[deleted]
Is it bad practice to use your real name online?
51–60 of 166 posts
Re: Is it bad practice to use your real name online?
#52Most people are very bad at consistently using a pseudonym and it's been my experience that even an unskilled "snoop" can very easily tie a pseudonym to a real person. The same goes for nicknames and for other forms of identity obfuscation. Very few people do it right, it's great advice, but in practice, it doesn't work.
It's much better to control the content you create and manage the distribution of that content in the way you are most comfortable with.
Re: Is it bad practice to use your real name online?
#53I use my real name everywhere online. The reasons why are pretty straightforward: 1. It reminds me to be civil and think before I post. 2. It makes it easier for other people reach out to me based on things I've posted (I have a fairly unique name). Pseudonyms are relatively easy to 'decode'. If I wrote something particularly dumb, offensive, or stupid, and someone wanted to pin that on me, I'm sure they could given…
Use of real name isn't problematic as long as you don't have unpopular opinions. I'm not foolish enough into thinking that the work world is like college when it comes to free expression. My employer wants to be popular in the market place, therefore they don't want to be associated with unpopular opinions.
If Gawker writes a hit piece on me because I held down an unpopular opinion in a discussion on feminism in tech I know I'm out of a job. I would likely be out of most jobs in Silicon Valley.
Re: Is it bad practice to use your real name online?
#54My main concern with this is account security questions like "what was your first car?". With how much information people put online these days, these questions are often pretty easy to crack. Some websites allow you to change your password after simply answering a couple of these.
I personally avoid this problem by generating "answers" as passwords in 1Password. But the vast majority of people don't do this.
Re: Is it bad practice to use your real name online?
#55When I got on the intertubes, oh-so-many years ago - the rules were simple: the ONLY piece of information you could freely give on public forums, or IRC, was your nick. Now, the only piece of information you are supposed to withhold is your credit card number. I'll say this about the new ways: I'm extremely glad that I didn't have my teenage years documented and archived. Dodged that bullet!
I felt the same way about nicknames, but at some point I realized that I had a digital trail attached to my online-name that was a mile wide. I figured I might as well just start using my real name (which is rather unique already).
Also, I find your story of rules interesting. When I was first introduced to the internet (when I was about 7 years old, in school), the one "rule" I remember being told to us over and over again, by parents, by teachers, by anyone in authority was:
Everything you do online *can* be traced back to you. Communicating online
requires the same etiquette as communicating face to face. Don't do or say
anything you wouldn't do or say in real life.
Re: Is it bad practice to use your real name online?
#56Re: Is it bad practice to use your real name online?
#57This seems pretty obvious to me. When you are working to build a positive reputation online you use your real name. When you are taking part in things you don't want associated with your reputation you use an alias. You don't want to never use your real name. You want to be googleable, but you want it to be mostly positive.
I go by epochwolf online and I very much care about the reputation I have under this name. Somewhat by accident there is an entire group of people that only know me as "epoch" in real life. My reputation among those people is just as important as my reputation among people that know me professionally under my real name.
I do try to keep my professional and personal relationships separate which part of the reason I have a pseudonym. In a bit of irony my company uses github and I use my epochwolf account at work. The seperation is less important than it used to be but I will always be epochwolf online.
Re: Is it bad practice to use your real name online?
#58I use my real name everywhere online. The reasons why are pretty straightforward: 1. It reminds me to be civil and think before I post. 2. It makes it easier for other people reach out to me based on things I've posted (I have a fairly unique name). Pseudonyms are relatively easy to 'decode'. If I wrote something particularly dumb, offensive, or stupid, and someone wanted to pin that on me, I'm sure they could given…
1. It reminds me to be civil and think before I post.
That sounds very much like "I don't kill people because I'd get caught". Why can't you be civil (whatever that means) and think just because?
Re: Is it bad practice to use your real name online?
#59At some point I figured: why pretend to be anonymous when I'm obviously not?
Re: Is it bad practice to use your real name online?
#60I use my real name here and in a few other online communities. The choice wasn't intentional. I'm just really self-critical about the dorkiness and unoriginality of any usernames I'm able to come up with. (Pop culture, video game, and sci-fi references tend not to age gracefully beyond a certain period in one's life.)
HN has been my first major experiment with RealName™. It's gone fairly well so far. People who want to talk shop can get a hold of me. People who want to talk trash can get a hold of me, too, but fortunately those people seem few and far between. Prospective employers are free to search my corpus on HN, and in doing so, they'll probably find better content than they would on Facebook or elsewhere. In fact, I've had some opportunities come my way via HN that probably never would have elsewhere. (AngelList is the one possible challenger in that respect.)
Most important: using my real name forces me to think before I post. That's not to say everything I post here is a gem. Far from it, as the record shows. But I don't mind that the record shows something here.