10 ms·

The anonymity I know

310 points by shasa 13y ago

izzydata 13y ago
I agree with every word. Of course I am incredibly biased because this is the kind of internet interaction that I prefer. It is just a different kind of internet culture and is obviously not for some people. If you want every possible opinion on something whether it be the most popular opinions or the least popular opinion and everything in-between then anonymity is the way to go. Preferably without internet aliases for a true representation of unfiltered opinions.
danso 13y ago
> I strongly disagree. What I’ve observed is the opposite—that anonymity facilitates honest discourse, creates a level playing field for ideas to be heard, and enables creativity like none other. I think Chris makes a great counter-argument, however, isn't it possible that anonymity can breed both meanness and creativity? I don't mean just creatively-cruel-pranks, but that what anonymity breeds is dependent on the community, and to an extent, how that community is moderated. HackerNews allows anonymity, but I think it'd be a much different place for discussion if it weren't for the mod policies in effect.
- Zikes 13y ago
  Honest discourse means that you're able to express meanness, but it does not necessarily spawn that meanness from nothing.
  - mikeg8 13y ago
    I disagree. Honest discourse means you are able to express a differing point of view, even if it is very critical/harsh. Meanness would be calling someone a faggot when it is unrelated to the topic and that is never a part of real discourse.
- wpietri 13y ago
  Yes. Healthy communities, real or virtual, self-regulate through social feedback loops. Requiring real names activates those social feedback loops in a way that is very handy from the perspective of people designing communities. If you're going to have anonymity, you need to find a workable substitute. Early BBSes were often pseudonymous, but they were also gardens carefully tended by their operators. HN's self-moderation and karma tracking provide a similar effect here. Quora has a functional mix of mostly real names with optional anonymity on a per-post basis plus user voting and heavy moderation to enforce a "be nice, be respectful" tone. Another good example is John Scalzi, who moderates his blog comments using the "Mallet of Loving Correction". His comment policy is a great example, but it clearly takes a lot of thoughtful gardening on his part to keep a pseudonymous comments section from descending into something pretty ugly: http://whatever.scalzi.com/about/site-disclaimer-and-comment-policy/ http://whatever.scalzi.com/about/site-disclaimer-and-comment...
  - crassus 13y ago
    Scalzi considers "ugly" anyone that is outside a very small neighborhood of idea space. It's fine for his own professional blog, but it's incredibly narrow as a general principle for discussions.
    - wpietri 13y ago
      I don't think that's the case. He's pretty strict in enforcing behavior, including the behavior of staying on topic. Another good example in this regard is Quora. They cover an incredibly wide range of topics and viewpoints. But they're pretty insistent on respectful behavior. I think that focus, respectful behavior, is exactly what makes for good real-world discussions. Because on-line fora break the sort of continuous, subtle social signals that help guide real-world discussions, I think we need to be especially disciplined in pursuing that respect.
      - crassus 13y ago
        It's tempting to define "impoliteness" as disagreement with progressive beliefs about feminism or white racial guilt. Judging by what Scalzi has banned people for, he seems to fall victim to this. He uses the banhammer more than any other blogger I've followed. The others don't feel the need to curate the discussion so closely. It's fine to be so closed off in your personal space, but the intellectual air can get a bit musty.
sp332 13y ago
The conversation is “raw” to say the least—almost everyone checks their filter at the door. The resulting dialogue is about as honest as it gets. In lieu of traditional barriers to membership, the community uses cryptic and crude language to regulate who can and cannot participate. On the surface this may seem offensive, but it’s often meant to do little more than keep newcomers on their toes and encourage they lurk and learn the house rules before participating. How can you have honest, unfiltered dialogue when there are barriers to entry and membership is regulated? Hey moot, why are YouTube comments so bad? Clearly it's not just anonymity.
- bsamuels 13y ago
  youtube comments are bad because there's no barrier to entry. with 4chan you have to get over the social impact of actually browsing 4chan. Just go look at the 4chan subreddit, it's filled to the brink with people who want to consume 4chan content but are too scared to actually visit the site.
- timpattinson 13y ago
  Youtube comments are terrible because it's the lowest common denominator of internet message boards. More sophisticated use Reddit/HN/etc.
wpietri 13y ago
On the one hand, I was an early BBS user, and there was a fair bit of benefit in anonymity or pseudonymity there. On the other, when somebody says that he strongly disagrees with the notion that anonymity breeds meanness and his positive example is 4chan, I'm gobsmacked. We must have such different standards for what qualifies as meanness that I'm not sure we're the same species.
- izzydata 13y ago
  I agree that in some sense it doesn't make sense and people from 4chan probably do have a drastically different standard for what is actually mean. I'm sure for most people on 4chan you don't really consider anything mean. It doesn't matter what anyone says to you because who cares. The thread dies and that's the end of that. You also have to remember though that most of 4chan is not /b/. It gives a misleading representation to the majority of the site.
- antoko 13y ago
  His point seems to be that it breeds HONESTY rather than meanness, I don't think he was saying it breeds the opposite of meanness, just that meanness is a side-effect of the honesty and the honesty is the real effect.
  - angersock 13y ago
    Exploring that just a little further... The meanest things are those with a grain of truth in them, a mirror for someone's imperfections. Thus, it follows that a community which enables blatant and rough honesty will be perceived as "meaner".
- bsamuels 13y ago
  Do keep in mind that 4chan is not /b/. There's a _huge_ discrepancy between people's interpretation of what 4chan is like, and what it really is. This is probably why the community has been able to stay so strong over the years. On the off-chance you visit one of the more aggressive boards and someone tries to say mean things to you, you can always reply in a friendly, careless fashion and make them feel really bad about what they said. I was gonna go look for some lovey dovey thread to cite as evidence, but instead I found a thread full of guys trying to build a physical version of their imaginary chinese-cartoon girlfriends. https://archive.foolz.us/a/thread/101944946/ https://archive.foolz.us/a/thread/101944946/ I literally can't imagine this happening anywhere other than on 4chan.
afreak 13y ago
I say this with hesitation but I believe that Snapchat, with all of its idiotic flaws is an indication of how the future of social networking platforms will be. It demonstrates that you can have a service where your friends are known but the content is seemingly temporary, allowing for some semblance of control. I don't think that Snapchat is the future, but it does make me think that the ideas around it are what will make Facebook lost to younger generations. Being anonymous is not important to most people. If it were, news website comments would be more palatable where real identities are required--far from the case.
- gknoy 13y ago
  I worry about the "seemingly" part. Sometime, whether due to law enforcement pressure or poor design, ephemeral chat messages/pictures will no longer be temporary -- and as users we might never know until it's too late. Interesting thoughts about anonymity not being important to most people, and the future of social networking, though. I'd never thought about it that way before, but it seems compelling.
- sneak 13y ago
  > I say this with hesitation but I believe that Snapchat, with all of its idiotic flaws is an indication of how the future of social networking platforms will be. Snapchat only really delivers on its promise because of the kind of user-hostile DRM Stallman and his ilk have been screaming warnings about for years. Its children and derivatives cannot reasonably exist in a future in which end users have real control over their computers.
  - pjc50 13y ago
    It's interesting that this is a case where DRM transfers power from one user to another: from recipient to sender. The only other case I've come across where this kind of transfer is accepted as beneficial is anti-cheat systems in games.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
nswanberg 13y ago
