5 ms·

I think the future will be one where we're split on this - not as a society, but individually. You will have your public persona and your private persona. I hav

I think the future will be one where we're split on this - not as a society, but individually. You will have your public persona and your private persona. I have to be public because I'm in news, but not everything I do has to be associated with my real name, and I take advantage of that when I feel like it. That ability and that habit will only become safer and more accepted over time.

svachalek 13y ago
I wish various sites were more supportive of this. Back in the day, Yahoo! groups supported multiple identities very comfortably, so you could be "yourself" in professional forums and "be" yourself elsewhere. I don't know about anymore since I haven't used them in years. But most other sites that support pseudonyms mostly still work hard to make sure you only have one, which does little to curtail the possible abuses thereof while making it painful to do so for good reasons.
icebraining 13y ago
I think we've always had multiple public and private personas. Many of us are not the exact same person around strangers than we are at home, or with friends. It's just that what's seamless and instinctive in physical space is often hard to translate into the 'net, and the big sites don't help at all.
sk00byd00 13y ago
In the future everyone will be anonymous for fifteen minutes -- Banksy
yaddayadda 13y ago
PhinisheD (http://www.phinished.org/ http://www.phinished.org/) has done this for many years. You must have a user account to make posts, but if there are reasons to post anonymously, then you can do so by posting it as "AFT" - anonymous for this. Everyone has the same anonymous moniker, and it is clear when someone is posting anonymously. I like this so approach so much that I've actually created AFT or numbered AFT accounts in several places where I don't want a regular username associated with the comment. I also have themed usernames. Anything I post professionally goes with my real life name or a moniker known by my professional colleagues. I have several hobbies and several very different subjects that I'm trying to learn, and each of those have different associated usernames. I thought that OpenID would support this concept, but it never seemed to (maybe I was missing some key concept?). Now I have hope that Mozilla Persona might fill this gap.

svachalek 13y ago

I wish various sites were more supportive of this. Back in the day, Yahoo! groups supported multiple identities very comfortably, so you could be "yourself" in professional forums and "be" yourself elsewhere. I don't know about anymore since I haven't used them in years. But most other sites that support pseudonyms mostly still work hard to make sure you only have one, which does little to curtail the possible abuses thereof while making it painful to do so for good reasons.

icebraining 13y ago

I think we've always had multiple public and private personas. Many of us are not the exact same person around strangers than we are at home, or with friends. It's just that what's seamless and instinctive in physical space is often hard to translate into the 'net, and the big sites don't help at all.

sk00byd00 13y ago

In the future everyone will be anonymous for fifteen minutes -- Banksy

yaddayadda 13y ago

PhinisheD (http://www.phinished.org/ http://www.phinished.org/) has done this for many years. You must have a user account to make posts, but if there are reasons to post anonymously, then you can do so by posting it as "AFT" - anonymous for this. Everyone has the same anonymous moniker, and it is clear when someone is posting anonymously. I like this so approach so much that I've actually created AFT or numbered AFT accounts in several places where I don't want a regular username associated with the comment. I also have themed usernames. Anything I post professionally goes with my real life name or a moniker known by my professional colleagues. I have several hobbies and several very different subjects that I'm trying to learn, and each of those have different associated usernames. I thought that OpenID would support this concept, but it never seemed to (maybe I was missing some key concept?). Now I have hope that Mozilla Persona might fill this gap.