8 ms·

I wish people were more public

149 points by swah 10mo ago

JohnFen 10mo ago
I used to be very public, just as the author prefers. However, as the amount of surveillance on the internet increased it eventually reached a tipping point for me and I switched to being much more private as a matter of self-protection. There's no way I'd be comfortable going back to the way things used to be unless the web becomes better -- and I don't think that's happening anytime soon.
- SoftTalker 10mo ago
  What is the concern with "surveillance" if you are writing for the public?
  - 000ooo000 10mo ago
    Dredging up common and mostly uncontroversial things that were said in 2010, but are now apparently very controversial, is somewhat of a sport for some people nowadays. There are some out there who would love fans of Ruby on Rails to suffer because of its association with DHH. It's not always entirely rational, so how could I ever predict what unhinged individuals in 2035 will take issue with on my blog? Everything online is preserved, so it's easier and safer to just not to participate at all.
    - wredcoll 10mo ago
      [flagged]
      - lbotos 10mo ago
        Read GP again. > There are some out there who would love fans of Ruby on Rails to suffer because of its association with DHH. This isn’t about DHH spouting whatever he is spouting. It’s about people trying to convince others to not associate with Rails because of DHH.
        AnthonyMouse 10mo ago
        It's worse than that. It's people generating a moral panic so they can retroactively declare something to be crimethink and then use that as a weapon against anyone who disagrees with them by trawling through their history. In which case it's not a matter of standing by it because mobs aren't interested in context or nuance. Society's defense against this should be that we don't use mobs to punish people for saying things we disagree with and anybody who attempts to do that gets laughed off the stage. Because as soon as that's not what happens, the public discourse gets marred by self-censorship until enough time passes with it not happening that people stop expecting it to and thereby stop worrying that they can't know what's going to be declared an offense tomorrow. But now that it has happened recently, the only way to get it back in the short term is to have people posting under pseudonyms.
        wredcoll 10mo ago
        This idea that people are too... what, fragile, to be criticized continues to puzzle me. Dhh said some stupid stuff and now people are calling him out. Why should dhh be allowed to say whatever wants but no one is allowed to criticize him?
        AnthonyMouse 10mo ago
        The problem is not people criticizing ideas. The problem is people attacking other people for saying things they don't like, trying to get them fired, etc. Attack their arguments, not their family, employer, etc.
        wredcoll 10mo ago
        I mean, you keep repeating the idea that "some people" shouldn't be allowed to use their speech but DHH can use his speech. You can't have it both ways, either DHH is free to speak his mind on any subject he chooses, and so is everyone else, or nobody is actually free to speak.
        wredcoll 10mo ago
      - liveoneggs 10mo ago
        woosh
      - 000ooo000 10mo ago
        >you should probably be willing to stand by the things you say, or why say them? Don't confuse the online world with the real one.
        wredcoll 10mo ago
        If you don't think real people use the internet, I dunno man, welcome to the 21st century, there's a lot to catch up on.
- ChrisMarshallNY 10mo ago
  I'm pretty open (check out my HN handle, if you don't believe me), but I'm also retired, and there's not many ways folks can get a handle on me. I have an ... eclectic ... life story, and it has supplied me with a healthy dose of cynicism and hardness, that makes me a not-so-easy mark. I'm also very much a person who enjoys other people; especially the ones that are hard to get along with. I've learned that being open, on my end, can encourage others to be more open to me. I don't have any nefarious motives, and am quite trustworthy, so I like to think I'm a "low-risk" person. I'm quite aware that the same can't be said for many others, and understand it, when that is cast onto me.
  - hellouruguay 10mo ago
    Eventually I hope to get to that point! For now, I'm still quite worried about what others think or being attacked or "cancelled" (as is quite common nowadays) for any reason. I hope to be like you someday.
bofadeez 10mo ago
Post brought to us by the NSA
readthenotes1 10mo ago
" I say reading in private is solipsistic" Only if you don't apply anything you learned publicly. For example, I read " evil is suffering passed on" and was able to relay that quote to an entitled friend to help hen change hens perception of how hens impositions affected others.
lioeters 10mo ago
I resonate with this. I enjoy reading people's technical, artistic and personal writings. How they built, solved, or learned something new. Their favorite tools, workflows. Favorite authors, concepts, interests. @simonw is a great example of this kind of openness and working in public. I'm learning how to do that in my own way. It makes the world friendlier, more welcoming for beginners and life-long students. It also creates a sense of community and human connection, which is often cynically exploited in today's society.
- vjvjvjvjghv 10mo ago
  There are several problems with this. First, a lot of people including myself don’t enjoy writing. Then there is the problem that these days people will give you a hard time for something you wrote 10 years ago. I don’t really feel I did anything wrong but I don’t want to have to spend time and energy on explaining myself. So if people enjoy writing , they should do it. But also be less judgmental about other people.
AuthAuth 10mo ago
Beautifully written, and something I resonate with. But I find myself wanting to read other peoples thoughts and peer at what they are doing. But I do not want to share any of that from myself because the internet is to permanent. I do not want to create an online footprint on this internet.
ursAxZA 10mo ago
I still love the era when everything online was text-based.
beloch 10mo ago
"And beyond my selfish curiosity there’s also the Fedorovist ancestor simulation angle: if you die and are not cryopreserved, how else are you going to make it to the other side of the intelligence explosion? Every tweet, blog post, Git commit, journal entry, keystroke, mouse click, every one of these things is a tomographic cut of the mind that created it." --------- Historians pour over this sort of stuff. If a historically interesting figure wrote a letter to their neighbour to complain about a noisy dog, it's been carefully preserved and obsessively analyzed. Historians want to get inside their subjects' heads and figure out what they were thinking when they did that big, important thing, and every scrap of remaining written material helps. We live in a period that is going to be real tough on historians studying it. Over the last few decades, physical correspondence (i.e. letters, etc.) has mostly died out. A lot of people still journal, but on their computer. Will that folder of old journal entries be found by whoever inherits your house full of junk or will it be tossed? A dead-tree diary is pretty easy to recognize for what it is. A computer's contents are comparatively easy to overlook. Most people who have lived over the last few decades have had multiple email addresses that, at first, they eagerly used for personal interactions and then, over time, more and more only for professional/commercial correspondence. At the same time, people started writing for fun and passion under anonymous pseudonyms in a variety of online forums. Some remain online and still operating. Some have been curated and remain online. Some are archived. Some are just gone. Then came social media and texting. A huge proportion of people's most intimate interactions are in texts now, but for how much longer? We seem to be on a novelty treadmill when it comes to personal interaction mediums. Yesterday's source of joy is today's chore. Imagine that you do something really significant in a decade or so, and some historian a hundred years from now is trying to figure out why you did it. Getting access to as much of your written output as remains and correctly associating the anonymous stuff with you is going to be a tough problem. How much of what is online today will remains? How much of it will be possible to associate with you, and not a pseudonym? Even if they speak your native tongue, they'll have to learn how to interpret your slang and texting shorthand. This sounds almost impossible today, but what kind of tools might they have in a century? My suspicion is that history is going to remain remarkably unchanged in a very specific way: For some historical figures we'll have mountains of material. Others, despite their importance, will be complete enigmas.
- 10mo ago
hellouruguay 10mo ago
Until someone evil uses all that to investigate you or do something against you...
- SXX 10mo ago