This is a great essay, and a great argument for anonymity and what it can offer. Sam's essay went too quickly towards condemning anonymity, but it started by attacking a different kind of anonymity--that of small groups. Secret might have problems not simply because the messages are anonymous, but because they are anonymous between people who know each other and can act on that information. In 4chan participants likely will never meet--in Secret they already have.
- mikeg8 13y ago
  Interesting perspective. Thanks.
MattGrommes 13y ago
I used to think that anonymous comments bred ugliness because it gave people a way to be (even temporarily) racist, hateful, etc. with no consequences for their "real" offline self. The most interesting effect of so much commenting going on using Facebook is my discovery that people are just as willing to be outright racist and hateful in a million ways when their real name, picture, and main online identity are involved.
- teddyh 13y ago
  Well, let’s look at it from a historical perspective. In the past, before the Internet, the only place it was even possible to be anonymous was in writing – anonymous pamphlets, books written under pseudonyms, etc. Now, did these contain horrible behavior? No, the horrible behavior (as judged by the standards of the times) was associated with lower classes instead. The anonymous pamphlets and books written under pseudonyms were instead challenges to the status quo and the powers that be.
josefresco 13y ago
I may be completely ignorant here but how is Snapchat anonymous? I thought you shared content with your contact list... but maybe I'm missing something. Is it because Snapchat has no "profile" page a la Facebook?
- bentcorner 13y ago
  It's not anonymous, but to the user it's ephemeral. You can make a pic, send it through snapchat, and be confident that regardless of the outcome (people loved it or hated it) they would never be able to see it again. Traditional internet forums are anonymous and static. Snapchat flips that around.
  - falcolas 13y ago
    > You can make a pic, send it through snapchat, and be confident that regardless of the outcome (people loved it or hated it) they would never be able to see it again. Yeah, not so much. If there weren't things like screenshots, perhaps. A browse through Reddit's seedier parts proves this ephemerality a lie.
    - sp332 13y ago
      You can take pictures of ephemeral things, but they're still ephemeral.
    - bentcorner 13y ago
      True, and the app itself doesn't actually delete the pictures off your device either. Still, the intention of the app is to share impermanent pictures, which is an interesting twist on things.
  - josefresco 13y ago
    "Snapchat has changed the game. Its success has demonstrated that given the right offering, there is in fact mainstream demand for products that incorporate anonymity and ephemerality" The author (moot) should revise the text as Snapchat is clearly ephemeral but not anonymous.
k-mcgrady 13y ago
Slight OT: I'm interested on people's thought on anonymity on HN. - Do you think we have better discussions because we don't have to use our real names? - How would using real names affect the discussion here? - Does the anonymity here go far enough? For example if someone manages to tie our real identity to our HN username their is no way of changing the HN username.
- higherpurpose 13y ago
  You know how we see "former" politicians, or "former" chairs at agencies, or "former" judges speaking on the war on drugs, and so on? Why are they always "former"? Because they know that what they say could impact their career and they could lose their jobs, at a time they may not be ready to lose their jobs. Now, imagine if everything they can say after they become "former" that position (so I'm not necessarily talking about leaking classified information here), could be said anonymously much earlier while they still have that job and know everything what's going on at the time. Anonymity is powerful, and not just in oppressive countries where the usefulness of anonymity should be obvious, but also in countries where you may want to tell a "truth" about something, without fearing for your financial situation or your career. Let's imagine Tim Cook had an opinion about what is going on between Palestine and Israel, and let's imagine it's a damn good one, since he's a pretty smart guy, and that opinion could even provide a big insight into the debate, and it would be very useful for the debate. I don't need to tell you that he wouldn't want to give that opinion under his real name on HN. That would create a media-firestorm, and could potentially get Apple, the company, in trouble, too, over his personal opinions. I think these are just a few of the reasons why anonymity is important, and more should be explored. Anonymity is important for humanity, and it should never be killed or banned, whether by NSA or by companies like Google and Facebook.
- bradleysmith 13y ago
  I do most of my posting and discussion on HN with my real name (which is nearly pseudonymous to begin with), and links to my real life. I have other user names for anonymous discussions, which I almost never use. I would need to log in and read comments of these accounts just to remember what my last use-case for anonymity was. I tend to hold 15-year-old moot's mindset; I just don't see the appeal of participating in anonymous discussion. I will read it (I'll unabashedly lurk SA, 4chan & reddit) but rarely feel the need to chime in without having a tie to my identity. Perhaps it is discounting the power of ideas, but identity is approximately ONE HALF of any communication in my mind; I always want to consider the source, so I don't have much to say without BEING the source. Short of discussions of philosophy or existential beliefs, the source identity is always important to me in evaluating ideas. Having said that, I've learned a great deal from anonymous users here on HN and each of the forums named above. I think that the people that comprise them are what give online communities their culture; anonymity does not cause the meanness in these communities, the acceptance or encouragement of meanness by the community causes that meanness. anonymity allows users to remove their filters right quickly; it is the communities that encourage or discourage particular communication patterns. Anonymous or not, you'll get down-voted and poo-poo'd on HN if you are overtly negative and 'mean' (particularly true when contrasted to other online forums). This is not a function of anonymity; it's a function of HN'ers having an aversion towards these behaviors as a whole.
k-mcgrady 13y ago
>> "What I’ve observed is the opposite—that anonymity facilitates honest discourse, creates a level playing field for ideas to be heard, and enables creativity like none other." One big counterpoint to this I can see is ask.fm. People are given total anonymity and they use it to berate and bully others (I believe it's also lead to several suicides). Anonymity can work great if the community is good. Here on HN I think it works pretty well. On ask.fm it clearly worked horribly but only because the community using it used it that way. In the end I think it's all down to the people using the service and anonymity or true identity plays only a very small role. Edit: and the downsides of anonymity can been seen below in '784927489234's comment.
- loupeabody 13y ago
  I wouldn't really consider ask.fm as a total utilization of anonymity. With reference to moot's point about the incontestable equality and a systemic reverence for ideas (instead of individuals) in an anonymous community, ask.fm isn't qualified as a service using anonymity. By placing those asked questions in a different social category (as the subject of focus) than those asking the questions (as those focusing on the subject), there is a major discrepancy between the identities of both types of participants.
- 784927489234 13y ago
  If someone commits suicide because of some bullshit on a random website, then the suicide was probably going to happen anyway. This is the same tired "think-of-the-children" argument about reversed song lyrics played backwards, Ozzy Osbourne, foul language, and on and on, that the PMRC lobbied against, and used as a point to provoke the parental advisory album labeling in the 80's. The term "cyber bullying" (which is new and different) is used incorrectly as a catch-all sometimes, but really, it should be reserved for a different form of pervasive harassment that follows the victim across many different scopes of internet and telecommunications access, where ignoring activity originating from one source (a single website, the victim's e-mail inbox, or the victim's telephone number) does not provide escape from disparaging remarks. This is not the same as one website providing anonymity or even pseudonymity. Yeah, children are inexperienced, and thin-skinned. They don't understand the risks of providing their real information on the internet, and and don't behave with the sophistication of those that do. There's lots of things on the internet that are not for kids. LOTS. All the more reason to inform the inexperienced to AVOID revealing their honest real-life identity, rather than encouraging rubes to engage in promiscuous full-disclosure so that advertisers and ad-driven businesses can make a buck off of "unique" impressions.
