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

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.