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Somewhat tangential to the article, but here's what I would like: A site like reddit, but you have to get your government ID verified when you sign up. You can still pick any alias you want, but mods see your location within, say, 100 miles. Imagine reddit with no bots, banning has consequences, and local subreddits can actually just be people who live there. The painful sign up flow makes that totally unreasonable,…
Anonymity is important because it allows you to have discussions purely based on the arguments and opinions, without the bias of who youre talking to. I often find myself having a wonderfully deep discussion with someone online, and when I eventually find out what they look like (etc), I often realize that they dont look as friendly, educated, etc as they are. Humans are really bad at this, and you will put people in…
As someone who was a long time user of 4chan and that believed this once before, I now adamantly disagree that total anonymity leads to better discussion and believe that 4chan and the like are ultimately failed experiments. With total anonymity you end up with trolls or people who are just seriously misinformed arguing vigorously. You can spend the time and present arguments to possibly convince an actual reasonable…
Satoshi Nakamoto.
Associate anonymous posts with an optional pubkey signing. Have tooling that can filter out bad actor signatures and highlight the ones you care about.
Have your interest graph and peer graph suggest new public keys to follow.
Identities can remain private.
The article cites the recent murder of politician David Amess as the purpose for revisiting discussions about banning anonymity on social networks. But Amess was stabbed to death by a Somali migrant with ‘religious and ideological motivations’. What does that have to do with social media anonymity?
Anonymity is important because it allows you to have discussions purely based on the arguments and opinions, without the bias of who youre talking to. I often find myself having a wonderfully deep discussion with someone online, and when I eventually find out what they look like (etc), I often realize that they dont look as friendly, educated, etc as they are. Humans are really bad at this, and you will put people in…
Anonymity can enable that but it also enables far nastier things. There are pros and cons. Simply pointing out pros is not enough to win the day.
I don’t know… my Nextdoor group is pretty abusive to certain groups at times, and people post happily with their real life name and the rough area of where they live attached. Hate towards an individual person isn’t super common, but it happens. If this extrapolates, I can’t see removing anonymity doing much other than e.g. hurting LGBT groups online (imagine asking questions as a member of that group in a conservati…
Nextdoor has had enormous racism/bigotry problems. They have had to revamp a variety of their interfaces to minimize this problem. It's like they have to do A/B testing to minimize it. Real identity doesn't do anything to slow down the oblivious.
51% of Murder and nonnegligent manslaughter is committed by about 7% of the US population. This is directly from Government data.
There are real biological factors identified for this discrepancy:
The article cites the recent murder of politician David Amess as the purpose for revisiting discussions about banning anonymity on social networks. But Amess was stabbed to death by a Somali migrant with ‘religious and ideological motivations’. What does that have to do with social media anonymity?
It doesn't actually matter what X is, the important thing for the government is to be seen to be doing something. In reality the calls by UK politicians to end online anonymity will fizzle out in a few weeks once the media cycle moves on, as it's not something they can really do without spending an immense amount of time, money and political capital. In the mean time there will be a flurry of articles like this one rehashing debates that have been going on ever since the first troll posted the first comment on a BBS.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If anything, he has proven that it brings out the absolutely worst.
It allows for taboo topics which could be the worst if you subscribe society norms. Remember if everyone was anonymous so would personal traits which forces judging on material and people not taking things personally because their real id isn't attach to this idea
Anonymity is important because it allows you to have discussions purely based on the arguments and opinions, without the bias of who youre talking to. I often find myself having a wonderfully deep discussion with someone online, and when I eventually find out what they look like (etc), I often realize that they dont look as friendly, educated, etc as they are. Humans are really bad at this, and you will put people in…
Anonymity can enable that but it also enables far nastier things. There are pros and cons. Simply pointing out pros is not enough to win the day.
It's enough to convince vulnerable people who are calling out the misdeeds of the powerful.
It might not be enough to sway the powerful who compulsively deploy (Gov/Corp/LEO) revenge on people who call them out.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If anything, he has proven that it brings out the absolutely worst.
The freedom to do the worst is also the freedom to do the best. That is an unavoidable universal law. Look at instances where the conversation is forced to respect conventional values. It's death. Conformity and moronic mob-politics becomes the norm. So norm that you forget that there was anything better. (Reddit and Facebook are 2 notorious cases of this.) 4chan is sharp and smart. And infantile and vile. And someti…
Well, it can be. But the main boards usually aren't. A lot of smart people have left the platform. What's left is mostly "bad" people who have nowhere else to go: nazis, child molesters, edgy teenagers and so on.