crassus 13y ago
These days, there are social justice warriors combing your twitter feed looking for a way to get you fired if you "offend" someone. Anonymity is vital for the diversity of ideas. I'm sure some people are slavering for a world without anonymity, where they can enforce ideological conformity. I prefer this way, thanks.
networked 13y ago
Here's an idea: to reap the benefit of anonymity but also to discourage the trolling that comes with it how about an anonymous BBS where you pay (anonymously and in some currency that people don't particularly mind parting with -- e.g., Dogecoin) to post?
- pavel_lishin 13y ago
  Haven't there been case studies showing that it's possible to deanonymize Bit/Dogecoin transactions? Since the blockchain records all transactions, one slip-up could lead to your identity being discovered.
  - networked 13y ago
    What I have in mind here is the kind of social anonymity discussed in the article, not the more rigorous kind of anonymity offered by Tor. On the technical side, I supposed you'd have a central recipient of $anycoin on the BBS server that would authorize a user to post when it received a given amount of $anycoin from that user. Other posters could possibly exploit this by trying to correlate the time on someone's posts with the transactions on the blockchain to find out what "wallet"/address is behind the posts. Perhaps this could be mitigated by the server introducing noise to the displayed time. I'm not sure how important this is to anonymity of the non-technical kind (one where you could subpoena the access logs from the website the discussion takes place on and where people routinely click on links).
- forgottenpass 13y ago
  Then the rich enough are free to continue posting whatever they want, the poor are discouraged from posting anything at all and everyone else has to justify paying money to communicate with strangers on the internet that don't care what they have to say anyway.
  - networked 13y ago
    >everyone else has to justify paying money to communicate with strangers on the internet that don't care what they have to say anyway I think many people would pay to post on an anonymous equivalent of Hacker News. Of course, the question is how you bootstrap such a community. A more straightforward alternative (which would benefit the poor posters the most) is to offer compensation to the posters through, say, the encouragement of tipping for good posts or some sort of a redistribution mechanism [1]. I wonder how this would affect the natural self-regulation of an anonymous community in what people choose to post. One could say that it would encourage the posting of popular opinions but I think that in most anonymous communities that already happens through other means. Another, more out-there, idea would be to algorithmically grade the posts and assign a price to each. A long, thought-post post would cost you nothing while a post consisting of just "lol" would cost a lot. [1] E.g., a voting-based system where everyone pays to post and then whoever paid can upvote other posts in the thread. The money is redistributed among the posters in proportion to the number of votes they got once the thread no longer accepts new posts. Try to come up with exploits for this system and ways of mitigating them.
xradionut 13y ago
Having been "online" since the '80s, I respectfully disagree. Relative anonymity in "real" life leads to antisocial activity and rudeness since there's little chance of identity or recourse. Consider the behavior of automobile drivers. Anonymity online can't fully be achieved except by a small few, but the positive benefits can be simulated for many by careful operators of BBS or internet forums.
bguthrie 13y ago
I think what both pieces miss is the behavior that asymmetric anonymity seems to encourage. The ability to lambast public figures from behind a screen of anonymity seems to bring out the abusive worst in people, and the target has nowhere to run. Conversely, communities in which everyone is anonymous seem to foster a degree of creativity and respect rarely found elsewhere. I think Altman was thinking about the former when he addressed the app, and this piece addresses the latter. But they're different kinds of anonymity. Edit: Asymmetric, not asynchronous.
- euoia 13y ago
  > asynchronous anonymity Do you mean asymmetric rather than asynchronous?
- loupeabody 13y ago
  I tend to agree, so long as you meant asymmetric anonymity instead of asynchronous anonymity
  - bguthrie 13y ago
    Ugh, fixed. Thanks!
- ben0x539 13y ago
  > The ability to lambast public figures from behind a screen of anonymity seems to bring out the abusive worst in people, I feel like this point is really overstated. I'm much more worried about people in disadvantaged positions suffering abuse from people who do not even feel the need to be anonymous, because society tolerates their abusive behavior. Comparatively, some anonymous screeching on a message board doesn't seem all that worrying.
  - potatolicious 13y ago
    > "Comparatively, some anonymous screeching on a message board doesn't seem all that worrying." If only it was limited to "anonymous screeching". Bear in mind that 4chan invented the term doxxing. We're talking about the anonymous mob inflicting real harm at many levels - from the mildly damaging (review bombs), to the extremely harmful (threats of rape, death, threats against family, home). All of the above has happened, not just on 4chan, but in many other communities that are anonymous. It happens so much we have a term for it. It happens so much that Reddit had to make a site-wide decree to get rid of it (to varying degrees of success). It's a level of abuse that only the deranged would engaged in, or a sufficient combination of sociopathy and anonymity. We're not talking about "John Doe sucks and is a giant asshole!", we're talking about "Hey everyone troll John Doe by calling in bomb threats lolz!". Symmetric anonymity is great. It guarantees that nothing exceeds the bounds of "anonymous screeching" as you put it. Asymmetric anonymity allows one side to attack a target that has no recourse whatsoever.
Kapura 13y ago
I always appreciate what moot has to say, and I think he's absolutely correct about anonymity creating a stage in which it's fine to fail publically. There's almost no judgement based on past efforts, which means that you can frequently see new ideas pop up. This is especially true of the boards with topics, which tend to have smaller communities than the random board, allowing for more effective meme propogation. For example, a recent tweet [1] by musician Lorde ended with the words "o i am laffin" which has since become a sort of alternative to "lol" on 4chan's music board (especially when a given thread is about Lorde herself). It became a meme not because karma reinforced its popularity and not because moot or any other admin endorsed it, but because enough anonymous people thought that it was funny that they ALL want to keep posting it for no good reason. moot mentions snapchat in the article, which I think is related in a fundamental way to what has made 4chan successful. I've had snapchat since June, and the way I use it with my friends is to share small jokes and the tiny frustrations of modern life. This is stuff that is amusing enough that I want a few people to see what I've written once, but not so funny that I think it should exist for eternity online. But it's always been more about the jokes for my friends and me than about security. Apparently I'm not alone. When news got out about the snapchat leaks[2], many people thought that this would be a damaging blow to Snapchat. These were people who I assume don't use snapchat very frequently. To me, it never mattered that the photos leaked, because there's so much noise in the snapchats that it'd be difficult, I am thinking, to use the data maliciously. The worst thing is that the database of snapchat ids leaked, so people can spam snaps to people they don't know. But this is not a problem that is difficult to deal with. Point is, moot is right about nobody in silicon valley really understanding the value of anonymity. While the Mr. Altman was discussing the negative face of people shedding their identity (e.g. people with bones to pick doing so anonymously in public) he didn't see the positive benefits that moot describes. Perhaps a gossip app is not the best place to see creativity blossom on the internet. I want to relay one last anecdote from my time on 4chan: 4chan has an advice board (/adv/[3]) that is as anonymous as the rest of 4chan[4]. On this board, people ask for advice. Often it's relationship problems, even more often it's the problems of sad men who like girls but have no idea how to transition from that point to a relationship with one of them. If Mr. Altman's hypothesis that "Anonymity breads meanness"[5] were true, one would expect this board to be full of people just trolling depressed neets. While that does happen from time to time, more often than not it's full of people genuinely trying to help these people that they don't know and have never met. They expect nothing in return, but they are a fully anonymous community that just tries to help people who feel they don't have anywhere better to ask for help. Maybe anonymity isn't so bad. [1] https://twitter.com/lordemusic/status/430186358930292736 https://twitter.com/lordemusic/status/430186358930292736 [2] http://www.cbsnews.com/news/46-million-snapchat-usernames-phone-numbers-reportedly-leaked/ http://www.cbsnews.com/news/46-million-snapchat-usernames-ph... [3] http://boards.4chan.org/adv/ http://boards.4chan.org/adv/ (probably NSFW) [4] there are actually different levels of anonymity on 4chan, but, for the most part, everybody is more or less completely anonymous with each post. [5] http://blog.samaltman.com/anonymity http://blog.samaltman.com/anonymity
