30 years ago, the internet was a big, international, scary place. I had several nicknames and didn’t use one too long or in too many places to maintain my anonymity. Now there are literally billions more people on the internet, but social media has made the entire internet feel local. I use my real name on a lot of sites to communicate with colleagues in my profession or people who share my hobbies. The only thing I’m afraid of now are the FAANG megacorps who have me doxxed seven ways to Sunday no matter how much info I try to hide or give up voluntarily.
This is the third time I’ve seen a meme like this and I’ve been really tempted to slap a link to my facebook profile here and link to my lemmy profile on my facebook page. To feel cool for spiting random people on the internet. Most of my recent facebooks posts don’t get seen by anyone as far as I can tell, even though I put everything to public. So I think it wouldn’t even get noticed.
But I don’t feel like having to explain being a trans woman to my friends and family even though they probably wouldn’t see the post or read anything in my profile. I think they would even be supportive. I’ve told two people and it’s been fine. I haven’t come out to my D&D groups either even though there is an openly trans man in one of them and both are queer friendly spaces. It feels weird to out myself, or even bring up the topic naturally in conversation. And it’s not like anyone in the D&D groups asked me about my pronouns.
I guess self preservation is another reason I’m not being openly trans. It seems like a bad idea given the fascists in the Republican party. It feels like I might end up in a death camp. =(
Takes a real dumb ass to tie everything they do back to a single identity. Tying it back to the one identity you can’t really change makes me question if you are even a sentient creature capable of thought.
I could use fake name just fine when i register for the account back in 2008 or 2009, even now you can still have fake account but it’s harder i heard.
Not much later Blizzard banned me from Starcraft 2 that I paid with my own money for “account sharing” because I played at work a few times, which is just across the border in another country. They would not unban me until I changed my pseudonym to a real name and provided a copy of my passport to prove it. Fuck that. I always owned this copy. I had the original box and game code and everything. There were no other fraud indicators
I vowed to never give Blizzard money ever again and I kept that promise. I loved their games too death, it sucks
My favorite example is journalists. Journalists were using their real names and I grew up without understanding why that using it is a core value of journalism.
Yeah, it’s surreal. Back when the Oregon Trail Generation got their first 486 class PCs with 14.4 dialup, all the safety guides were about “never use your real name.”
The fear of some theoretical elite AOL pedophile corps and being able to age out of an embarrassing “ponygirl1987” account actually made good prep for the idea of “you have multiple identities for different contexts” and “keep personal and work stuff isolated.”
I’m not the first to say it and I won’t be the last, but it just amazes me how the older generation went from “never post your name online, never upload a photo with your face on it, and always be skeptical of things you see on the internet” to “I have to give this sketchy website my credit card info because a guy on Facebook told me…” and then the most bonkers conspiracy theory you have ever heard.
Its because all the old people who dont even know the basics of computers are finally catching up thanks to social media.
Not that its a bad thing. I just wish that social media is held accountable for scams and bullying cuz they have the authority to do something about it.
No, it’s algorithms. They prioritise retention and everything else gets tossed onto that fire. Decency, mental health, reality, it doesn’t matter. The machine will stochastically find every weakness in human psychology and exploit it.
And that is driven by business decisions. Facebook in Myanmar was the de facto internet because they’d subsidised it so they would have a monopoly. They knew that they needed to implement native language filters to deal with bigotry that was becoming rampant on the platform because their algorithm was finding that bigotry and amplifying it. But they noticed that when they turned on those filters, their revenue went down, so they disabled them. That decision is fairly credibly implicated in the genocide that followed.
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