behavioral shift.[2] These actually indicate an improvement in general, and in fact the first reason listed in for scrapping the real-name registration was that it increased "cyber hacking" rather than the ineffectiveness of using real names.[1] I haven't read through the paper, but I'm interested in the contexts where changes occur. For example, if HN and reddit and YouTube all switched to real-name logins, which site would have the most improvement? Are sites that discuss primarily controversial topics more likely to resist improvements in comment quality after a switch to real-name login? (These are rhetorical.) 1: http://english.chosun.com/site/data/html_dir/2011/12/30/2011123001526.html http://english.chosun.com/site/data/html_dir/2011/12/30/2011... 2: http://www.computer.org/csdl/proceedings/hicss/2012/4525/00/4525d041-abs.html http://www.computer.org/csdl/proceedings/hicss/2012/4525/00/...

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

ThomPete 14y ago

The best way to improve comments is to charge for your service. well.com have probably some of the most amazing discussions I have ever been part of. Sadly the website is slowly waning. But there are great great discussions in there and all of them well behaved even when it gets heated. You own your words

paulsutter 14y ago

Most Koreans have the surnames Kim, Park, or Lee. I once tried searching for the names of Korean friends on a Korean social network. Every name I tried had a huge number of matches, and I was unable to find anyone by name. Of course I do agree that moderation is important anywhere. Forcing users to identify themselves may have an adverse selection bias. People with anything to lose may comment much less, and the trolls may be proud of their provocative opinions.

john_flintstone 14y ago
I once tried searching for my friend John Smith on Facebook, and there he was, right at the top. Good thing westerners have such distinctive names.
- bokonist 14y ago
  In Korea ~50% of the population has one of the three most popular surnames (Park, Lee or Kim). There are only about 250 surnames in use ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_name http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_name ). In the U.S. a bit less than 3% of the population has one of the three most popular surnames (Smith, Johnson or Williams) and there are over ten thousand names in common use ( http://www.census.gov/genealogy/www/data/1990surnames/dist.all.last http://www.census.gov/genealogy/www/data/1990surnames/dist.a... ). So yes, your sarcasm aside, American names are an order of magnitude more distinctive.
  - kineticflow 14y ago
    >So yes, your sarcasm aside, American names are an order of magnitude more distinctive. I wouldn't be so quick to say that. Your data is only based on last names. Yes, it is true that Korean last names are an order of magnitude less distinctive than American ones. However, you failed to consider the entire name. While American names are chosen from a handful of common first names (e.g., John, Megan...), Korean first names are much more complex and less likely to collide with others [1] - at least not as much as English names. Additionally, the Korean law mandates that websites collect people's social security number, not just "real names", so if I were to sue an online commenter for defamation, the court just needs to pick up the phone, call the site administrator, match the user account with SSN, and SSN with whatever the government has. So distinctiveness of names don't really have any meaning in this context. Also note that when you register for a website, you can't simply enter a SSN that passes the parity test; in addition to that, the SSN you entered goes through a service provided by the government that matches the entered SSN and name with actual data from financial institutions. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_name http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_name

yaix 14y ago

Real name means: (a) lawyers will make more money suing people for ever bad word they write (b) you will have problems all your life for some puberty-influenced shit you wrote when 16 (c) that people who worry about their real-life reputation do not speak up when they should. This real name wave is the worst thing happening to web culture since aol was invented.

cbr 14y ago
You will probably have (b) even without real names. Pseudonymity is hard enough that as we get better at interpreting this data I suspect most will be connected back to offline identities. Relying on the identity separation we have now to persist is asking for trouble.
- mechanical_fish 14y ago
  For social purposes you usually don't need the kind of anonymity that would fool a government agency, or a private investigator, or even the Googlebot. You need plausible deniability and relative obscurity. When someone goes looking for the most embarrassing thing you ever wrote, they often find it. But we treat them the way we'd treat someone who hired a private detective: If they don't have a good reason, we conclude that they're creepy and rude.
flogic 14y ago
Also it tends to shut up exactly the disadvantaged people we want to here from. Personally, I use my real name, but I'm a white heterosexual male. Change any of those and I might not feel so comfortable giving random strangers the means to find me. My fiancee for instance avoids using her real name like the plague of death.
- mynameishere 14y ago
  I use a fake name specifically because I'm a white heterosexual male. You don't seem to understand which views are verboten and punishable in this modern age.

djt 14y ago

The irony is that Techcrunch started using Facebook Comments to decrease the amount of trolls. http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/06/techcrunch-facebook-comments/ http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/06/techcrunch-facebook-comment...