steven2012 13y ago
reddit has some of the most helpful, positive and encouraging communities on the Internet. It really depends on the tone that each particular app/forum cultivates. Sure, there are assholes but for the most part, the communities created in some subreddits are simply fantastic. And their upvoting/downvoting system is far superior to anything, including HN and slashdot, and really helps clean up the noise. Had I never used reddit, I probably would have thought the same thing of Sam Altman, but reddit has such positivity in some of the subreddits that it is really great to see.
- jordigh 13y ago
  I have recently quit using reddit because I got tired of the bickering, particularly in the more mainstream subreddits. The smaller subreddits seem fine. While there is also some bickering in HN, it seems to me to be much more moderated. It seems like once a community grows large enough, so do its number of assholes, but the asshole count must be absolute, not relative, since it just takes a few to ruin the fun for everyone. This is why HN seems to me less bickery than reddit right now, because it's more focussed on just one niche. What really did it for me was the pack rape mentality that parts of reddit exhibit. I want nothing to do with a website that allows this: http://betabeat.com/2012/08/reddit-watches-with-glee-as-camgirl-has-heartbreaking-meltdown/ http://betabeat.com/2012/08/reddit-watches-with-glee-as-camg...
normloman 13y ago
We have pseudoanonymity on hacker news, and everyone gets along just fine. Perhaps anonymity is a red herring. Maybe the tone of discourse is a function of what kinds of people a community attracts, and how involved each user is with that community.
- hellbanTHIS 13y ago
  Yeah that's pretty obvious if you've ever seen a news article with Facebook comments that the Drudge Report has linked to, particularly one involving a black person.
egocodedinsol 13y ago
I made this account anonymous to see if my comments improved. They're certainly shorter. I suspect it's because I'm not as worried about being misunderstood.
ChuckMcM 13y ago
Great article moot, and well said. What is particularly intriguing to me on this (hackernews) and 4chan has been how so many people conflate anonymity with "non-identity", which is absolutely not the same. Karma systems attach value to a 'handle' which is its own form of identity. So I can create an account on a forum as xyz123 and say what ever I want, but if the speech is of low value to the community I'll get "down karma" (what ever the mechanism is) and that identity will become less valuable, if instead the speech is found to be of value I will get "up karma" and that identity will become more valuable. I might find at some point that my identify as xyz123 is more valuable to me than my "real" identity. So am I anonymous? Sure, but does that mean I don't have an identity? Absolutely not. Of course this allows for sock puppetry, for whom Scott Adams will forever be the patron saint. And in that sense there is value in being able to isolate uniqueness. Which is to say these two names are the same human, versus these two handles are two different humans. And this is the point that rubs on the 'anti-anonymity' folks. As much of the conversation's interpretation can change when you know the relationship between the participants, it can completely flip one's perception of it. And not knowing the underlying relationships can make us susceptible to manipulation (which is used often enough to have its own name "astro-turfing") I keep wondering if we'll ever get to a system which has both anonymity and structure, but I don't know if that is possible as identity is often discernible by the relationships.
- bglazer 13y ago
  What do you mean by "this allows for sock puppetry, for whom Scott Adams will forever be the patron saint"
  - ChuckMcM 13y ago
    What part of Scott Adams participation in anonymous forums with sock puppets was unclear to you?
    - carbocation 13y ago
      I suspect he just didn't know that Scott Adams, back in 2011, was found to be using sock puppets to defend himself on social media sites.
pearjuice 13y ago
>The conversation is “raw” to say the least—almost everyone checks their filter at the door. Their filter? You mean privilege and doubles.
yuhong 13y ago
As I said before, I am not for real name policies, but I do want the problems with posting under real names to be fixed if possible.
saraid216 13y ago
Both of them are conflating anonymity with its consequences. This really needs to stop, because it's preventing us from actually understanding the mechanisms in play. moot understands that identity is "prismatic", but he misses one of the consequences of this, which is that one of the fundamental components of identity is how we are related to by others. Who we share as is a function of who we are seen as. Anonymity strips away this latter part to provide a blank slate. That's what makes the experience "raw". Because the filters on your speech are derived from who you care about hearing you speak. If my mother is in the room, I'm not going to talk about the crime in my neighborhood, because it would worry her unnecessarily. But that's also something I'd be willing to discuss publicly under my real name with a home address attached. It's not a function of "am I anonymous"; it's a function of expected consequences. Talking about anonymity and ephemerality obfuscates the issue. It's a simplified model easily understood by a software hacker, making it so that FOAF networks don't need to be included into solutions. One of the simplest ways to understand Google+'s early advantage over Facebook was that, if you were about to comment on a post to a limited group, you were explicitly told you who could see what you were about to say. It wasn't enough, but it was an order of magnitude better. (Yes, for the record, the real name thing was dumb.) When we post on HN, we have certain expectations of our audience, and we often feel betrayed and indignant when commenters fail to meet them. Anonymity and ephemerality aren't wrong. They're reasonable defaults for many situations. They're also good ways to sidestep harder questions, like how to accurately parse a name or portray an identity, when you do want to do that. (P.S. This comment turned out as a really shitty piece of writing. Sorry for the scattered incoherency.)
qq66 13y ago
Anonymity increases the variance of behaviors that people will demonstrate online. When you use your real identity, your actions carry risk with them, so you tend to bring your actions towards the population mean. If you choose to dress in an outlandish way in New York, you might wear a pink sweater and orange jeans. At Burning Man, where your real identity has been shed temporarily, you may wear a toga or nothing at all. The dirty look you give someone in "real life" might become an unspeakably rude comment in an anonymous forum. But the funny dance you invented to go along with a Daft Punk song might be something you choose to share with the whole world under the veil of anonymity. When something changes the variance of a human behavior without changing the mean, you'll never be able to come to agreement on whether it's "good" or "bad" -- it's just different.
juliob 13y ago
I don't know about these days, but I personally had to deal with 4chan/Anonymous several years ago (before Anonymous became known for taking on public causes) and what they were doing was downright evil (and immature) with real-world consequences. "For the lolz." I wonder what moot was doing when he presided over this disgusting behavior.
Grue3 13y ago
> What I’ve observed is the opposite—that anonymity facilitates honest discourse, creates a level playing field for ideas to be heard, and enables creativity like none other. Clearly moot hasn't ever been to /pol/.
thanatropism 13y ago
I just discovered that 4chan works great on mobile phones. The great barrier to entry, for me, was the high risk of not only NSFW, but very weird NSFW stuff randomly popping up (even if I stay in /mu/ and /pol/) at work. Now I have a tiny screen for it.

