51–60 of 126 posts
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.
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?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 a…
/b/ seems to be a "honey pot" for the more negative behaviors on 4chan. By providing that outlet, the rest of the site's communities are that much more civil as a result.
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 wil…
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.
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?
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.
Yeah, not so much. If there weren't things like screenshots, perhaps. A browse through Reddit's seedier parts proves this ephemerality a lie.
>> "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 thin…
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…
"Hahahahahahahaha How The Fuck Is Cyber Bullying Real Hahahaha Nigga Just Walk Away From The Screen"
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…
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.
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?
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.
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).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The notion that anonymity breeds meanness suggests that the meanness is created. I think moot's assertion that anonymity facilitates honesty suggests that what is exposed is the meanness that was within people all along.
People have everything within them: we contain multitudes. But we also become what we do, and what we surround ourselves with. Setting aside 4chan, which I don't know well, look at newspaper comments. People positively compete to be giant assholes. They practice being mean. I think there's a big difference between people having the potential for meanness within them and indulging that in a way that magnifies and shar…