  You dont even need anyone evil . Might be just dumb and misinformed by AI news slop that people of your kind are evil, dangerous, etc. Whoever you are.
nospice 10mo ago
If you're on the internet long enough, I think you learn that openness has plenty of downsides. You indirectly interact with tens of thousands of people and in that set, there will be people who don't wish you well, sometimes for reasons you can't even grasp. In the 1990s, I used to put my phone number in my .signature file. I've come to regret that. In the 2000s, I participated in relatively large online forums under my real name, and have gotten threats mailed to my family and employer. Etc, etc. If you want others to broadcast their lives, I don't think that moralizing is enough; you gotta offset the negatives. Which basically means "positively engage", but we mostly don't do it on forums such as Twitter. Have you ever thanked anyone for a recommendation, a photo, an article? And how often do you do that, compared to posting to disagree?
- pinkmuffinere 10mo ago
  I think you’re right that it’s hard. But I think you’re implying that it could be less hard if we just behaved better à la “be the change you want to see”, and I believe you’re wrong about that. The people that send death threats do not read your advice, nor do they care enough to take it to heart. The people that _will_ listen were not sending death threats to begin with. And getting 500 thankyou-messages does not outweigh the handful of death threats
  - nospice 10mo ago
    I think it does. Internet death threats are upsetting but you also learn they tend to be toothless 99.9% of the time. Most of it is just internet tough guys hundreds or thousands of miles away. A lifetime of small positive outcomes can easily offset that for many people.
    - jamblewamble 10mo ago
      Also 90% of the time when you finally manage to get someone to quote one of these "death threats" it turns out to be something like "I hope you die of cancer" or "You deserve to get shot" which are horrible but are not threats in any sense whatsoever. This is why when you see yet another article about someone getting "death threats" they don't actually say what the threats are: most of the time they aren't threats at all. On the other hand, sometimes people really do actually threaten people and if someone actually threatens you, the likelihood that he is 1000s of km away isn't particularly reassuring let me tell you.
zephen 10mo ago
> I read in private, build in private, learn in private. And the problem with that is self-doubt and arbitrariness. Certainly if you do it in public, you don't have doubt yourself. Everyone else will do it for you.
iamnothere 10mo ago
No thanks. I once was interested in things like lifelogging, radical sharing, etc. Then the internet became super toxic, and it was clear that humans who don’t like you will use any information they can find as a weapon against you. I found through real life experience that the marginal benefits I gained from sharing were outweighed by the downsides. So I no longer share. Normalize privacy. You can engage in radical sharing if you want to take the risk, but the average person probably won’t see a net benefit from it. Don’t push people into it if they don’t want to, and respect people who prefer to stay out of the spotlight.
petterroea 10mo ago
Questions surrounding this has plagued me for the last years, and this is basically where I'm at right now: * I am trying to write more because writing is a good skill to practice, and it's fun to discuss with colleagues and have meanings that resonate with people. Or not. I still think most use of Cloudflare is naive and unnecessary cargo culting that just adds infrastructure complexity, but last time I complained it got a reasonable amount of pushback :D * But being a public person has downsides. The more public you are, the less of an expectation of privacy you have, and the less you are allowed to make mistakes. I grew up as a somewhat infamous person in my local community due to sticking out, it wasn't unusual that people already knew of me when I met them for the first time. As a result I had to accept that there was no such thing for me as simply going somewhere, the chance was high that someone who knew who I was (even if I didn't know them!) spotted me. I have lived long enough to see many people mess up being a famous public person on the internet. Often they never even wanted to be famous, it just happened and then they had to deal with the consequences. It could happen to anyone who happens to be at the right place at the right time. For hackers and similar people, it seems some just find a calling and that calling makes them well known as a side-effect. If you do anything that could be considered novel, you risk becoming well known. If you have a public persona and people like it, you will get followers. And if that happens, your public activity becomes the bane of your existence. You will be picked apart, analyzed, and possibly targeted by people who disagree with you. People will expect you to have opinions on things and drag you into conflicts. And what you say _matters_ - you have to think about everything you say because one misstep and entire communities will mobilize against you. Many people have gotten hate for saying something controversial on a topic they had little knowledge about. This is normal in a private setting, we discuss politics we aren't experts on with friends all the time. But if you are a public person, you lose many avenues to do this. I am Norwegian, and the lack of tech literacy in government and the general public is frankly depressing. This isn't necessarily because the general public is stupid. Bob Kåre (49) has better things to do with his life than learn about tech-politics. Norway needs more technical people to be politically active. But doing so seems downright stupid, considering the reflections above. It is practically a sacrifice. I think the reward has to be pretty large for this to be worth considering. It is a lot better, and easier, to just stick to yourself and your circle.
deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]
arjie 10mo ago
I am. I know it’s not free but I think it’s important for humanity to move forward. E.g. my genome variant report https://viz.roshangeorge.dev/roshan-genvue/ https://viz.roshangeorge.dev/roshan-genvue/ My wife’s pregnancy as logged by me https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Pregnancy https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Pregnancy I think it's important to have real-world actual experiences written down because a lot of online information is just people repeating what other people say and it's not true. I'm hoping that by just writing the truth of what I've seen with my own eyes, people will have real information to work with, and maybe LLMs will have this in there somewhere and we'll move a little closer to fact. I talked a little bit about the risks in another comment on a similar post here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46336356 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46336356
- llmslave2 10mo ago
  I love this for you :)
RatchetWerks 10mo ago
I have similar feelings as the author. I aim to be as public as possible while maintaining personal privacy. I *want* to meet other like-minded people that enjoy the same topics I do. I treat any of my public facing information as a honeypot for nerds (i.e like-minded people). In real life, if I meet interesting people, I point them to my website. If they reach out with questions, I know I found "one of my people". On a similar note, if I an idea, project or thought of mine could benefit someone else and allow them to learn and gain from it. I'd like to publish it with my privacy in mind.
satisfice 10mo ago
I like this guy. I want to know more about him.
ThrowawayTestr 10mo ago
When I was a child my teacher told me to never use my real name online
zarzavat 10mo ago
It's all very well being more public, until a government decides to make 5 years of social media history an entry condition[0], and moreover imprisons those people who are denied entry instead of simply sending them home on the next flight[1]. I have no problem with this per se, as I have no plans to go to the US this decade, but I do worry about contagion. Perhaps being a public person on the internet is an idea whose time has come and gone. [0] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1dz0g2ykpeo.amp https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1dz0g2ykpeo.amp [1] https://amp.dw.com/en/german-nationals-us-immigration-detained-interrogation-ice-donald-trump/a-71987211 https://amp.dw.com/en/german-nationals-us-immigration-detain...
- exe34 10mo ago
  [flagged]
  - braebo 10mo ago
    Brown sympathizers
- GFischer 10mo ago
  My father lived through the Uruguay dictatorship in the 1970s and avoids all social media whenever possible. I was an infant at the beginning of democracy, so I haven't taken that much care. Now, it seems he'll be vindicated once again, I do plan on visiting the USA and I'm hoping my social media won't be an obstacle (fortunately I don't think I have anything, but who knows, maybe I liked a meme or something).
- yanoleaf 10mo ago
  they don't care ... it's all boomer-tier scare tactics