310 points by shasa 13y ago

I agree with every word. Of course I am incredibly biased because this is the kind of internet interaction that I prefer. It is just a different kind of internet culture and is obviously not for some people. If you want every possible opinion on something whether it be the most popular opinions or the least popular opinion and everything in-between then anonymity is the way to go. Preferably without internet aliases for a true representation of unfiltered opinions.

danso 13y ago

> I strongly disagree. What I’ve observed is the opposite—that anonymity facilitates honest discourse, creates a level playing field for ideas to be heard, and enables creativity like none other. I think Chris makes a great counter-argument, however, isn't it possible that anonymity can breed both meanness and creativity? I don't mean just creatively-cruel-pranks, but that what anonymity breeds is dependent on the community, and to an extent, how that community is moderated. HackerNews allows anonymity, but I think it'd be a much different place for discussion if it weren't for the mod policies in effect.

Zikes 13y ago
Honest discourse means that you're able to express meanness, but it does not necessarily spawn that meanness from nothing.
- mikeg8 13y ago
  I disagree. Honest discourse means you are able to express a differing point of view, even if it is very critical/harsh. Meanness would be calling someone a faggot when it is unrelated to the topic and that is never a part of real discourse.
wpietri 13y ago
Yes. Healthy communities, real or virtual, self-regulate through social feedback loops. Requiring real names activates those social feedback loops in a way that is very handy from the perspective of people designing communities. If you're going to have anonymity, you need to find a workable substitute. Early BBSes were often pseudonymous, but they were also gardens carefully tended by their operators. HN's self-moderation and karma tracking provide a similar effect here. Quora has a functional mix of mostly real names with optional anonymity on a per-post basis plus user voting and heavy moderation to enforce a "be nice, be respectful" tone. Another good example is John Scalzi, who moderates his blog comments using the "Mallet of Loving Correction". His comment policy is a great example, but it clearly takes a lot of thoughtful gardening on his part to keep a pseudonymous comments section from descending into something pretty ugly: http://whatever.scalzi.com/about/site-disclaimer-and-comment-policy/ http://whatever.scalzi.com/about/site-disclaimer-and-comment...
- crassus 13y ago
  Scalzi considers "ugly" anyone that is outside a very small neighborhood of idea space. It's fine for his own professional blog, but it's incredibly narrow as a general principle for discussions.
  - wpietri 13y ago
    I don't think that's the case. He's pretty strict in enforcing behavior, including the behavior of staying on topic. Another good example in this regard is Quora. They cover an incredibly wide range of topics and viewpoints. But they're pretty insistent on respectful behavior. I think that focus, respectful behavior, is exactly what makes for good real-world discussions. Because on-line fora break the sort of continuous, subtle social signals that help guide real-world discussions, I think we need to be especially disciplined in pursuing that respect.
    - crassus 13y ago
      It's tempting to define "impoliteness" as disagreement with progressive beliefs about feminism or white racial guilt. Judging by what Scalzi has banned people for, he seems to fall victim to this. He uses the banhammer more than any other blogger I've followed. The others don't feel the need to curate the discussion so closely. It's fine to be so closed off in your personal space, but the intellectual air can get a bit musty.

sp332 13y ago

The conversation is “raw” to say the least—almost everyone checks their filter at the door. The resulting dialogue is about as honest as it gets. In lieu of traditional barriers to membership, the community uses cryptic and crude language to regulate who can and cannot participate. On the surface this may seem offensive, but it’s often meant to do little more than keep newcomers on their toes and encourage they lurk and learn the house rules before participating. How can you have honest, unfiltered dialogue when there are barriers to entry and membership is regulated? Hey moot, why are YouTube comments so bad? Clearly it's not just anonymity.

bsamuels 13y ago
youtube comments are bad because there's no barrier to entry. with 4chan you have to get over the social impact of actually browsing 4chan. Just go look at the 4chan subreddit, it's filled to the brink with people who want to consume 4chan content but are too scared to actually visit the site.
timpattinson 13y ago
Youtube comments are terrible because it's the lowest common denominator of internet message boards. More sophisticated use Reddit/HN/etc.

wpietri 13y ago

On the one hand, I was an early BBS user, and there was a fair bit of benefit in anonymity or pseudonymity there. On the other, when somebody says that he strongly disagrees with the notion that anonymity breeds meanness and his positive example is 4chan, I'm gobsmacked. We must have such different standards for what qualifies as meanness that I'm not sure we're the same species.

izzydata 13y ago
I agree that in some sense it doesn't make sense and people from 4chan probably do have a drastically different standard for what is actually mean. I'm sure for most people on 4chan you don't really consider anything mean. It doesn't matter what anyone says to you because who cares. The thread dies and that's the end of that. You also have to remember though that most of 4chan is not /b/. It gives a misleading representation to the majority of the site.
antoko 13y ago
His point seems to be that it breeds HONESTY rather than meanness, I don't think he was saying it breeds the opposite of meanness, just that meanness is a side-effect of the honesty and the honesty is the real effect.
- angersock 13y ago
  Exploring that just a little further... The meanest things are those with a grain of truth in them, a mirror for someone's imperfections. Thus, it follows that a community which enables blatant and rough honesty will be perceived as "meaner".
bsamuels 13y ago
Do keep in mind that 4chan is not /b/. There's a _huge_ discrepancy between people's interpretation of what 4chan is like, and what it really is. This is probably why the community has been able to stay so strong over the years. On the off-chance you visit one of the more aggressive boards and someone tries to say mean things to you, you can always reply in a friendly, careless fashion and make them feel really bad about what they said. I was gonna go look for some lovey dovey thread to cite as evidence, but instead I found a thread full of guys trying to build a physical version of their imaginary chinese-cartoon girlfriends. https://archive.foolz.us/a/thread/101944946/ https://archive.foolz.us/a/thread/101944946/ I literally can't imagine this happening anywhere other than on 4chan.

afreak 13y ago

I say this with hesitation but I believe that Snapchat, with all of its idiotic flaws is an indication of how the future of social networking platforms will be. It demonstrates that you can have a service where your friends are known but the content is seemingly temporary, allowing for some semblance of control. I don't think that Snapchat is the future, but it does make me think that the ideas around it are what will make Facebook lost to younger generations. Being anonymous is not important to most people. If it were, news website comments would be more palatable where real identities are required--far from the case.

gknoy 13y ago
I worry about the "seemingly" part. Sometime, whether due to law enforcement pressure or poor design, ephemeral chat messages/pictures will no longer be temporary -- and as users we might never know until it's too late. Interesting thoughts about anonymity not being important to most people, and the future of social networking, though. I'd never thought about it that way before, but it seems compelling.
sneak 13y ago
> I say this with hesitation but I believe that Snapchat, with all of its idiotic flaws is an indication of how the future of social networking platforms will be. Snapchat only really delivers on its promise because of the kind of user-hostile DRM Stallman and his ilk have been screaming warnings about for years. Its children and derivatives cannot reasonably exist in a future in which end users have real control over their computers.
- pjc50 13y ago
  It's interesting that this is a case where DRM transfers power from one user to another: from recipient to sender. The only other case I've come across where this kind of transfer is accepted as beneficial is anti-cheat systems in games.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

nswanberg 13y ago

This is a great essay, and a great argument for anonymity and what it can offer. Sam's essay went too quickly towards condemning anonymity, but it started by attacking a different kind of anonymity--that of small groups. Secret might have problems not simply because the messages are anonymous, but because they are anonymous between people who know each other and can act on that information. In 4chan participants likely will never meet--in Secret they already have.

mikeg8 13y ago
Interesting perspective. Thanks.

