31–40 of 157 posts
Most of the people leading major product decisions in this area either have very common names or are already famous. But for the rest of us, using our real name online means that anyone who meets us can discover our online identity with a google search.
When I "meet" someone online (such as reading a comment he/she wrote on HN) I really don't care what his/her real name is. I don't understand why Google cares.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Actually they do disallow tripcodes on /soc/, which is hilarious. Doubly funny though, is how people there still use the name field, and rarely troll with it. The honor system largely works.
Oh. I didn't know that. I don't visit /soc/ at all.
Heh, he spent the evening at my house working on and fretting about this presentation. While my dog watched: http://yfrog.com/hsokxkwj
They may be doing it wrong from a psychology perspective, but seem to be doing fine from a business perspective.
This point (anti-point?) is often made, but I'm not sure it actually means anything. After all, you could have said the same about AOL at the time when the few forward thinking among us were saying "Hey, there's more to the internet than this walled-garden stuff." On paper AOL looked great (at the time), but they'd made a grave conceptual error in their product design that eventually became apparent to all. Perhaps w…
I'm not saying there isn't a business model for Poole's ideas, but execution will not be simple. Which shouldn't phase the HN crowd, as the rewards for doing it better and still meeting the needs of the users could be a large pay off.
This general "you're doing it wrong" thing reminds me of Jonathan Blow's comments on execution and Doom. It's easy to nitpick from afar, much hard to succeed. I know Poole has a successful community under his belt, but it's a community that's not exactly easy to generate a living from.
They may be doing it wrong from a psychology perspective, but seem to be doing fine from a business perspective.
It's the former area that naturally tends towards large, unified networks worth billions though. Its understandable that Facebook prefers not to lose the factors that made it unique by permitting joke accounts and impostors and devils advocates and trolls, even if many people find them find entertaining. Not to mention all the other things that come with a truly liberal policy on identity (like hundreds of millions of autofriending spambots).
There's the rest of the Internet for that...
We present ourselves differently in different contexts, and that's key to our creativity and self-expression. "It's not 'who you share with,' it's 'who you share as,'" Poole told us. "Identity is prismatic." moot just kinda blew my mind. And it makes total sense. I'd go so far as to say it's almost painfully obvious once it's pointed out to you. I hope someone's got it on video and posts it somewhere.
Is there some difference between this and what Danah Boyd et al. were saying 8 years ago regarding "Faceted Identity"? http://smg.media.mit.edu/people/danah/thesis/
I've always used my real name on everything I do since I got in trouble in high school for being part of a group prank under a pseudonym. My father told me that unless I want what I do to be associated with my real name, I just probably shouldn't do it. I've found those to be good words to live by. And if you've ever explored 4chan for even a minute you'll see why this is important, the anonymity there turns those people into, well, freaks. I think "real names" can be considered a product of evolution, they came about for a good reason.
We present ourselves differently in different contexts, and that's key to our creativity and self-expression. "It's not 'who you share with,' it's 'who you share as,'" Poole told us. "Identity is prismatic." moot just kinda blew my mind. And it makes total sense. I'd go so far as to say it's almost painfully obvious once it's pointed out to you. I hope someone's got it on video and posts it somewhere.
Is there some difference between this and what Danah Boyd et al. were saying 8 years ago regarding "Faceted Identity"? http://smg.media.mit.edu/people/danah/thesis/
But my point wasn't that "it's an original thought that he's had and no one has ever considered it before!" just "I was ignorant of this exact problem until it was pointed out to me. Then it became evident."
But, maybe I'm just reading that as a little more antagonistic than intended.
As someone who used to post a lot on forums, I agree that being able to have multiple pseudonyms is great. On the other hand, I also appreciate the value of enforcing real names in online discussions. If you've ever read the comments on news articles on Facebook (MSNBC/Breaking News/etc.), it's amazing the hateful, racist, bigoted shit people will post under their REAL NAMES. I can only imagine how bad it would be if…
Mainstram media forums are full of idiotic posts because the mainstream is primarily composed of idiots.