phendrenad2 10mo ago
Most of the people disagreeing seem to be forgetting that public doesn't necessarily mean using your real name. We used to have vibrant communities full of people with names like "claxxon" and "zerg". claxxon knows about cisco networking and zerg knows about the best punk bands in the chicago area. Their real names? Not needed, wanted, or relevant, and we're offended you even asked, noob!
- esseph 10mo ago
  That use to be useful in a time where it was much harder to instantly de-mask those handles. If you're trying to make a name for yourself and you're social long enough, you'll eventually have a decent sized footprint on the internet. Sites and services get breached all the time.
  - phendrenad2 10mo ago
    > it was much harder to instantly de-mask those handles This is just a failure of the baseline thought that people put into security these days. It's not exactly hard to sign up for a free email service with no tie to your real identity. (Unless you're in the EU, that is)
- Telaneo 10mo ago
  I try to live up to that ideal in a way. I'm more comfortable with my internet handle than my real name. However, connecting the dots between a username with any decently long history and the person behind that username is trivial unless you go out of your way not to reveal too much about yourself, and even then, given enough time, there will be enough breadcrumbs eventually. I've given up on preventing people from connecting the dots. If people want to engage with me, they can do it with my username in situ, or send me an email which uses that same username. If they're being creepy about it, I can block them and ignore them.
  - squigz 10mo ago
    > unless you go out of your way not to reveal too much about yourself, and even then, given enough time, there will be enough breadcrumbs eventually. This is why it's not reasonable (for the vast, vast majority of people) to attempt this, and why we have to be realistic about our threat profiles. Sure, anyone who knows what they're doing and is dedicated enough can find out information about me - that doesn't mean I'm going to advertise my name and location so that everyone can find that information about me with ease.
AndrewKemendo 10mo ago
I write for myself so I don’t forget things and so I can have a record of my thought processes as empirical proof of my processing and understanding I publish so that I get feedback grounded in alternative interpretations which helps sharpen the ideas and processes and understanding You can’t actually understand anything in any real way if it’s not subject to intense and widespread scrutiny Doubly so if you think you’re onto some new idea.
llmslave2 10mo ago
A lot of people are talking about the downsides and I get it - for me it's about authenticity. I think it's really lacking in today's world, and if you don't feel comfortable sharing on the internet (which is fair!) at least do it irl. We need more real human connection and people being themselves!
neilv 10mo ago
We're in an environment in which a handful of billionaire techbros (and aspiring ones) have simply taken most of the world's copyrighted material, and are using it to destroy the livelihoods of people who create it. Why give them more stuff to steal for free? (HN techbros are slow on feeling the pain of the greed and corruption, partly because we can temporarily ride the coattails of the exploiters. And partly because we don't have field-wide strong tradition of ethics and integrity, unlike some disciplines that are objecting fiercely to plagiarism and shoddy quality. But eventually HN will feel the livelihood impact, and many AI slop poems will be written about not speaking up when some earlier groups got wronged.)
ai_critic 10mo ago
We have systematically dismantled by popular consensus the safety of liberalism and belief in a marketplace of ideas. There is no advantage to being "more public" when it's all to common to get hit by marauding bands of idealists and trolls of all atripes. Nobody rewards you for having nuanced opinions on things like immigration publicly, nor trans rights, nor even something as banal as programming language choice. We've now lived through a full pendulum cycle where public writing that was insufficiently woke was punished via internet lynch mobs and state pressure, and now we are seeing the exact same thing with insufficiently reactionary ideas invoking...internet lynch mobs and state pressure. So, no, I don't think I will be more public, and I'll be unsurprised--if sad--when other rational actors do similarly. There's no reason to be public, because people have made it clear that they'd rather support a system that attacks that than protects it.
abstractspoon 10mo ago
A very self centred viewpoint
virtualbluesky 10mo ago
Acting in public is hyperlocal - your behaviour affects those around you and gives those affected right of reply, if they have the courage to take it. Publishing your actions on the Internet is a little different. If people were affected by the action, they are affected (likely unknowingly) by the publication too - and the audience that you grant right of reply has at best an ideological horse in the race, not true skin in the game. And not much courage is required to engage with an opposing position. So "living publicly" on the internet leaves a permanent door open to ideological conflict, mob behaviour, and creates a disconnect between action and reaction - in both time and space. Kinda alien for a monkey brain to wrap banana powered neurons around.
mosquitobiten 10mo ago
Everytime I intentionally interact with Meta's apps/data factories, I feel a bit like in the movie Matrix when Neo is disconnected from the Matrix, wakes up from his pod and sees the other pods. And have to admit I saw that movie when I was to young for it and that scene really did a number on me. I don't mind being public but I mind if I'm in a way a slave to an entity that uses that to farm my identity and distorts my perception of reality.
- sshine 10mo ago
  If they farm your identity, they do so whether you post online or not. The only way to not contribute is to practice no identity. In that case your biomass still serves as a battery somehow (the movie fails to explain the physics here.)
  - yesbabyyes 10mo ago
    As I heard it explained, the original manuscript had the humans kept alive because the Matrix was actually running on the humans' brains as the computing substrate. This both made much more sense than humans as a power source, was more horrific, and a better story. Apparently this was deemed to hard for the unwashed masses to understand, and we were left with this battery analogy instead.
    - wkat4242 10mo ago
      Huh interesting. It makes also much more sense then to have some humans have the ability to change things in the Matrix, considering it was basically running on their brains. The big question in that case though is why? Why would the AIs keep a simulation of the old world?
      - shimman 10mo ago
        Matrix lore is quite cool, if you haven't seen the Animatrix check it out. The Second Renaissance is great world building! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sU8RunvBRZ8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sU8RunvBRZ8 (first part) To answer your Q tho, this was in one of the sequels I believe, basically the first iterations of the matrix were like "Eden" but humans couldn't adapt to it so they redesigned and iterated it into what you see in the movie. The idea being that if humans weren't busy they'd realize they were enslaved so they had to make a system to keep humans occupied and stimulated enough to be useful.
throw-12-16 10mo ago
No thanks. I wish people kept to themselves more.
paprikanotfound 10mo ago
The internet is a very different place nowadays. There are private companies using your data for profit and manipulating you. Governments prosecuting you based on what you post and bad actors trying to hack/scam you. Even if you stay anonymous. And yet I think there are plenty of people being public online, just perhaps not as much sharing the kinds of things the author mentions.
Anonyneko 10mo ago
Officials in my country of origin might lock me out of using banking and government services if I post something wrong on the internet even if I permanently reside abroad, and while I still have relatives there I cannot risk that happening. Oh and if they do and I come back they might also slap me with a 10-20-year sentence for good measure. So nope, can't afford to be any more public than I am (I'm under no illusion that connecting my nickname to my real name isn't a piece of cake, but at least it's one layer of indirection). I imagine that many people are in very similar boats, and more and more countries steer that way as of late.
- hellobluelings 10mo ago
  Come to Switzerland. The worst country in that regard. Cameras everywhere (lamps etc.). Nobody follows the law. They just make up reasons to ruin your life and everyone has to suffer. There is no privacy, at least in CH.
  - jojomodding 10mo ago
    I live in Switzerland too and can't relate at all.
    - kyboren 10mo ago