MattGrommes 13y ago

I used to think that anonymous comments bred ugliness because it gave people a way to be (even temporarily) racist, hateful, etc. with no consequences for their "real" offline self. The most interesting effect of so much commenting going on using Facebook is my discovery that people are just as willing to be outright racist and hateful in a million ways when their real name, picture, and main online identity are involved.

teddyh 13y ago
Well, let’s look at it from a historical perspective. In the past, before the Internet, the only place it was even possible to be anonymous was in writing – anonymous pamphlets, books written under pseudonyms, etc. Now, did these contain horrible behavior? No, the horrible behavior (as judged by the standards of the times) was associated with lower classes instead. The anonymous pamphlets and books written under pseudonyms were instead challenges to the status quo and the powers that be.

josefresco 13y ago

I may be completely ignorant here but how is Snapchat anonymous? I thought you shared content with your contact list... but maybe I'm missing something. Is it because Snapchat has no "profile" page a la Facebook?

bentcorner 13y ago
It's not anonymous, but to the user it's ephemeral. You can make a pic, send it through snapchat, and be confident that regardless of the outcome (people loved it or hated it) they would never be able to see it again. Traditional internet forums are anonymous and static. Snapchat flips that around.
- falcolas 13y ago
  > You can make a pic, send it through snapchat, and be confident that regardless of the outcome (people loved it or hated it) they would never be able to see it again. Yeah, not so much. If there weren't things like screenshots, perhaps. A browse through Reddit's seedier parts proves this ephemerality a lie.
  - sp332 13y ago
    You can take pictures of ephemeral things, but they're still ephemeral.
  - bentcorner 13y ago
    True, and the app itself doesn't actually delete the pictures off your device either. Still, the intention of the app is to share impermanent pictures, which is an interesting twist on things.
- josefresco 13y ago
  "Snapchat has changed the game. Its success has demonstrated that given the right offering, there is in fact mainstream demand for products that incorporate anonymity and ephemerality" The author (moot) should revise the text as Snapchat is clearly ephemeral but not anonymous.

k-mcgrady 13y ago

Slight OT: I'm interested on people's thought on anonymity on HN. - Do you think we have better discussions because we don't have to use our real names? - How would using real names affect the discussion here? - Does the anonymity here go far enough? For example if someone manages to tie our real identity to our HN username their is no way of changing the HN username.

higherpurpose 13y ago
You know how we see "former" politicians, or "former" chairs at agencies, or "former" judges speaking on the war on drugs, and so on? Why are they always "former"? Because they know that what they say could impact their career and they could lose their jobs, at a time they may not be ready to lose their jobs. Now, imagine if everything they can say after they become "former" that position (so I'm not necessarily talking about leaking classified information here), could be said anonymously much earlier while they still have that job and know everything what's going on at the time. Anonymity is powerful, and not just in oppressive countries where the usefulness of anonymity should be obvious, but also in countries where you may want to tell a "truth" about something, without fearing for your financial situation or your career. Let's imagine Tim Cook had an opinion about what is going on between Palestine and Israel, and let's imagine it's a damn good one, since he's a pretty smart guy, and that opinion could even provide a big insight into the debate, and it would be very useful for the debate. I don't need to tell you that he wouldn't want to give that opinion under his real name on HN. That would create a media-firestorm, and could potentially get Apple, the company, in trouble, too, over his personal opinions. I think these are just a few of the reasons why anonymity is important, and more should be explored. Anonymity is important for humanity, and it should never be killed or banned, whether by NSA or by companies like Google and Facebook.
bradleysmith 13y ago
I do most of my posting and discussion on HN with my real name (which is nearly pseudonymous to begin with), and links to my real life. I have other user names for anonymous discussions, which I almost never use. I would need to log in and read comments of these accounts just to remember what my last use-case for anonymity was. I tend to hold 15-year-old moot's mindset; I just don't see the appeal of participating in anonymous discussion. I will read it (I'll unabashedly lurk SA, 4chan & reddit) but rarely feel the need to chime in without having a tie to my identity. Perhaps it is discounting the power of ideas, but identity is approximately ONE HALF of any communication in my mind; I always want to consider the source, so I don't have much to say without BEING the source. Short of discussions of philosophy or existential beliefs, the source identity is always important to me in evaluating ideas. Having said that, I've learned a great deal from anonymous users here on HN and each of the forums named above. I think that the people that comprise them are what give online communities their culture; anonymity does not cause the meanness in these communities, the acceptance or encouragement of meanness by the community causes that meanness. anonymity allows users to remove their filters right quickly; it is the communities that encourage or discourage particular communication patterns. Anonymous or not, you'll get down-voted and poo-poo'd on HN if you are overtly negative and 'mean' (particularly true when contrasted to other online forums). This is not a function of anonymity; it's a function of HN'ers having an aversion towards these behaviors as a whole.

k-mcgrady 13y ago

>> "What I’ve observed is the opposite—that anonymity facilitates honest discourse, creates a level playing field for ideas to be heard, and enables creativity like none other." One big counterpoint to this I can see is ask.fm. People are given total anonymity and they use it to berate and bully others (I believe it's also lead to several suicides). Anonymity can work great if the community is good. Here on HN I think it works pretty well. On ask.fm it clearly worked horribly but only because the community using it used it that way. In the end I think it's all down to the people using the service and anonymity or true identity plays only a very small role. Edit: and the downsides of anonymity can been seen below in '784927489234's comment.

loupeabody 13y ago
I wouldn't really consider ask.fm as a total utilization of anonymity. With reference to moot's point about the incontestable equality and a systemic reverence for ideas (instead of individuals) in an anonymous community, ask.fm isn't qualified as a service using anonymity. By placing those asked questions in a different social category (as the subject of focus) than those asking the questions (as those focusing on the subject), there is a major discrepancy between the identities of both types of participants.
784927489234 13y ago
If someone commits suicide because of some bullshit on a random website, then the suicide was probably going to happen anyway. This is the same tired "think-of-the-children" argument about reversed song lyrics played backwards, Ozzy Osbourne, foul language, and on and on, that the PMRC lobbied against, and used as a point to provoke the parental advisory album labeling in the 80's. The term "cyber bullying" (which is new and different) is used incorrectly as a catch-all sometimes, but really, it should be reserved for a different form of pervasive harassment that follows the victim across many different scopes of internet and telecommunications access, where ignoring activity originating from one source (a single website, the victim's e-mail inbox, or the victim's telephone number) does not provide escape from disparaging remarks. This is not the same as one website providing anonymity or even pseudonymity. Yeah, children are inexperienced, and thin-skinned. They don't understand the risks of providing their real information on the internet, and and don't behave with the sophistication of those that do. There's lots of things on the internet that are not for kids. LOTS. All the more reason to inform the inexperienced to AVOID revealing their honest real-life identity, rather than encouraging rubes to engage in promiscuous full-disclosure so that advertisers and ad-driven businesses can make a buck off of "unique" impressions.

