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Interesting. I don't have a lot of connections to... "your generation". (Sigh, I guess I'm to the point where I get/have to say that. ;-) Therefor, I've bee

Interesting. I don't have a lot of connections to... "your generation". (Sigh, I guess I'm to the point where I get/have to say that. ;-) Therefor, I've been going more than a bit by what I've seen others writing in the press and blogging. Never an entirely trustworthy source of information. Perhaps I'm part of an atypical graph. And/or the recent FB news feed jiggering has decreased my perceived quality. My own reaction is probably primarily one of privacy. I don't get super-paranoid, but I don't want to be blatting my personal interactions all over a fully public, searchable interface. It suddenly occurs to me to ask: The press -- more a few years ago than recently -- reports on different generational perspectives towards privacy including online. (As in, younger people... are more ready to take on the nuances, if not that they are simple unconcerned, as some perhaps misinforming reporting has claimed.) I also read recently that a major attraction of Tumblr has been pseudonyms. You tell your friends what your Tumblr ID is, but you don't necessarily freely associate your (full) name with it. Would you have and care to share any perspective on these points: Privacy, and pseudonymity in order to at least loosely control the resulting... "graph" and perhaps unwanted discovery? (If not, no worries -- thought I'd ask, though.)

argonaut 14y ago
Keep in mind that I am by no means representative of the younger generation since I'm a really techy guy in Silicon Valley who is very much plugged into startups, etc. The fact that I frequent HN makes me much different than 99% of 16 - 21 year olds. I do feel like most people my age do not care about privacy. I obsessively use and tune all the FB privacy controls, but I feel like most people don't know about them. The appeal of pseudonyms on Tumblr has more to do with aspiration than privacy, I think. A lot of people younger than me (who I've FB stalked!) who use Tumblr use it like they use Pinterest: basically a collection of aspirational images. For example, a 16 year old guy might have a Tumblr that's full of pictures of sports cars, beautiful women, exotic locations, music artists that he likes, etc. There is certainly no actual blogging, because that requires lot's of writing. They'll typically have a tumblrID that has less to do with their name, and more to do with their identity. So someone who plays sports might have a tumblrID of "sportsguy123" (you get the picture).

argonaut 14y ago

Keep in mind that I am by no means representative of the younger generation since I'm a really techy guy in Silicon Valley who is very much plugged into startups, etc. The fact that I frequent HN makes me much different than 99% of 16 - 21 year olds. I do feel like most people my age do not care about privacy. I obsessively use and tune all the FB privacy controls, but I feel like most people don't know about them. The appeal of pseudonyms on Tumblr has more to do with aspiration than privacy, I think. A lot of people younger than me (who I've FB stalked!) who use Tumblr use it like they use Pinterest: basically a collection of aspirational images. For example, a 16 year old guy might have a Tumblr that's full of pictures of sports cars, beautiful women, exotic locations, music artists that he likes, etc. There is certainly no actual blogging, because that requires lot's of writing. They'll typically have a tumblrID that has less to do with their name, and more to do with their identity. So someone who plays sports might have a tumblrID of "sportsguy123" (you get the picture).