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Skin in the Game

lucumr.pocoo.org

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Re: Skin in the Game

#4
TIL that untypical is a word that means the same as atypical.

It's funny. I think of anonymity as something that has been part of the Internet going back through at least the last three decades of my experience with it. Back in the day you had anonymous retailers, let alone people using pseudonyms. It was very much part of the fabric. If anything, it feels like anonymity on the Internet is harder to achieve these days.

Even if you know the identity of a contributor, you have to consider the possibility that they or their systems have been compromised. I agree it's stressful and difficult to be constantly vigilant about contributions, but it's kind of all there is.

Re: Skin in the Game

#5
Pseudonyms are fine, as long as each person has only one, and multiple alts are guaranteed to be extremely costly to create. People are primarily just afraid of being duped or tricked somehow by someone hiding behind multiple identities, otherwise they don’t treat pseudonyms much differently.

Of course there’s a practical difficulty in making sure creating the first pseudonym identity has a low bar but also to make sure that subsequent creations have much higher bars.

One way to get around this is to mandate a real identity account but allow it to be private without a public facing component, and allow up to one pseudonym account to be linked to it privately.

Re: Skin in the Game

#6

Pseudonyms are fine, as long as each person has only one, and multiple alts are guaranteed to be extremely costly to create. People are primarily just afraid of being duped or tricked somehow by someone hiding behind multiple identities, otherwise they don’t treat pseudonyms much differently. Of course there’s a practical difficulty in making sure creating the first pseudonym identity has a low bar but also to make s…

the cost of pseudonym is the amount of work you invest to build a reputation, I don't think there's really a problem here

Re: Skin in the Game

#7
> There was a bit of a kerfuffle (https://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2024/03/29/4) about subverting open source projects recently

> [...]

> A well established identity on the internet creates a form of inner piece

Worth noting that the motivating incident (xz backdoor) was a user with legitimate history under what at the time appeared to be a real name. Even mandatory ID verification may not have helped in this case, if they're a state actor.

Re: Skin in the Game

#8
post #4

TIL that untypical is a word that means the same as atypical. It's funny. I think of anonymity as something that has been part of the Internet going back through at least the last three decades of my experience with it. Back in the day you had anonymous retailers, let alone people using pseudonyms. It was very much part of the fabric. If anything, it feels like anonymity on the Internet is harder to achieve these day…

I agree

Part of that is getting older. A decade ago I contributed to Python under the name "Demur Rumed" & that's what they put in the 3.6 contributor list. Back then I worked at a company that didn't use GitHub so it was all personal stuff that I'd put under that name

Since then I started working in open source companies that are operating on GitHub. An early meeting someone asked "who's this Demur Rumed making random pull requests?" sheepishly I declared myself, "Please update your profile with your real name"

Growing up in the 00s, the advice for teenagers going online is that they should protect themselves by not sharing their identity. For years I avoided associating my real identity online (outside obvious things like banking, which wasn't associated with my online identity)

Hard to tell if this is a macroscopic trend, or just my experience. Personally I prefer pseudonymous identity. But I've never been anonymous, since there's 20 years of digital trash left around at this point

Re: Skin in the Game

#9
Not sure if I get the point with this one, but what I know for sure is: as long as there are maintainers there will be open source as it is now. The "system" will only change when we stop having maintainers.
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