crassus 13y ago

These days, there are social justice warriors combing your twitter feed looking for a way to get you fired if you "offend" someone. Anonymity is vital for the diversity of ideas. I'm sure some people are slavering for a world without anonymity, where they can enforce ideological conformity. I prefer this way, thanks.

networked 13y ago

Here's an idea: to reap the benefit of anonymity but also to discourage the trolling that comes with it how about an anonymous BBS where you pay (anonymously and in some currency that people don't particularly mind parting with -- e.g., Dogecoin) to post?

pavel_lishin 13y ago
Haven't there been case studies showing that it's possible to deanonymize Bit/Dogecoin transactions? Since the blockchain records all transactions, one slip-up could lead to your identity being discovered.
- networked 13y ago
  What I have in mind here is the kind of social anonymity discussed in the article, not the more rigorous kind of anonymity offered by Tor. On the technical side, I supposed you'd have a central recipient of $anycoin on the BBS server that would authorize a user to post when it received a given amount of $anycoin from that user. Other posters could possibly exploit this by trying to correlate the time on someone's posts with the transactions on the blockchain to find out what "wallet"/address is behind the posts. Perhaps this could be mitigated by the server introducing noise to the displayed time. I'm not sure how important this is to anonymity of the non-technical kind (one where you could subpoena the access logs from the website the discussion takes place on and where people routinely click on links).
forgottenpass 13y ago
Then the rich enough are free to continue posting whatever they want, the poor are discouraged from posting anything at all and everyone else has to justify paying money to communicate with strangers on the internet that don't care what they have to say anyway.
- networked 13y ago
  >everyone else has to justify paying money to communicate with strangers on the internet that don't care what they have to say anyway I think many people would pay to post on an anonymous equivalent of Hacker News. Of course, the question is how you bootstrap such a community. A more straightforward alternative (which would benefit the poor posters the most) is to offer compensation to the posters through, say, the encouragement of tipping for good posts or some sort of a redistribution mechanism [1]. I wonder how this would affect the natural self-regulation of an anonymous community in what people choose to post. One could say that it would encourage the posting of popular opinions but I think that in most anonymous communities that already happens through other means. Another, more out-there, idea would be to algorithmically grade the posts and assign a price to each. A long, thought-post post would cost you nothing while a post consisting of just "lol" would cost a lot. [1] E.g., a voting-based system where everyone pays to post and then whoever paid can upvote other posts in the thread. The money is redistributed among the posters in proportion to the number of votes they got once the thread no longer accepts new posts. Try to come up with exploits for this system and ways of mitigating them.

xradionut 13y ago

Having been "online" since the '80s, I respectfully disagree. Relative anonymity in "real" life leads to antisocial activity and rudeness since there's little chance of identity or recourse. Consider the behavior of automobile drivers. Anonymity online can't fully be achieved except by a small few, but the positive benefits can be simulated for many by careful operators of BBS or internet forums.

bguthrie 13y ago

I think what both pieces miss is the behavior that asymmetric anonymity seems to encourage. The ability to lambast public figures from behind a screen of anonymity seems to bring out the abusive worst in people, and the target has nowhere to run. Conversely, communities in which everyone is anonymous seem to foster a degree of creativity and respect rarely found elsewhere. I think Altman was thinking about the former when he addressed the app, and this piece addresses the latter. But they're different kinds of anonymity. Edit: Asymmetric, not asynchronous.

euoia 13y ago
> asynchronous anonymity Do you mean asymmetric rather than asynchronous?
loupeabody 13y ago
I tend to agree, so long as you meant asymmetric anonymity instead of asynchronous anonymity
- bguthrie 13y ago
  Ugh, fixed. Thanks!
ben0x539 13y ago
> The ability to lambast public figures from behind a screen of anonymity seems to bring out the abusive worst in people, I feel like this point is really overstated. I'm much more worried about people in disadvantaged positions suffering abuse from people who do not even feel the need to be anonymous, because society tolerates their abusive behavior. Comparatively, some anonymous screeching on a message board doesn't seem all that worrying.
- potatolicious 13y ago
  > "Comparatively, some anonymous screeching on a message board doesn't seem all that worrying." If only it was limited to "anonymous screeching". Bear in mind that 4chan invented the term doxxing. We're talking about the anonymous mob inflicting real harm at many levels - from the mildly damaging (review bombs), to the extremely harmful (threats of rape, death, threats against family, home). All of the above has happened, not just on 4chan, but in many other communities that are anonymous. It happens so much we have a term for it. It happens so much that Reddit had to make a site-wide decree to get rid of it (to varying degrees of success). It's a level of abuse that only the deranged would engaged in, or a sufficient combination of sociopathy and anonymity. We're not talking about "John Doe sucks and is a giant asshole!", we're talking about "Hey everyone troll John Doe by calling in bomb threats lolz!". Symmetric anonymity is great. It guarantees that nothing exceeds the bounds of "anonymous screeching" as you put it. Asymmetric anonymity allows one side to attack a target that has no recourse whatsoever.

Kapura 13y ago

I always appreciate what moot has to say, and I think he's absolutely correct about anonymity creating a stage in which it's fine to fail publically. There's almost no judgement based on past efforts, which means that you can frequently see new ideas pop up. This is especially true of the boards with topics, which tend to have smaller communities than the random board, allowing for more effective meme propogation. For example, a recent tweet [1] by musician Lorde ended with the words "o i am laffin" which has since become a sort of alternative to "lol" on 4chan's music board (especially when a given thread is about Lorde herself). It became a meme not because karma reinforced its popularity and not because moot or any other admin endorsed it, but because enough anonymous people thought that it was funny that they ALL want to keep posting it for no good reason. moot mentions snapchat in the article, which I think is related in a fundamental way to what has made 4chan successful. I've had snapchat since June, and the way I use it with my friends is to share small jokes and the tiny frustrations of modern life. This is stuff that is amusing enough that I want a few people to see what I've written once, but not so funny that I think it should exist for eternity online. But it's always been more about the jokes for my friends and me than about security. Apparently I'm not alone. When news got out about the snapchat leaks[2], many people thought that this would be a damaging blow to Snapchat. These were people who I assume don't use snapchat very frequently. To me, it never mattered that the photos leaked, because there's so much noise in the snapchats that it'd be difficult, I am thinking, to use the data maliciously. The worst thing is that the database of snapchat ids leaked, so people can spam snaps to people they don't know. But this is not a problem that is difficult to deal with. Point is, moot is right about nobody in silicon valley really understanding the value of anonymity. While the Mr. Altman was discussing the negative face of people shedding their identity (e.g. people with bones to pick doing so anonymously in public) he didn't see the positive benefits that moot describes. Perhaps a gossip app is not the best place to see creativity blossom on the internet. I want to relay one last anecdote from my time on 4chan: 4chan has an advice board (/adv/[3]) that is as anonymous as the rest of 4chan[4]. On this board, people ask for advice. Often it's relationship problems, even more often it's the problems of sad men who like girls but have no idea how to transition from that point to a relationship with one of them. If Mr. Altman's hypothesis that "Anonymity breads meanness"[5] were true, one would expect this board to be full of people just trolling depressed neets. While that does happen from time to time, more often than not it's full of people genuinely trying to help these people that they don't know and have never met. They expect nothing in return, but they are a fully anonymous community that just tries to help people who feel they don't have anywhere better to ask for help. Maybe anonymity isn't so bad. [1] https://twitter.com/lordemusic/status/430186358930292736 https://twitter.com/lordemusic/status/430186358930292736 [2] http://www.cbsnews.com/news/46-million-snapchat-usernames-phone-numbers-reportedly-leaked/ http://www.cbsnews.com/news/46-million-snapchat-usernames-ph... [3] http://boards.4chan.org/adv/ http://boards.4chan.org/adv/ (probably NSFW) [4] there are actually different levels of anonymity on 4chan, but, for the most part, everybody is more or less completely anonymous with each post. [5] http://blog.samaltman.com/anonymity http://blog.samaltman.com/anonymity