rocky1138 14y ago

Isn't there a culture difference between Korea and America/Canada/England/France/Russia? Perhaps there are more variables at stake here than just whether or not it's a person's real name. It's neat that this didn't work in Korea, but that doesn't mean it won't work elsewhere.

rrbrambley 14y ago
Yeah, what this study doesn't acknowledge (or at least via TechCrunch's perspective) is that the culture (and more broadly, the country) in which the website visitors live (in the offline world) would probably contribute to how they present themselves to an online community. I would imagine that people might go as far as to speak in a way that they think will reflect on themselves positively in the physical "real" world, if they care about their reputation in their physical community. However, if you live in a rural community, you might not care as much, because your reputation online does not necessarily transfer to the real world and affect relationships with people you see on a daily basis.

mindslight 14y ago

You know what would actually improve comments? A browser extension that posted Markov chain generated trolling, recognized such comments from other instances, and then removed the auto-generated comments and their replies. Most "trolling" is just unintrospective but earnest people arguing at other morons. Trap them in a honeypot.

mokus 14y ago
Serious question - how do you stop the trolls from running that extension too?

Sami_Lehtinen 14y ago

I think real names do make difference. It makes you effectively self censor, because every comment is a statement with your name with it. Do you often troll you boss or clients / customers?

rossjudson 14y ago
This is where Slashdot's "anonymous coward" really starts to shine. Sure, you can post anonymously, but ac can get filtered out very quickly. Anonymous should mean anonymous, not pseudonym-anonymous.

Produce 14y ago

So the Google ecosystem was a bad idea after all. I knew it. First they lure you in with a slick web mail client and a couple of gigabytes of storage. Then they buy up a bunch of companies, including YouTube. Then they link your Google and YouTube accounts together. And now your Google identity is suddenly your YouTube identity which is linked to your real name. I didn't ask or sign up for the vast majority of this!

jkn 14y ago
I don't really use YouTube so I can't say, but is there anything preventing you from keeping separate accounts on Gmail and YouTube, something that makes it less convenient than if these websites were run independently of one another?
- pi18n 14y ago
  It seems that Google will log you in across all of their services if you log into one. So to use separate names, you would have to be logging in and out whenever you switch services.
  - reddit_clone 14y ago
    Or use multiple browsers.
    - jkn 14y ago
      Or use incognito windows. But yeah I see how that makes it less convenient.

stcredzero 14y ago

> In 2007, South Korea temporarily mandated that all websites with over 100,000 viewers require real names, but scraped [sic] it after it was found to be ineffective... In other news, TC editors still found to be ineffective.

dhughes 14y ago

Damn, I'm going to have to change my username to rocketboy2354.

milesskorpen 14y ago

They buried it, but: "Further analysis by Carnegie Mellon’s Daegon Cho and Alessandro Acquisti, found that ... the policy reduced swearing and “anti-normative” behavior at the aggregate level by as much as 30% ..." Seems pretty compelling (and positive) to me.

WiseWeasel 14y ago
But at what cost? /dramatic
freshhawk 14y ago
Oh well, if there's less swearing in youtube comments then it's clearly worth it. Plus, with more real names then we have less of that uppity anti-establishment talk. That stuff is so annoying when it drowns out my stream of pictures of cats and plates of food. And history clearly shows us that the only times important works were published pseudonymously those works were attacking their betters and upsetting the status quo. Like these hooligans: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pseudonyms_used_in_the_American_constitutional_debates http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pseudonyms_used_in_the_...
- sunir 14y ago
  I do not feel worried that we will miss out on the next revolution because its manifesto can no longer be written in a YouTube comment. As long as free expression is legal and there is a free market, there will be an outlet for free, anonymous expression. It just doesn't have to be every single one. I do think it is reasonable to wonder if real names on YouTube is too restrictive. Yet in the same vein it is ludicrous to confuse the issue with the extreme worry that the US constitution could not be debated in YouTube videos--possibly arguing if LMFAO's Party Rock Anthem should be our bro-national bro-anthem.
  - freshhawk 14y ago
    Did you really think I was worried that the next constitution wouldn't be debated in youtube comments or was that just to set up your LMFAO joke (which I laughed at)? I'll speak more plainly just in case it was the former: Anonymous speech being widespread and common instead of just "available" is extremely important for a healthy society. Anyone who thinks that removing anonymity is good because it cuts down on curse words is an idiot. Anyone who doesn't own stock or work for the big players is acting against their own interests for supporting those trying to win the current fight to be the first online identity monopoly, especially since they are both trying to tie them to real names. Youtube is a great example when using hyperbole because it has famously stupid comments that will not be improved by a reduction in curse words. The other paragraphs were not necessarily about youtube just because it was mentioned in a sarcastic opening comment.