      I have noticed that a few years ago, at least in Zürich, small unobtrusive black enclosures have appeared everywhere on traffic signal/lamp posts along the roads. I can only assume that they contain cameras. But nobody else I've talked to has even noticed them. Flock ALPR mass surveillance is at least controversial in the US, yet I haven't heard any controversy over the apparent(?) roll-out of ALPR mass surveillance in Switzerland. I have not spent the effort to dig into what exactly those things are, who owns them, and what their claimed purpose is, but given their recent installation, density, clear view of the roads, and strategic locations (intersections, roadway exits, etc.) an ALPR mass surveillance network is, to me, the most plausible explanation.
0xbadc0de5 10mo ago
Never have so many people with so little to say, said it so loudly.
tim333 10mo ago
I think an answer is maybe to have multiple identities on the web. Like I've got real name stuff on Facebook and Linkedin and some anonymous accounts too. You keep the real name stuff safe for work and your mum seeing.
sapphirebreeze 10mo ago
[dead]
RiverCrochet 10mo ago
> I will often find a blog post on Hacker News that really resonates. And when I go to check the rest of the site there’s three other posts. And I think: I wish you’d write more! I really miss that period in the 90's and early 2000's when: - people were doing interesting things online and tending to those spaces regularly, - Google actually worked and it was easy to find those things, - Myspace/Facebook wasn't a thing I'd love to have the general mood and vibe of the 90's back, which I think contributed greatly to the early Internet and the ability and desire to be public within it. But even in the 90's, spam was a problem, and it's grown amd morphed into different things over time. Banner ad popups, link farms, SEO optimization, etc. Age verification laws are going to fully destroy the Internet for anything other than approved business uses, such as selling stuff. Soon, any "public" left will be spammers-spammers in the modern form of influencers either directly trying to sell you something or sponsored in order to support/create a market. Some may argue we've mostly reached that point. It's over. The forward thinkers need to think beyond the Internet. Until then it's closed groups and chats.
- MrDrMcCoy 10mo ago
  Forums need to make a comeback. Kids these days not only don't know what they are, but have trouble understanding them when explained. I somehow feel like forums could catch on again if there were a shiny enough platform. To that end, can anyone recommend any decent forum engines? Discourse's UI rubs me the wrong way, and it would be nice to avoid PHP/MySQL as dependencies in general.
  - peterspath 10mo ago
    what's wrong with PHP/MySQL? I am not into web tech, so genuine curiosity.
  - LeratoAustini 10mo ago
    As someone who is sometimes on slow/spotty internet, Discourse's loading dots/circles rub me the wrong way. Like what are they *doing* for all this time while I wait for a page of relatively simple-looking HTML to load? I kept seeing these familiar coloured dots on seemingly disparate sites and it took me a while to realise they were all running Discourse.
bicepjai 10mo ago
I usually don’t like it when people use unnecessary big words. But sometimes a word comes by that explains exactly the idea. One of my favorites is Schadenfreude ( it’s funny and real at the same time). When I noticed the author used Solipsism, I definitely judged him for a moment, but after I read the explanation, it was a beautiful description of his stance :) Solipsism is a philosophical position asserting that only one's own mind is certain to exist.
bicepjai 10mo ago
The post made me think of a different compromise: more public artifacts when we choose, without surrendering our lives to centralized platforms. Like mentioned in the comments, today’s internet is permanent, searchable, and easily weaponized through harassment, surveillance, or data exploitation, so the personal cost of being ‘public’ can be unpredictable and high. So why don’t we build a system where our identity and activity data live with us by default, on a small server in our home, instead of scattered across company clouds? Everything we do online could be logged locally under our control, and shared only when we explicitly allow it. If a company wants to use our data (for ads, analytics, or training models), it should be a clear opt-in, scoped to a specific purpose, and priced transparently. If it’s valuable, we should get paid for it and that creates incentive structures. This also matches how I want to use AI personally. I want my own local model that can learn from my data privately, say something like training or updating nightly while I sleep; so I get the benefits of personalization without handing over the raw contents of my life to someone else’s servers. In a world like that, being “more public” becomes a choice you can make safely, not a gamble you’re forced into. ~ organized thoughts with GPT5.2 and used Apple proofread
Offlines 10mo ago
Reading is as much engagement as writing if not more.
kgwxd 10mo ago
Clearly phrased to take advantage of the "controversial opinion" for clicks. "I wish people would publish more" is what they mean, but that's not interesting. Can one even "be public"?
WahyuS002 10mo ago
I resonate with the "honeypot for nerds" sentiment mentioned by others here. There is a distinct difference between "being public" as a performance (influencer style) and "working with the garage door open." The author seems to be advocating for the latter. I've found that publishing raw notes, half-baked projects, or niche interests acts as a high-quality filter. It might not get mass engagement, but the few people who do reach out are almost always high-signal connections. The fear of surveillance is valid, but the cost of total obscurity is missing out on that serendipity.
avaer 10mo ago
As interesting as such a world is to the author, the post fails to appreciate that the beneficiaries of such a world won't be us, but AI companies that hoover this data, pollute it with "alignment", and sell it back to us. As well as nefarious government actors.
metalman 10mo ago
Public is that which happens once, in real time,and most importantly derives it's content from spontainious colaberations of humans.Speaking and acting to the moment. Everything else, the all of all, is a spin off from this.
saghm 10mo ago
> I try to apply a rule that if I do something, and don’t write about it—or otherwise generate external-facing evidence of it—it didn’t happen. I have built so many things in the dark, little experiments or software projects or essays that never saw the light of day. I want to put more things out. If it doesn’t merit an entire blog post, then at least a tweet. I think this might be the crux of a lot of the disagreement that seems to be present with article (which I feel as well admittedly). So much of my life is stuff that isn't around things I've built or written; sometimes I'm just existing without producing, nowadays with my wife, but in the past maybe with a friend, roommate, or just relaxing alone. I'm not the type of person to be greatly concerned with my legacy or whether lots of people remember me after I'm gone as much as whether the people who do happen to remember me from the interactions I had with them have good memories. I don't see any purpose in documenting this sort of thing, and most of the time it would actively worsen the experience to do so. I don't know if this isn't something that would apply to the author's life or if they're just talking about something else specifically and don't intend to imply that it should literally be every moment, but by their own rule, if they spend any time like this, it didn't happen, so I guess it would be hard to tell the difference.
tsylba 10mo ago
> This is one of the best things about writing online: your future friends will seek you out. Do I live in the same reality as the author? is that really a thing as in "it happens regularly enough to be mentioned as if it was"? Apart from this I'm so-so about this, like I believe a lot of people from my generation I'm fond of the idea of the internet as it was in the 90s, like a decentralized cyberspace of free spirit thinkers, which slowly diluted itself as decades past and might have been at its peaks during the blog bubble and RSS feeds era (meeh it's arguable). But it seems like that spirit is long gone and we've been compartmentalized, our spaces enclosed like the British Luddites were before us. I'm all for the permacomputing self-hosting ring websites but it seems like a thing mostly done by the cool kids, the Artists, the few that tend to do it for the performative angle more than from their own tropism or the one from the culture (as it was done when it was natural to do so). I'm not sure we could really go back to that era flavored internet culture without burning the centralized juggernauts to the ground.
yanoleaf 10mo ago
the anonymous are more honest because they don't worry about ostracization or whatever bullshit if people don't like their opinion ... i treat people with their "real name and real face" with suspicion because they're putting on a display that makes them "look good"

