I made this account anonymous to see if my comments improved. They're certainly shorter. I suspect it's because I'm not as worried about being misunderstood.
The anonymity I know
61–70 of 126 posts
Re: The anonymity I know
#62I 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 tend to agree, so long as you meant asymmetric anonymity instead of asynchronous anonymity
Ugh, fixed. Thanks!
Re: The anonymity I know
#63On the one hand, I was an early BBS user, and there was a fair bit of benefit in anonymity or pseudonymity there. On the other, when somebody says that he strongly disagrees with the notion that anonymity breeds meanness and his positive example is 4chan , I'm gobsmacked. We must have such different standards for what qualifies as meanness that I'm not sure we're the same species.
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…
>instead I found a thread full of guys trying to build a physical version of their imaginary chinese-cartoon girlfriends
Between this and the movie "Her", where's the "waifu" (virtual girlfriend) startup?
Re: The anonymity I know
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> 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. Yeah, not so much. If there weren't things like screenshots, perhaps. A browse through Reddit's seedier parts proves this ephemerality a lie.
You can take pictures of ephemeral things, but they're still ephemeral.
Re: The anonymity I know
#65Great article moot, and well said. What is particularly intriguing to me on this (hackernews) and 4chan has been how so many people conflate anonymity with "non-identity", which is absolutely not the same.
Karma systems attach value to a 'handle' which is its own form of identity. So I can create an account on a forum as xyz123 and say what ever I want, but if the speech is of low value to the community I'll get "down karma" (what ever the mechanism is) and that identity will become less valuable, if instead the speech is found to be of value I will get "up karma" and that identity will become more valuable. I might find at some point that my identify as xyz123 is more valuable to me than my "real" identity. So am I anonymous? Sure, but does that mean I don't have an identity? Absolutely not.
Of course this allows for sock puppetry, for whom Scott Adams will forever be the patron saint. And in that sense there is value in being able to isolate uniqueness. Which is to say these two names are the same human, versus these two handles are two different humans. And this is the point that rubs on the 'anti-anonymity' folks. As much of the conversation's interpretation can change when you know the relationship between the participants, it can completely flip one's perception of it. And not knowing the underlying relationships can make us susceptible to manipulation (which is used often enough to have its own name "astro-turfing")
I keep wondering if we'll ever get to a system which has both anonymity and structure, but I don't know if that is possible as identity is often discernible by the relationships.
Re: The anonymity I know
#66Slight OT: I'm interested on people's thought on anonymity on HN. - Do you think we have better discussions because we don't have to use our real names? - How would using real names affect the discussion here? - Does the anonymity here go far enough? For example if someone manages to tie our real identity to our HN username their is no way of changing the HN username.
TBH, even if you are anonymous on HN, it doesn't mean anything. The mods here are very aggressive in banning/downvoting to hell/hellbanning members if they are not behaving in accordance with the tone of the site. So the quality of discussion has little relevance with anonymity here.
Re: The anonymity I know
#67I 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…
> The ability to lambast public figures from behind a screen of anonymity seems to bring out the abusive worst in people,
You could have left out the "of anonymity" and still have been true.
Re: The anonymity I know
#68Here'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?
Then the rich enough are free to continue posting whatever they want, the poor are discouraged from posting anything at all and everyone else has to justify paying money to communicate with strangers on the internet that don't care what they have to say anyway.
>everyone else has to justify paying money to communicate with strangers on the internet that don't care what they have to say anyway
I think many people would pay to post on an anonymous equivalent of Hacker News. Of course, the question is how you bootstrap such a community.
A more straightforward alternative (which would benefit the poor posters the most) is to offer compensation to the posters through, say, the encouragement of tipping for good posts or some sort of a redistribution mechanism [1]. I wonder how this would affect the natural self-regulation of an anonymous community in what people choose to post. One could say that it would encourage the posting of popular opinions but I think that in most anonymous communities that already happens through other means.
Another, more out-there, idea would be to algorithmically grade the posts and assign a price to each. A long, thought-post post would cost you nothing while a post consisting of just "lol" would cost a lot.
[1] E.g., a voting-based system where everyone pays to post and then whoever paid can upvote other posts in the thread. The money is redistributed among the posters in proportion to the number of votes they got once the thread no longer accepts new posts. Try to come up with exploits for this system and ways of mitigating them.
Re: The anonymity I know
#69Great article moot, and well said. What is particularly intriguing to me on this (hackernews) and 4chan has been how so many people conflate anonymity with "non-identity", which is absolutely not the same. Karma systems attach value to a 'handle' which is its own form of identity. So I can create an account on a forum as xyz123 and say what ever I want, but if the speech is of low value to the community I'll get "dow…
What do you mean by "this allows for sock puppetry, for whom Scott Adams will forever be the patron saint"
Re: The anonymity I know
#70Great article moot, and well said. What is particularly intriguing to me on this (hackernews) and 4chan has been how so many people conflate anonymity with "non-identity", which is absolutely not the same. Karma systems attach value to a 'handle' which is its own form of identity. So I can create an account on a forum as xyz123 and say what ever I want, but if the speech is of low value to the community I'll get "dow…
What do you mean by "this allows for sock puppetry, for whom Scott Adams will forever be the patron saint"
What part of Scott Adams participation in anonymous forums with sock puppets was unclear to you?