Social media scandals like this one are a reminder that there are larger numbers of closet pedophiles, racists, Nazi sympathizers, and conspiracy theorists in our societies than many people realized. Social media gives them a means to discover each other and collaborate, but they were always there. I agree with Youtube’s move here, but the root cause of the problem is that our societies are worse than we thought they…
It's not quite as bad as it looks, people say and do things online they would never do in real life. Might want to consider requiring permanent irrevocable identities, linked with their real-world identity, for certain forums. By removing anonymity a lot of this type of behavior is suppressed.
Are you sure about that? This sort of thing is difficult to present hard data on, but I feel like arguing for real name policies as a way towards better user behavior is a 2012-era FB talking point that hasn't panned out in practice.
I'll admit that literal pedophilia might be a special case, but requiring (and aggressively enforcing) real names on FB and FB-only embedded comment sections hasn't been anything close to a silver bullet. People are surprisingly willing to say some horrifying things under their real identities, especially if those things are considered socially acceptable in their real-life environment.
Rather than pseudoanonymity vs verified identities, I think the big differentiator is quality of manual moderation. HN is pseudoanonymous. Wikipedia is pseudoanonymous. Neither is immune from trolls and creeps, but aggressive and consistent moderation is fairly successful in maintaining quality.
Of course, YT has scaled to the point where that's not an option. Being forced into this sort of cop-out is a sign that they've grown too big to be able to police user-submitted content in any meaningful way. Maybe I'm overly optimistic, but I see abuse and moderateability as, ironically, one of the factors that might push us away from centralized monoliths.