JumpCrisscross 14y ago

For "surprisingly good evidence" the TechCrunch article blatantly ignores the findings of the Carnegie Mellon study linked to [1]. TL;DR the study found "that the proportion of negative postings has decreased on the pseudonym-based forum after the law; whereas, the law was not influential on the website in which real names were being revealed regardless of the law." It gives little insight into what happens when a site switches from being pseudyonym-based to real named. The Real Name Verification Law of 2007 required website owners verify the identities of users but did "not force websites to reveal [their] real names". Thus, it resulted in pseudonym-based forums that can now link to a real identity if needed and sites which always used real names but can now verify them. On the pseudonym-based forum, after switching from unlinked pseudonyms, i.e. anonymity, to linkable pseudonyms "the proportion of bad postings clearly decreased...in both short-term and long-term compared to the control group, and they are statistically significant". The switch was "not salient" on the real name board that always used real names. Plus one TechCrunch. The study readily states that the "proportions of bad postings [on the real name forum] are smaller than those [on the pseudonym-based forum]" across the board. This suggests a real name board will contain less vulgarity. If one is worried about switching from unlinked to linked pseudonyms, note that the "composition of user groups did not change over the period regardless of the law". We should also qualify articulating these findings to the United States given that "South Korea’s household broadband penetration reached 95%, which was the highest rate among those of all 57 surveyed countries" and that their political culture tends to be a mark more boisterous than we have here. [1] http://www.computer.org/csdl/proceedings/hicss/2012/4525/00/4525d041-abs.html http://www.computer.org/csdl/proceedings/hicss/2012/4525/00/...

ChuckMcM 14y ago
I too was surprised that they would link to a study which kinda skewers their argument. The point about how people eventually stop caring about cameras though is well taken. I can certainly believe that people will eventually get accustomed to the fact that their identity is out there and revert to their 'normal' behavior.
- JumpCrisscross 14y ago

grandalf 14y ago

One thing I don't understand is if "real name" means that I have to use my real name or that my username must consist of a made up first name and made up last name...

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

veeti 14y ago
I thought that this would be a link to the comments for some random TC article.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]

Of_Prometheus 14y ago

I was part of a large forum a number of years ago, before a scuffle between a group of members and the forum's leadership caused a mass exodus. Being a (minor) part of that group, the event led me to create a new forum that was less dictatorial in its approach to moderation, as well as less intent on enforcing the silly minutae that dogged the former site. Compared with the former forum, our own has a minuscule and stagnant userbase, but everyone is on a fist-name basis despite the absence of a naming policy. Our last trolling incident was over a year ago, though arguments do occur. There is always a conversation going on somewhere, and it's almost always entertaining. I think the secret to the "perfect" community is a poison pill: you have to make sure it stays small; i.e. growth, and therefore success, has to be limited. The more a community grows, the less familiar you are with everyone, and the less incentive you're going to have to be civil. Unless you're an *hole, people don't generally randomly insult people they consider to be their friends. I don't think this is exclusive to online communities, but all societies, in general, as seen in the big city/little town dynamic/trope. After a certain population level, the friendliness of the early history of your community will inevitably degenerate. (The current population of the aforementioned forum is 51, but will decline soon as I delete unused accounts.)

DanBC 14y ago

> “People behave a lot better when they have their real names down. I've read plenty of mailing lists where real names are used and people behave appallingly. See also fidonet; Usenet; some wikis; some web forums. And do they actually want a real name, or just something that sounds like a real name? "Ivor Trotts" only makes YouTube videos about bowels?

ck2 14y ago

Can you imagine in the USA if individuals were allowed to donate millions completely anonymously to political campaigns but not allowed to post a comment online without a real name by law?

dredmorbius 14y ago

Pseudonyms and anonymity are also an established part of many cultures -- for good reason. - Alma Whitten, Director of Privacy, Product and Engineering, Google http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/2011/02/freedom-to-be-who-you-want-to-be.html http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/2011/02/freedom-to-be...

Tsagadai 14y ago

Note the date for the KCC's move to scrap it (the date is today for those who didn't read the source). The real names policy has been used by the government and corporations to stifle serious discussions and criticisms in South Korea. Korea has a really strong and trivially abusable libel law, the [Cyber defamation law](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyber_defamation_law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyber_defamation_law). Basically, right now in Korea, I cannot criticise the accuracy or validity of a news article online without giving the journalist a strong case for suing me for damaging their career of ineptitude. The law is completely ambiguous and even allows political figures to sue opponents for criticising their policies. That, and as a coder the way the law was worded made it very difficult to actually comply with securely. Politicians are the last people you want to have writing a data retention policy for you.