steven2012 13y ago

reddit has some of the most helpful, positive and encouraging communities on the Internet. It really depends on the tone that each particular app/forum cultivates. Sure, there are assholes but for the most part, the communities created in some subreddits are simply fantastic. And their upvoting/downvoting system is far superior to anything, including HN and slashdot, and really helps clean up the noise. Had I never used reddit, I probably would have thought the same thing of Sam Altman, but reddit has such positivity in some of the subreddits that it is really great to see.

jordigh 13y ago
I have recently quit using reddit because I got tired of the bickering, particularly in the more mainstream subreddits. The smaller subreddits seem fine. While there is also some bickering in HN, it seems to me to be much more moderated. It seems like once a community grows large enough, so do its number of assholes, but the asshole count must be absolute, not relative, since it just takes a few to ruin the fun for everyone. This is why HN seems to me less bickery than reddit right now, because it's more focussed on just one niche. What really did it for me was the pack rape mentality that parts of reddit exhibit. I want nothing to do with a website that allows this: http://betabeat.com/2012/08/reddit-watches-with-glee-as-camgirl-has-heartbreaking-meltdown/ http://betabeat.com/2012/08/reddit-watches-with-glee-as-camg...

normloman 13y ago

We have pseudoanonymity on hacker news, and everyone gets along just fine. Perhaps anonymity is a red herring. Maybe the tone of discourse is a function of what kinds of people a community attracts, and how involved each user is with that community.

hellbanTHIS 13y ago
Yeah that's pretty obvious if you've ever seen a news article with Facebook comments that the Drudge Report has linked to, particularly one involving a black person.

egocodedinsol 13y ago

I made this account anonymous to see if my comments improved. They're certainly shorter. I suspect it's because I'm not as worried about being misunderstood.

ChuckMcM 13y ago

Great article moot, and well said. What is particularly intriguing to me on this (hackernews) and 4chan has been how so many people conflate anonymity with "non-identity", which is absolutely not the same. Karma systems attach value to a 'handle' which is its own form of identity. So I can create an account on a forum as xyz123 and say what ever I want, but if the speech is of low value to the community I'll get "down karma" (what ever the mechanism is) and that identity will become less valuable, if instead the speech is found to be of value I will get "up karma" and that identity will become more valuable. I might find at some point that my identify as xyz123 is more valuable to me than my "real" identity. So am I anonymous? Sure, but does that mean I don't have an identity? Absolutely not. Of course this allows for sock puppetry, for whom Scott Adams will forever be the patron saint. And in that sense there is value in being able to isolate uniqueness. Which is to say these two names are the same human, versus these two handles are two different humans. And this is the point that rubs on the 'anti-anonymity' folks. As much of the conversation's interpretation can change when you know the relationship between the participants, it can completely flip one's perception of it. And not knowing the underlying relationships can make us susceptible to manipulation (which is used often enough to have its own name "astro-turfing") I keep wondering if we'll ever get to a system which has both anonymity and structure, but I don't know if that is possible as identity is often discernible by the relationships.

bglazer 13y ago
What do you mean by "this allows for sock puppetry, for whom Scott Adams will forever be the patron saint"
- ChuckMcM 13y ago
  What part of Scott Adams participation in anonymous forums with sock puppets was unclear to you?
  - carbocation 13y ago
    I suspect he just didn't know that Scott Adams, back in 2011, was found to be using sock puppets to defend himself on social media sites.

pearjuice 13y ago

>The conversation is “raw” to say the least—almost everyone checks their filter at the door. Their filter? You mean privilege and doubles.

yuhong 13y ago

As I said before, I am not for real name policies, but I do want the problems with posting under real names to be fixed if possible.

saraid216 13y ago

Both of them are conflating anonymity with its consequences. This really needs to stop, because it's preventing us from actually understanding the mechanisms in play. moot understands that identity is "prismatic", but he misses one of the consequences of this, which is that one of the fundamental components of identity is how we are related to by others. Who we share as is a function of who we are seen as. Anonymity strips away this latter part to provide a blank slate. That's what makes the experience "raw". Because the filters on your speech are derived from who you care about hearing you speak. If my mother is in the room, I'm not going to talk about the crime in my neighborhood, because it would worry her unnecessarily. But that's also something I'd be willing to discuss publicly under my real name with a home address attached. It's not a function of "am I anonymous"; it's a function of expected consequences. Talking about anonymity and ephemerality obfuscates the issue. It's a simplified model easily understood by a software hacker, making it so that FOAF networks don't need to be included into solutions. One of the simplest ways to understand Google+'s early advantage over Facebook was that, if you were about to comment on a post to a limited group, you were explicitly told you who could see what you were about to say. It wasn't enough, but it was an order of magnitude better. (Yes, for the record, the real name thing was dumb.) When we post on HN, we have certain expectations of our audience, and we often feel betrayed and indignant when commenters fail to meet them. Anonymity and ephemerality aren't wrong. They're reasonable defaults for many situations. They're also good ways to sidestep harder questions, like how to accurately parse a name or portray an identity, when you do want to do that. (P.S. This comment turned out as a really shitty piece of writing. Sorry for the scattered incoherency.)

qq66 13y ago

Anonymity increases the variance of behaviors that people will demonstrate online. When you use your real identity, your actions carry risk with them, so you tend to bring your actions towards the population mean. If you choose to dress in an outlandish way in New York, you might wear a pink sweater and orange jeans. At Burning Man, where your real identity has been shed temporarily, you may wear a toga or nothing at all. The dirty look you give someone in "real life" might become an unspeakably rude comment in an anonymous forum. But the funny dance you invented to go along with a Daft Punk song might be something you choose to share with the whole world under the veil of anonymity. When something changes the variance of a human behavior without changing the mean, you'll never be able to come to agreement on whether it's "good" or "bad" -- it's just different.

juliob 13y ago

I don't know about these days, but I personally had to deal with 4chan/Anonymous several years ago (before Anonymous became known for taking on public causes) and what they were doing was downright evil (and immature) with real-world consequences. "For the lolz." I wonder what moot was doing when he presided over this disgusting behavior.

Grue3 13y ago

> What I’ve observed is the opposite—that anonymity facilitates honest discourse, creates a level playing field for ideas to be heard, and enables creativity like none other. Clearly moot hasn't ever been to /pol/.

thanatropism 13y ago

I just discovered that 4chan works great on mobile phones. The great barrier to entry, for me, was the high risk of not only NSFW, but very weird NSFW stuff randomly popping up (even if I stay in /mu/ and /pol/) at work. Now I have a tiny screen for it.