149 points by swah 10mo ago

I used to be very public, just as the author prefers. However, as the amount of surveillance on the internet increased it eventually reached a tipping point for me and I switched to being much more private as a matter of self-protection. There's no way I'd be comfortable going back to the way things used to be unless the web becomes better -- and I don't think that's happening anytime soon.

SoftTalker 10mo ago
What is the concern with "surveillance" if you are writing for the public?
- 000ooo000 10mo ago
  Dredging up common and mostly uncontroversial things that were said in 2010, but are now apparently very controversial, is somewhat of a sport for some people nowadays. There are some out there who would love fans of Ruby on Rails to suffer because of its association with DHH. It's not always entirely rational, so how could I ever predict what unhinged individuals in 2035 will take issue with on my blog? Everything online is preserved, so it's easier and safer to just not to participate at all.
  - wredcoll 10mo ago
    [flagged]
    - lbotos 10mo ago
      Read GP again. > There are some out there who would love fans of Ruby on Rails to suffer because of its association with DHH. This isn’t about DHH spouting whatever he is spouting. It’s about people trying to convince others to not associate with Rails because of DHH.
      - AnthonyMouse 10mo ago
        It's worse than that. It's people generating a moral panic so they can retroactively declare something to be crimethink and then use that as a weapon against anyone who disagrees with them by trawling through their history. In which case it's not a matter of standing by it because mobs aren't interested in context or nuance. Society's defense against this should be that we don't use mobs to punish people for saying things we disagree with and anybody who attempts to do that gets laughed off the stage. Because as soon as that's not what happens, the public discourse gets marred by self-censorship until enough time passes with it not happening that people stop expecting it to and thereby stop worrying that they can't know what's going to be declared an offense tomorrow. But now that it has happened recently, the only way to get it back in the short term is to have people posting under pseudonyms.
        wredcoll 10mo ago
        This idea that people are too... what, fragile, to be criticized continues to puzzle me. Dhh said some stupid stuff and now people are calling him out. Why should dhh be allowed to say whatever wants but no one is allowed to criticize him?
        AnthonyMouse 10mo ago
        The problem is not people criticizing ideas. The problem is people attacking other people for saying things they don't like, trying to get them fired, etc. Attack their arguments, not their family, employer, etc.
        wredcoll 10mo ago
        I mean, you keep repeating the idea that "some people" shouldn't be allowed to use their speech but DHH can use his speech. You can't have it both ways, either DHH is free to speak his mind on any subject he chooses, and so is everyone else, or nobody is actually free to speak.
      - wredcoll 10mo ago
    - liveoneggs 10mo ago
      woosh
    - 000ooo000 10mo ago
      >you should probably be willing to stand by the things you say, or why say them? Don't confuse the online world with the real one.
      - wredcoll 10mo ago
        If you don't think real people use the internet, I dunno man, welcome to the 21st century, there's a lot to catch up on.
ChrisMarshallNY 10mo ago
I'm pretty open (check out my HN handle, if you don't believe me), but I'm also retired, and there's not many ways folks can get a handle on me. I have an ... eclectic ... life story, and it has supplied me with a healthy dose of cynicism and hardness, that makes me a not-so-easy mark. I'm also very much a person who enjoys other people; especially the ones that are hard to get along with. I've learned that being open, on my end, can encourage others to be more open to me. I don't have any nefarious motives, and am quite trustworthy, so I like to think I'm a "low-risk" person. I'm quite aware that the same can't be said for many others, and understand it, when that is cast onto me.
- hellouruguay 10mo ago
  Eventually I hope to get to that point! For now, I'm still quite worried about what others think or being attacked or "cancelled" (as is quite common nowadays) for any reason. I hope to be like you someday.

bofadeez 10mo ago

Post brought to us by the NSA

readthenotes1 10mo ago

" I say reading in private is solipsistic" Only if you don't apply anything you learned publicly. For example, I read " evil is suffering passed on" and was able to relay that quote to an entitled friend to help hen change hens perception of how hens impositions affected others.

lioeters 10mo ago

I resonate with this. I enjoy reading people's technical, artistic and personal writings. How they built, solved, or learned something new. Their favorite tools, workflows. Favorite authors, concepts, interests. @simonw is a great example of this kind of openness and working in public. I'm learning how to do that in my own way. It makes the world friendlier, more welcoming for beginners and life-long students. It also creates a sense of community and human connection, which is often cynically exploited in today's society.

vjvjvjvjghv 10mo ago
There are several problems with this. First, a lot of people including myself don’t enjoy writing. Then there is the problem that these days people will give you a hard time for something you wrote 10 years ago. I don’t really feel I did anything wrong but I don’t want to have to spend time and energy on explaining myself. So if people enjoy writing , they should do it. But also be less judgmental about other people.

AuthAuth 10mo ago

Beautifully written, and something I resonate with. But I find myself wanting to read other peoples thoughts and peer at what they are doing. But I do not want to share any of that from myself because the internet is to permanent. I do not want to create an online footprint on this internet.

ursAxZA 10mo ago

I still love the era when everything online was text-based.

beloch 10mo ago

"And beyond my selfish curiosity there’s also the Fedorovist ancestor simulation angle: if you die and are not cryopreserved, how else are you going to make it to the other side of the intelligence explosion? Every tweet, blog post, Git commit, journal entry, keystroke, mouse click, every one of these things is a tomographic cut of the mind that created it." --------- Historians pour over this sort of stuff. If a historically interesting figure wrote a letter to their neighbour to complain about a noisy dog, it's been carefully preserved and obsessively analyzed. Historians want to get inside their subjects' heads and figure out what they were thinking when they did that big, important thing, and every scrap of remaining written material helps. We live in a period that is going to be real tough on historians studying it. Over the last few decades, physical correspondence (i.e. letters, etc.) has mostly died out. A lot of people still journal, but on their computer. Will that folder of old journal entries be found by whoever inherits your house full of junk or will it be tossed? A dead-tree diary is pretty easy to recognize for what it is. A computer's contents are comparatively easy to overlook. Most people who have lived over the last few decades have had multiple email addresses that, at first, they eagerly used for personal interactions and then, over time, more and more only for professional/commercial correspondence. At the same time, people started writing for fun and passion under anonymous pseudonyms in a variety of online forums. Some remain online and still operating. Some have been curated and remain online. Some are archived. Some are just gone. Then came social media and texting. A huge proportion of people's most intimate interactions are in texts now, but for how much longer? We seem to be on a novelty treadmill when it comes to personal interaction mediums. Yesterday's source of joy is today's chore. Imagine that you do something really significant in a decade or so, and some historian a hundred years from now is trying to figure out why you did it. Getting access to as much of your written output as remains and correctly associating the anonymous stuff with you is going to be a tough problem. How much of what is online today will remains? How much of it will be possible to associate with you, and not a pseudonym? Even if they speak your native tongue, they'll have to learn how to interpret your slang and texting shorthand. This sounds almost impossible today, but what kind of tools might they have in a century? My suspicion is that history is going to remain remarkably unchanged in a very specific way: For some historical figures we'll have mountains of material. Others, despite their importance, will be complete enigmas.

10mo ago

hellouruguay 10mo ago

Until someone evil uses all that to investigate you or do something against you...

