All it takes to create a perfect space on the Internet is good, consistent, 24/7 moderation. Easy to do when the space is small; impossibly difficult beyond a certain size. But I can’t fault anyone for trying to achieve it.
Absolutely. My unsolicited advice is to proceed with caution. I was there, many years ago, when the Internet changed from University access to a flood of the public. It has become known as the ‘Eternal September’.
From most person’s experience, during that transition, we all knew each other in real life. There wasn’t anonymity.
And, all of a sudden, there was anonymity. Thus, people could just say anything that they wanted without consequences.
Fast forward to now, and it’s a complete shit show. Where do we turn?
I feel it’s less about anonymity and more about being part of a tribe. When you identify as part of a tribe, anonymous or not, you’re more likely to follow social conventions within that tribe. When the tribe grows and nobody recognises anyone any more, suddenly you’re among strangers, tribal norms break down, and being an asshat is on the table for some. We saw the same thing happen recently with Reddit (anonymous) and Facebook (known).
Facebook has recently gone anonymous, they’re now letting people create additional accounts that “don’t need to use your real name”… can’t wait to see what 3 Billion anonymous users pushed together into a single place, can come up with.
Only with anonymity will you hear the truth, so I don’t think it’s a downside. Google and others wants to end anonymity since then they make sure nobody will speak the truth under their real name.
Only people who has nothing socially challenging to say will talk under those circumstances.
It’s like we have forgotten that social change starts by hearing uncomfortable things.
Anonymity enables you to speak the truth if you want, but it also enables you to lie whatever, if you want. No one can hold accountable an anonymous person if their lies produce something tragic.
While people speaking openly under their identity are more likely to speak the truth when they do it, as they have much more to lose if they're caught lying.
You assume that people are more likely to speak the truth, but it depends very much how socially acceptable the truth is. People lie all the time because they know their real opinions wouldn’t be accepted by others.
So what you get with real identifies are everyone falsely agreeing with eachother. Look at linkedin for example of what happens when people don’t discuss their true opinions in front of their employers for example. You get lots of upvotes, cheering and general faked positivity and self promotion.
You will never see an employee being critical of his employer there, because of real names. If you go to glass door, you get the true opinions, because of no real names.
@1984 That is because of the purpose of those networks. On more general purpose networks like Reddit it is not uncommon for people to simply take advantage of the anonymous system in order to farm karma by posting stuff that is simply not true.
And I'm saying this as a person who genuinely liked Reddit at first, because of the reasons you mentioned.
And it probably was like that before.
But things got a bit more complex. Even on LinkedIn and Facebook, while you should theoretically be public, many people are chosing not to. While on Reddit, you could clearly recognize some people, even public persons.
Even so, the issue is more complex than that of anonymity. It's more about motives and other things, and anonymity does not ipso facto bring the truth, no matter how socially acceptable is it.
I tend to view most of the stuff that is posted online nowadays as rather a personal opinion of the poster - which can be true, or not. You decide.
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