11–20 of 266 posts
I don't understand why people make anything of "real names" policies. They just want the users to have real looking names. They don't actually have any way to force real names. So it's a non-issue. There's no oppressed person in a police state signing up for Facebook that reads a EULA and concludes "well, Facebook said I have to reveal my true identity, I guess that's the way it is."
Real names keep Facebook spam down. You can report real name violations to make spam accounts go away. That's worth doing. Giving that up to make a tiny number of drag queens happy isn't worth it.
One of those people will actually leave a movie theater if they spot one of her students in the same movie, because she knows from experience they'll take pictures of her on their cell phones and try to catch her saying or doing something even slightly off.
Teaching can't be the only profession where people want to be careful about using their real names so they can easily be found by anyone who wants to look. And it certainly isn't just a tiny number of drag queens either.
Isn't it kinda obvious the long game of facebook is to become the single globally mandated identity service? Governments will contract with them to maintain your official citizen ID records. Game over.
I don't understand why people make anything of "real names" policies. They just want the users to have real looking names. They don't actually have any way to force real names. So it's a non-issue. There's no oppressed person in a police state signing up for Facebook that reads a EULA and concludes "well, Facebook said I have to reveal my true identity, I guess that's the way it is."
I don't understand why people make anything of "real names" policies. They just want the users to have real looking names. They don't actually have any way to force real names. So it's a non-issue. There's no oppressed person in a police state signing up for Facebook that reads a EULA and concludes "well, Facebook said I have to reveal my true identity, I guess that's the way it is."
This kind of policy goes a long way towards the perception of professionalism at any web site. You're probably not going to take a person named "Spazmo Jones" as seriously as you would "Amy Wong". It's a sort of broken window theory.
(And yes, all of the examples above are pen names people actually tried to sign up with!)
Isn't it kinda obvious the long game of facebook is to become the single globally mandated identity service? Governments will contract with them to maintain your official citizen ID records. Game over.
You should read "The Circle". It is basically that and more.
It was a perfect example of SV employees "going native" and surrendering their entire sense of self worth over to the desires of their employer. It tracked the ways startups indoctrinate naive employees into to their cults of personality pretty accurately. Company as Godhead. If the protagonist drank any more koolaid she would have become the koolaid man herself. After all, without that external sense of approval, you are worthless. One for all, and all for the billionaires.
It's a case study in trojan horsing your way to the top though. Company offers shiny service X, but with nefarious capabilities (surveillance, tracking, blackmail) nobody considers, because, hey, shiny selfies!!!
Sign up now for my 2016 course: Defense Against the Dark Software
And in fact illegal in Germany and probably a hell lot of other places. I wonder if that gets enforced anytime soon.
I'm sincerely curious ... how is a social network like Facebook, which is built around connecting you with your real-world friends and acquaintances, supposed to work if you can't require users to identify themselves in a meaningful way? The little "people you may know" widget is really useful, because it shows me names I recognize from my offline life. If it's just a random stream of pseudonyms and online handles, t…
"Hey, Steve, what's your Facebook name?" "Goku35179." "Cool, I'm friending you."
If your long-lost friends and former co-workers and classmates do not choose to be findable, that should be their decision to make. But that was always only a secondary use case for Facebook.
And in fact illegal in Germany and probably a hell lot of other places. I wonder if that gets enforced anytime soon.
I'm sincerely curious ... how is a social network like Facebook, which is built around connecting you with your real-world friends and acquaintances, supposed to work if you can't require users to identify themselves in a meaningful way? The little "people you may know" widget is really useful, because it shows me names I recognize from my offline life. If it's just a random stream of pseudonyms and online handles, t…
Getting kicked off of Facebook was the best thing to happen to my productivity and mood. My only frustration is that there are several people on Facebook I have no easy method of giving alternative contact info to.