SXX 10mo ago
You dont even need anyone evil . Might be just dumb and misinformed by AI news slop that people of your kind are evil, dangerous, etc. Whoever you are.

nospice 10mo ago

If you're on the internet long enough, I think you learn that openness has plenty of downsides. You indirectly interact with tens of thousands of people and in that set, there will be people who don't wish you well, sometimes for reasons you can't even grasp. In the 1990s, I used to put my phone number in my .signature file. I've come to regret that. In the 2000s, I participated in relatively large online forums under my real name, and have gotten threats mailed to my family and employer. Etc, etc. If you want others to broadcast their lives, I don't think that moralizing is enough; you gotta offset the negatives. Which basically means "positively engage", but we mostly don't do it on forums such as Twitter. Have you ever thanked anyone for a recommendation, a photo, an article? And how often do you do that, compared to posting to disagree?

pinkmuffinere 10mo ago
I think you’re right that it’s hard. But I think you’re implying that it could be less hard if we just behaved better à la “be the change you want to see”, and I believe you’re wrong about that. The people that send death threats do not read your advice, nor do they care enough to take it to heart. The people that _will_ listen were not sending death threats to begin with. And getting 500 thankyou-messages does not outweigh the handful of death threats
- nospice 10mo ago
  I think it does. Internet death threats are upsetting but you also learn they tend to be toothless 99.9% of the time. Most of it is just internet tough guys hundreds or thousands of miles away. A lifetime of small positive outcomes can easily offset that for many people.
  - jamblewamble 10mo ago
    Also 90% of the time when you finally manage to get someone to quote one of these "death threats" it turns out to be something like "I hope you die of cancer" or "You deserve to get shot" which are horrible but are not threats in any sense whatsoever. This is why when you see yet another article about someone getting "death threats" they don't actually say what the threats are: most of the time they aren't threats at all. On the other hand, sometimes people really do actually threaten people and if someone actually threatens you, the likelihood that he is 1000s of km away isn't particularly reassuring let me tell you.

zephen 10mo ago

> I read in private, build in private, learn in private. And the problem with that is self-doubt and arbitrariness. Certainly if you do it in public, you don't have doubt yourself. Everyone else will do it for you.

iamnothere 10mo ago

No thanks. I once was interested in things like lifelogging, radical sharing, etc. Then the internet became super toxic, and it was clear that humans who don’t like you will use any information they can find as a weapon against you. I found through real life experience that the marginal benefits I gained from sharing were outweighed by the downsides. So I no longer share. Normalize privacy. You can engage in radical sharing if you want to take the risk, but the average person probably won’t see a net benefit from it. Don’t push people into it if they don’t want to, and respect people who prefer to stay out of the spotlight.

petterroea 10mo ago

Questions surrounding this has plagued me for the last years, and this is basically where I'm at right now: * I am trying to write more because writing is a good skill to practice, and it's fun to discuss with colleagues and have meanings that resonate with people. Or not. I still think most use of Cloudflare is naive and unnecessary cargo culting that just adds infrastructure complexity, but last time I complained it got a reasonable amount of pushback :D * But being a public person has downsides. The more public you are, the less of an expectation of privacy you have, and the less you are allowed to make mistakes. I grew up as a somewhat infamous person in my local community due to sticking out, it wasn't unusual that people already knew of me when I met them for the first time. As a result I had to accept that there was no such thing for me as simply going somewhere, the chance was high that someone who knew who I was (even if I didn't know them!) spotted me. I have lived long enough to see many people mess up being a famous public person on the internet. Often they never even wanted to be famous, it just happened and then they had to deal with the consequences. It could happen to anyone who happens to be at the right place at the right time. For hackers and similar people, it seems some just find a calling and that calling makes them well known as a side-effect. If you do anything that could be considered novel, you risk becoming well known. If you have a public persona and people like it, you will get followers. And if that happens, your public activity becomes the bane of your existence. You will be picked apart, analyzed, and possibly targeted by people who disagree with you. People will expect you to have opinions on things and drag you into conflicts. And what you say _matters_ - you have to think about everything you say because one misstep and entire communities will mobilize against you. Many people have gotten hate for saying something controversial on a topic they had little knowledge about. This is normal in a private setting, we discuss politics we aren't experts on with friends all the time. But if you are a public person, you lose many avenues to do this. I am Norwegian, and the lack of tech literacy in government and the general public is frankly depressing. This isn't necessarily because the general public is stupid. Bob Kåre (49) has better things to do with his life than learn about tech-politics. Norway needs more technical people to be politically active. But doing so seems downright stupid, considering the reflections above. It is practically a sacrifice. I think the reward has to be pretty large for this to be worth considering. It is a lot better, and easier, to just stick to yourself and your circle.

deleted 10mo ago

[deleted]

arjie 10mo ago

I am. I know it’s not free but I think it’s important for humanity to move forward. E.g. my genome variant report https://viz.roshangeorge.dev/roshan-genvue/ https://viz.roshangeorge.dev/roshan-genvue/ My wife’s pregnancy as logged by me https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Pregnancy https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Pregnancy I think it's important to have real-world actual experiences written down because a lot of online information is just people repeating what other people say and it's not true. I'm hoping that by just writing the truth of what I've seen with my own eyes, people will have real information to work with, and maybe LLMs will have this in there somewhere and we'll move a little closer to fact. I talked a little bit about the risks in another comment on a similar post here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46336356 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46336356

llmslave2 10mo ago
I love this for you :)

RatchetWerks 10mo ago

I have similar feelings as the author. I aim to be as public as possible while maintaining personal privacy. I *want* to meet other like-minded people that enjoy the same topics I do. I treat any of my public facing information as a honeypot for nerds (i.e like-minded people). In real life, if I meet interesting people, I point them to my website. If they reach out with questions, I know I found "one of my people". On a similar note, if I an idea, project or thought of mine could benefit someone else and allow them to learn and gain from it. I'd like to publish it with my privacy in mind.

satisfice 10mo ago

I like this guy. I want to know more about him.

ThrowawayTestr 10mo ago

When I was a child my teacher told me to never use my real name online

zarzavat 10mo ago

It's all very well being more public, until a government decides to make 5 years of social media history an entry condition[0], and moreover imprisons those people who are denied entry instead of simply sending them home on the next flight[1]. I have no problem with this per se, as I have no plans to go to the US this decade, but I do worry about contagion. Perhaps being a public person on the internet is an idea whose time has come and gone. [0] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1dz0g2ykpeo.amp https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1dz0g2ykpeo.amp [1] https://amp.dw.com/en/german-nationals-us-immigration-detained-interrogation-ice-donald-trump/a-71987211 https://amp.dw.com/en/german-nationals-us-immigration-detain...

exe34 10mo ago
[flagged]
- braebo 10mo ago
  Brown sympathizers
GFischer 10mo ago
My father lived through the Uruguay dictatorship in the 1970s and avoids all social media whenever possible. I was an infant at the beginning of democracy, so I haven't taken that much care. Now, it seems he'll be vindicated once again, I do plan on visiting the USA and I'm hoping my social media won't be an obstacle (fortunately I don't think I have anything, but who knows, maybe I liked a meme or something).
yanoleaf 10mo ago
they don't care ... it's all boomer-tier scare tactics

phendrenad2 10mo ago

Most of the people disagreeing seem to be forgetting that public doesn't necessarily mean using your real name. We used to have vibrant communities full of people with names like "claxxon" and "zerg". claxxon knows about cisco networking and zerg knows about the best punk bands in the chicago area. Their real names? Not needed, wanted, or relevant, and we're offended you even asked, noob!

