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I'm old enough to remember the internet before the WWW and yes, anonymity enabled the troll culture (among other things). Honesty and free expression didn't req

I'm old enough to remember the internet before the WWW and yes, anonymity enabled the troll culture (among other things). Honesty and free expression didn't require anonymity because people weren't being constantly monitored or having their every pronouncement judged (by the mostly anonymous). Yes, there were lots of flame-wars, but folks by and large had the gumption to hold their name to their positions. * I may be wearing rose-tinted glasses. It's been a very long time since I'd spend 4 hours a day reading and replying on various Usenet groups.

mlyle 1y ago
You don't need anonymity so much until certain things show up: other anonymous people, commercial bulk data aggregation, bullying subcultures, blending of real life with the online world, political intolerance. Unfortunately, I don't see a path back to the kind of internet where we don't need anonymity so much.
anigbrowl 1y ago
Anonymity was important back then to, and I was a strident defender of anon.penet.fi (look this up if you're not familiar). The problem is that what worked well as an option with a degree of persistence created its own set of problems when industrialized. We are not imho better off with fully anonymous swarms or the increasingly default situation of website ownership being hidden from the public, both of which have enabled the automation of abuse, misinformation, slop content and so on. Over the last 30-40 years internet communication/communities have gone from relatively high trust and levels of user participation/democracy toward zero trust and an extremely bimodal power distribution which has produced an excess of toxicity and adversarial behavior. I blame hacking/phreaking culture to a certain extent, because openness and information exchange valorized in that culture are also accompanies with a lot of drama and personal backbiting.
SilverElfin 1y ago
> Honesty and free expression didn't require anonymity because people weren't being constantly monitored or having their every pronouncement judged This feels revisionist. The internet was almost entirely anonymous. Whether it was “required” or not is irrelevant. People could be honest and not fear censorship.

mlyle 1y ago

You don't need anonymity so much until certain things show up: other anonymous people, commercial bulk data aggregation, bullying subcultures, blending of real life with the online world, political intolerance. Unfortunately, I don't see a path back to the kind of internet where we don't need anonymity so much.

anigbrowl 1y ago

Anonymity was important back then to, and I was a strident defender of anon.penet.fi (look this up if you're not familiar). The problem is that what worked well as an option with a degree of persistence created its own set of problems when industrialized. We are not imho better off with fully anonymous swarms or the increasingly default situation of website ownership being hidden from the public, both of which have enabled the automation of abuse, misinformation, slop content and so on. Over the last 30-40 years internet communication/communities have gone from relatively high trust and levels of user participation/democracy toward zero trust and an extremely bimodal power distribution which has produced an excess of toxicity and adversarial behavior. I blame hacking/phreaking culture to a certain extent, because openness and information exchange valorized in that culture are also accompanies with a lot of drama and personal backbiting.

SilverElfin 1y ago

> Honesty and free expression didn't require anonymity because people weren't being constantly monitored or having their every pronouncement judged This feels revisionist. The internet was almost entirely anonymous. Whether it was “required” or not is irrelevant. People could be honest and not fear censorship.