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The anonymity I know

chrishateswriting.com

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Re: The anonymity I know

#91

Post by Torgo »

polemic wrote: post #84
Kapura wrote: post #40

I always appreciate what moot has to say, and I think he's absolutely correct about anonymity creating a stage in which it's fine to fail publically. There's almost no judgement based on past efforts, which means that you can frequently see new ideas pop up. This is especially true of the boards with topics, which tend to have smaller communities than the random board, allowing for more effective meme propogation. Fo…

Regarding your anecdote: IMO it works for 4chan because the entire system is built around anonymity and a troll culture. If every message on 4chan is a trolling opportunity but every user is anonymous, trolling looses a lot of it's 'fun'. You get no notoriety, the target is primed for it already and is protected by their own anonymity. Trolling on 4chan has been elevated to such an art-form that it takes more energy…

Feminists and friends fling just as much shit as anybody else on Twitter. During the Piers Morgan Twitter flamefest, you should have seen some of the hatred thrown his way. In particular I remember the person who wished him to get "dick cancer." I posted a link one time to an article critical of the DailyKos response to a particular Ted Rall cartoon, and a social justice warrior flamed the shit out of me for _weeks_ after I stopped responding, because I didn't think a badly drawn caricature of Obama constituted racism.

I don't think you need anonymity to make trolling lose its flavor, I have used plenty of forums over the years where there were persistent identities but the sophisticated (compared to twitter users) forum members just didn't take the bait and trolling attempts usually just fell flat.

Re: The anonymity I know

#92

Post by saraid216 »

Both of them are conflating anonymity with its consequences. This really needs to stop, because it's preventing us from actually understanding the mechanisms in play.

moot understands that identity is "prismatic", but he misses one of the consequences of this, which is that one of the fundamental components of identity is how we are related to by others. Who we share as is a function of who we are seen as. Anonymity strips away this latter part to provide a blank slate. That's what makes the experience "raw".

Because the filters on your speech are derived from who you care about hearing you speak. If my mother is in the room, I'm not going to talk about the crime in my neighborhood, because it would worry her unnecessarily. But that's also something I'd be willing to discuss publicly under my real name with a home address attached. It's not a function of "am I anonymous"; it's a function of expected consequences.

Talking about anonymity and ephemerality obfuscates the issue. It's a simplified model easily understood by a software hacker, making it so that FOAF networks don't need to be included into solutions. One of the simplest ways to understand Google+'s early advantage over Facebook was that, if you were about to comment on a post to a limited group, you were explicitly told you who could see what you were about to say. It wasn't enough, but it was an order of magnitude better. (Yes, for the record, the real name thing was dumb.)

When we post on HN, we have certain expectations of our audience, and we often feel betrayed and indignant when commenters fail to meet them.

Anonymity and ephemerality aren't wrong. They're reasonable defaults for many situations. They're also good ways to sidestep harder questions, like how to accurately parse a name or portray an identity, when you do want to do that.

(P.S. This comment turned out as a really shitty piece of writing. Sorry for the scattered incoherency.)

Re: The anonymity I know

#93

Post by lmm »

k-mcgrady wrote: post #22

Slight 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.

I think we are, for all practical purposes, using our real names (in particular, there are a number of recognizable "power users", which I think is where most of the harm of nonymity comes from); I don't think a switch to our birth names would make much difference. I think under a fully-anonymous HN the best discussions would be better but the average discussion would be worse (as it is on 4chan). I would favour increased anonymity.

Re: The anonymity I know

#94

Post by wpietri »

crassus wrote: post #88
wpietri wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that's the case. He's pretty strict in enforcing behavior , including the behavior of staying on topic. Another good example in this regard is Quora. They cover an incredibly wide range of topics and viewpoints. But they're pretty insistent on respectful behavior. I think that focus, respectful behavior, is exactly what makes for good real-world discussions. Because on-line fora break the sort of contin…

It's tempting to define "impoliteness" as disagreement with progressive beliefs about feminism or white racial guilt. Judging by what Scalzi has banned people for, he seems to fall victim to this. He uses the banhammer more than any other blogger I've followed. The others don't feel the need to curate the discussion so closely. It's fine to be so closed off in your personal space, but the intellectual air can get a b…

Do you have some examples of him banning people who were behaving well and discussing topics respectfully but were still banned? I actually don't see him banning many people; I think he's just frank about being willing to ban.

In particular, I think a lot of my fellow white males who charge into topics of sexism and racism do so without significant respect for the lived experience of participants or the large amount of existing discussion. It is easy for them to see a ban on that behavior as intolerance of their opinion.