esseph 10mo ago
That use to be useful in a time where it was much harder to instantly de-mask those handles. If you're trying to make a name for yourself and you're social long enough, you'll eventually have a decent sized footprint on the internet. Sites and services get breached all the time.
- phendrenad2 10mo ago
  > it was much harder to instantly de-mask those handles This is just a failure of the baseline thought that people put into security these days. It's not exactly hard to sign up for a free email service with no tie to your real identity. (Unless you're in the EU, that is)
Telaneo 10mo ago
I try to live up to that ideal in a way. I'm more comfortable with my internet handle than my real name. However, connecting the dots between a username with any decently long history and the person behind that username is trivial unless you go out of your way not to reveal too much about yourself, and even then, given enough time, there will be enough breadcrumbs eventually. I've given up on preventing people from connecting the dots. If people want to engage with me, they can do it with my username in situ, or send me an email which uses that same username. If they're being creepy about it, I can block them and ignore them.
- squigz 10mo ago
  > unless you go out of your way not to reveal too much about yourself, and even then, given enough time, there will be enough breadcrumbs eventually. This is why it's not reasonable (for the vast, vast majority of people) to attempt this, and why we have to be realistic about our threat profiles. Sure, anyone who knows what they're doing and is dedicated enough can find out information about me - that doesn't mean I'm going to advertise my name and location so that everyone can find that information about me with ease.

AndrewKemendo 10mo ago

I write for myself so I don’t forget things and so I can have a record of my thought processes as empirical proof of my processing and understanding I publish so that I get feedback grounded in alternative interpretations which helps sharpen the ideas and processes and understanding You can’t actually understand anything in any real way if it’s not subject to intense and widespread scrutiny Doubly so if you think you’re onto some new idea.

llmslave2 10mo ago

A lot of people are talking about the downsides and I get it - for me it's about authenticity. I think it's really lacking in today's world, and if you don't feel comfortable sharing on the internet (which is fair!) at least do it irl. We need more real human connection and people being themselves!

neilv 10mo ago

We're in an environment in which a handful of billionaire techbros (and aspiring ones) have simply taken most of the world's copyrighted material, and are using it to destroy the livelihoods of people who create it. Why give them more stuff to steal for free? (HN techbros are slow on feeling the pain of the greed and corruption, partly because we can temporarily ride the coattails of the exploiters. And partly because we don't have field-wide strong tradition of ethics and integrity, unlike some disciplines that are objecting fiercely to plagiarism and shoddy quality. But eventually HN will feel the livelihood impact, and many AI slop poems will be written about not speaking up when some earlier groups got wronged.)

ai_critic 10mo ago

We have systematically dismantled by popular consensus the safety of liberalism and belief in a marketplace of ideas. There is no advantage to being "more public" when it's all to common to get hit by marauding bands of idealists and trolls of all atripes. Nobody rewards you for having nuanced opinions on things like immigration publicly, nor trans rights, nor even something as banal as programming language choice. We've now lived through a full pendulum cycle where public writing that was insufficiently woke was punished via internet lynch mobs and state pressure, and now we are seeing the exact same thing with insufficiently reactionary ideas invoking...internet lynch mobs and state pressure. So, no, I don't think I will be more public, and I'll be unsurprised--if sad--when other rational actors do similarly. There's no reason to be public, because people have made it clear that they'd rather support a system that attacks that than protects it.

abstractspoon 10mo ago

A very self centred viewpoint

virtualbluesky 10mo ago

Acting in public is hyperlocal - your behaviour affects those around you and gives those affected right of reply, if they have the courage to take it. Publishing your actions on the Internet is a little different. If people were affected by the action, they are affected (likely unknowingly) by the publication too - and the audience that you grant right of reply has at best an ideological horse in the race, not true skin in the game. And not much courage is required to engage with an opposing position. So "living publicly" on the internet leaves a permanent door open to ideological conflict, mob behaviour, and creates a disconnect between action and reaction - in both time and space. Kinda alien for a monkey brain to wrap banana powered neurons around.

mosquitobiten 10mo ago

Everytime I intentionally interact with Meta's apps/data factories, I feel a bit like in the movie Matrix when Neo is disconnected from the Matrix, wakes up from his pod and sees the other pods. And have to admit I saw that movie when I was to young for it and that scene really did a number on me. I don't mind being public but I mind if I'm in a way a slave to an entity that uses that to farm my identity and distorts my perception of reality.

sshine 10mo ago
If they farm your identity, they do so whether you post online or not. The only way to not contribute is to practice no identity. In that case your biomass still serves as a battery somehow (the movie fails to explain the physics here.)
- yesbabyyes 10mo ago
  As I heard it explained, the original manuscript had the humans kept alive because the Matrix was actually running on the humans' brains as the computing substrate. This both made much more sense than humans as a power source, was more horrific, and a better story. Apparently this was deemed to hard for the unwashed masses to understand, and we were left with this battery analogy instead.
  - wkat4242 10mo ago
    Huh interesting. It makes also much more sense then to have some humans have the ability to change things in the Matrix, considering it was basically running on their brains. The big question in that case though is why? Why would the AIs keep a simulation of the old world?
    - shimman 10mo ago
      Matrix lore is quite cool, if you haven't seen the Animatrix check it out. The Second Renaissance is great world building! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sU8RunvBRZ8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sU8RunvBRZ8 (first part) To answer your Q tho, this was in one of the sequels I believe, basically the first iterations of the matrix were like "Eden" but humans couldn't adapt to it so they redesigned and iterated it into what you see in the movie. The idea being that if humans weren't busy they'd realize they were enslaved so they had to make a system to keep humans occupied and stimulated enough to be useful.

throw-12-16 10mo ago

No thanks. I wish people kept to themselves more.

paprikanotfound 10mo ago

The internet is a very different place nowadays. There are private companies using your data for profit and manipulating you. Governments prosecuting you based on what you post and bad actors trying to hack/scam you. Even if you stay anonymous. And yet I think there are plenty of people being public online, just perhaps not as much sharing the kinds of things the author mentions.

Anonyneko 10mo ago

Officials in my country of origin might lock me out of using banking and government services if I post something wrong on the internet even if I permanently reside abroad, and while I still have relatives there I cannot risk that happening. Oh and if they do and I come back they might also slap me with a 10-20-year sentence for good measure. So nope, can't afford to be any more public than I am (I'm under no illusion that connecting my nickname to my real name isn't a piece of cake, but at least it's one layer of indirection). I imagine that many people are in very similar boats, and more and more countries steer that way as of late.

hellobluelings 10mo ago
Come to Switzerland. The worst country in that regard. Cameras everywhere (lamps etc.). Nobody follows the law. They just make up reasons to ruin your life and everyone has to suffer. There is no privacy, at least in CH.
- jojomodding 10mo ago
  I live in Switzerland too and can't relate at all.
  - kyboren 10mo ago
    I have noticed that a few years ago, at least in Zürich, small unobtrusive black enclosures have appeared everywhere on traffic signal/lamp posts along the roads. I can only assume that they contain cameras. But nobody else I've talked to has even noticed them. Flock ALPR mass surveillance is at least controversial in the US, yet I haven't heard any controversy over the apparent(?) roll-out of ALPR mass surveillance in Switzerland. I have not spent the effort to dig into what exactly those things are, who owns them, and what their claimed purpose is, but given their recent installation, density, clear view of the roads, and strategic locations (intersections, roadway exits, etc.) an ALPR mass surveillance network is, to me, the most plausible explanation.

0xbadc0de5 10mo ago

Never have so many people with so little to say, said it so loudly.

tim333 10mo ago

I think an answer is maybe to have multiple identities on the web. Like I've got real name stuff on Facebook and Linkedin and some anonymous accounts too. You keep the real name stuff safe for work and your mum seeing.

sapphirebreeze 10mo ago

[dead]

RiverCrochet 10mo ago

> I will often find a blog post on Hacker News that really resonates. And when I go to check the rest of the site there’s three other posts. And I think: I wish you’d write more! I really miss that period in the 90's and early 2000's when: - people were doing interesting things online and tending to those spaces regularly, - Google actually worked and it was easy to find those things, - Myspace/Facebook wasn't a thing I'd love to have the general mood and vibe of the 90's back, which I think contributed greatly to the early Internet and the ability and desire to be public within it. But even in the 90's, spam was a problem, and it's grown amd morphed into different things over time. Banner ad popups, link farms, SEO optimization, etc. Age verification laws are going to fully destroy the Internet for anything other than approved business uses, such as selling stuff. Soon, any "public" left will be spammers-spammers in the modern form of influencers either directly trying to sell you something or sponsored in order to support/create a market. Some may argue we've mostly reached that point. It's over. The forward thinkers need to think beyond the Internet. Until then it's closed groups and chats.

MrDrMcCoy 10mo ago
Forums need to make a comeback. Kids these days not only don't know what they are, but have trouble understanding them when explained. I somehow feel like forums could catch on again if there were a shiny enough platform. To that end, can anyone recommend any decent forum engines? Discourse's UI rubs me the wrong way, and it would be nice to avoid PHP/MySQL as dependencies in general.
- peterspath 10mo ago
  what's wrong with PHP/MySQL? I am not into web tech, so genuine curiosity.
- LeratoAustini 10mo ago
  As someone who is sometimes on slow/spotty internet, Discourse's loading dots/circles rub me the wrong way. Like what are they *doing* for all this time while I wait for a page of relatively simple-looking HTML to load? I kept seeing these familiar coloured dots on seemingly disparate sites and it took me a while to realise they were all running Discourse.

bicepjai 10mo ago

I usually don’t like it when people use unnecessary big words. But sometimes a word comes by that explains exactly the idea. One of my favorites is Schadenfreude ( it’s funny and real at the same time). When I noticed the author used Solipsism, I definitely judged him for a moment, but after I read the explanation, it was a beautiful description of his stance :) Solipsism is a philosophical position asserting that only one's own mind is certain to exist.

bicepjai 10mo ago

The post made me think of a different compromise: more public artifacts when we choose, without surrendering our lives to centralized platforms. Like mentioned in the comments, today’s internet is permanent, searchable, and easily weaponized through harassment, surveillance, or data exploitation, so the personal cost of being ‘public’ can be unpredictable and high. So why don’t we build a system where our identity and activity data live with us by default, on a small server in our home, instead of scattered across company clouds? Everything we do online could be logged locally under our control, and shared only when we explicitly allow it. If a company wants to use our data (for ads, analytics, or training models), it should be a clear opt-in, scoped to a specific purpose, and priced transparently. If it’s valuable, we should get paid for it and that creates incentive structures. This also matches how I want to use AI personally. I want my own local model that can learn from my data privately, say something like training or updating nightly while I sleep; so I get the benefits of personalization without handing over the raw contents of my life to someone else’s servers. In a world like that, being “more public” becomes a choice you can make safely, not a gamble you’re forced into. ~ organized thoughts with GPT5.2 and used Apple proofread

Offlines 10mo ago

Reading is as much engagement as writing if not more.

kgwxd 10mo ago

Clearly phrased to take advantage of the "controversial opinion" for clicks. "I wish people would publish more" is what they mean, but that's not interesting. Can one even "be public"?

WahyuS002 10mo ago

I resonate with the "honeypot for nerds" sentiment mentioned by others here. There is a distinct difference between "being public" as a performance (influencer style) and "working with the garage door open." The author seems to be advocating for the latter. I've found that publishing raw notes, half-baked projects, or niche interests acts as a high-quality filter. It might not get mass engagement, but the few people who do reach out are almost always high-signal connections. The fear of surveillance is valid, but the cost of total obscurity is missing out on that serendipity.

avaer 10mo ago

As interesting as such a world is to the author, the post fails to appreciate that the beneficiaries of such a world won't be us, but AI companies that hoover this data, pollute it with "alignment", and sell it back to us. As well as nefarious government actors.

metalman 10mo ago

Public is that which happens once, in real time,and most importantly derives it's content from spontainious colaberations of humans.Speaking and acting to the moment. Everything else, the all of all, is a spin off from this.

saghm 10mo ago

> I try to apply a rule that if I do something, and don’t write about it—or otherwise generate external-facing evidence of it—it didn’t happen. I have built so many things in the dark, little experiments or software projects or essays that never saw the light of day. I want to put more things out. If it doesn’t merit an entire blog post, then at least a tweet. I think this might be the crux of a lot of the disagreement that seems to be present with article (which I feel as well admittedly). So much of my life is stuff that isn't around things I've built or written; sometimes I'm just existing without producing, nowadays with my wife, but in the past maybe with a friend, roommate, or just relaxing alone. I'm not the type of person to be greatly concerned with my legacy or whether lots of people remember me after I'm gone as much as whether the people who do happen to remember me from the interactions I had with them have good memories. I don't see any purpose in documenting this sort of thing, and most of the time it would actively worsen the experience to do so. I don't know if this isn't something that would apply to the author's life or if they're just talking about something else specifically and don't intend to imply that it should literally be every moment, but by their own rule, if they spend any time like this, it didn't happen, so I guess it would be hard to tell the difference.

tsylba 10mo ago

> This is one of the best things about writing online: your future friends will seek you out. Do I live in the same reality as the author? is that really a thing as in "it happens regularly enough to be mentioned as if it was"? Apart from this I'm so-so about this, like I believe a lot of people from my generation I'm fond of the idea of the internet as it was in the 90s, like a decentralized cyberspace of free spirit thinkers, which slowly diluted itself as decades past and might have been at its peaks during the blog bubble and RSS feeds era (meeh it's arguable). But it seems like that spirit is long gone and we've been compartmentalized, our spaces enclosed like the British Luddites were before us. I'm all for the permacomputing self-hosting ring websites but it seems like a thing mostly done by the cool kids, the Artists, the few that tend to do it for the performative angle more than from their own tropism or the one from the culture (as it was done when it was natural to do so). I'm not sure we could really go back to that era flavored internet culture without burning the centralized juggernauts to the ground.

yanoleaf 10mo ago

the anonymous are more honest because they don't worry about ostracization or whatever bullshit if people don't like their opinion ... i treat people with their "real name and real face" with suspicion because they're putting on a display that makes them "look good"