One blogger I'm fond of recently quoted this bit: "The more foreign the idea, the more relational groundwork you need to do before you can broach that topic." [1] He was quoting a Christian pastor who is talking about how to introduce the notion of human evolution to Christians who are (incorrectly) hostile to it. But it applies anywhere: jumping in and expecting people to instantly listen to your views is in itself a behavior, and a lot of communities find it disrespectful. That it isn't intended that way doesn't really matter; part of being respectful to people is caring about whether your friendly intentions are matched by the impact they have on your audience.

[1] http://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2014/02/10/why-youn...

Re: The anonymity I know

#95

Post by hellbanTHIS »

normloman wrote: post #51

We have pseudoanonymity on hacker news, and everyone gets along just fine. 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.

Yeah that's pretty obvious if you've ever seen a news article with Facebook comments that the Drudge Report has linked to, particularly one involving a black person.

Re: The anonymity I know

#96

Post by crassus »

wpietri wrote: post #94
crassus wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's tempting to define "impoliteness" as disagreement with progressive beliefs about feminism or white racial guilt. Judging by what Scalzi has banned people for, he seems to fall victim to this. He uses the banhammer more than any other blogger I've followed. The others don't feel the need to curate the discussion so closely. It's fine to be so closed off in your personal space, but the intellectual air can get a b…

Do you have some examples of him banning people who were behaving well and discussing topics respectfully but were still banned? I actually don't see him banning many people; I think he's just frank about being willing to ban. In particular, I think a lot of my fellow white males who charge into topics of sexism and racism do so without significant respect for the lived experience of participants or the large amount…

I'm adding "disrespectful" to the list of euphemism that progressives use to silence dissent.

Re: The anonymity I know

#97

Post by Antiquarian »

wpietri wrote: post #81
Antiquarian wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you use intemperate language to tell Bob to leave you alone, you are not in an anonymous context. In an anonymous context, there is no you and no Bob , just alternating post-sources. The same person may be both you and Bob , putting on a Punch and Judy show.

This is true, but I'm not sure how it's relevant. Alternating post-sources can still be mean about third parties.

From anonymity, it follows that A and B cannot raise their own statuses by being mean to a 3rd party.

From ephemerality, it follows that anything mean A and B post cannot long endure. Were C & D to post something mean about a 3rd party in the same thread, it would push the mean postings of A & B into /dev/null. Were E & F to post something mean about a 4th party in a new thread, it would push the entire thread about the 3rd party into /dev/null.

Re: The anonymity I know

#98

Post by pervycreeper »

pamelafox wrote: post #86
bguthrie wrote: post #31

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…

My only experience on 4chan was due to a Google Alert notifying me that I was the subject of a thread on /d/. That thread was the highest density collection of insults about me that I'd ever seen on the net, and sadly, I'm not yet thick-skinned enough to entirely ignore the "comments on the internet." When I see things like that, or comments on youtube videos of my talks, I sometimes think "maybe I should retreat and…

>it sure would be nice if they realized that everyone's a person

I hope you realize that anonymous comments are also (usually) written by people, and the points of view they express are also worthy of consideration and respect. Making comments which lack a connection to a person's real life identity enables the commenter to use an honest and direct tone, without resorting to passive-aggressive innuendo.

Also, people tend to forget that there is an implicit social contract involved in becoming a "public figure", namely, in return for having a platform for disseminating ideas, the people you are able to reach have a right to respond and criticize them (and you) in return. If your ideas are too weak to defend, perhaps they are not deserving of wider attention.

Re: The anonymity I know

#99

Post by qq66 »

Anonymity increases the variance of behaviors that people will demonstrate online.

When you use your real identity, your actions carry risk with them, so you tend to bring your actions towards the population mean. If you choose to dress in an outlandish way in New York, you might wear a pink sweater and orange jeans. At Burning Man, where your real identity has been shed temporarily, you may wear a toga or nothing at all.

The dirty look you give someone in "real life" might become an unspeakably rude comment in an anonymous forum. But the funny dance you invented to go along with a Daft Punk song might be something you choose to share with the whole world under the veil of anonymity.

When something changes the variance of a human behavior without changing the mean, you'll never be able to come to agreement on whether it's "good" or "bad" -- it's just different.

Re: The anonymity I know

#100

Post by ANTSANTS »

NotUncivil wrote: post #63
bsamuels wrote: post #13

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…

>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?

Occulus VR, of course.
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