[0x4f3759df]

Maybe Americans figured out it's not that much fun to post when you have to consider that your mom, your aunt, your employer, your future employers, law enforcement, the TSA, the NSA and foreign governments are going to read it. Long live pseudonyms.

[shrimp_emoji]

There was this old and ostensibly authoritative page that was describing hacker culture. The author said that true hackers don't hide behind pseudonyms because they should be proud enough of what they do that they can put their real names behind it.

It lost me there. Not only am I not proud of my social track record through the ages, but the idea of "privacy is dead" online identification is quaint, naive, and/or intolerable to me. For better or worse, there's a sharp, strategic/emotional partitioning of how I interact with or present myself to strangers, friends, family, employers, and law enforcement, and the chilling effect applied to my behavior from all angles is very limiting.

LONG live pseudonyms. : D

[gonehome]

I think you're probably referencing ESR's How to Be a Hacker post: http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html.

The commentary may have been more relevant in the 90s and more about people calling themselves random names and writing viruses, rather than contributing to Open Source with their names standing behind their work.

[mjevans]

The intellectual ivory towers and shining cities I think we all want our primary public facing names to be on, at least in the fine print on some obscure plaque somewhere (like the credits no one watches at the end of a movie).

The grimy, day to day, forgettable things... not so much. That's the "being human" layer. Not many get to do their more ideal work as their actual job in society.

[eldavido]

Of course there is.

If you want more of a discussion on this topic, I would highly encourage reading some of Larry Lessig's work on internet identity and "cyberspace". Code 2.0 is a good start. He viewed pseudonyms like you, very much as a feature.

The fact is, people act differently depending on their degree of anonymity, and there's a place for everything on the entire spectrum from pseudonym to real name only.

[Swizec]

I swung too far and started using my pseudonym irl. Now I’m thinking I need new ones

[beenBoutIT]

There's no shortage of ways of looking past pseudonyms and identifying authors.

[DoreenMichele]

I can be identified. And until very recently, if you searched under my legal name, you found little or nothing about me online, never mind that if you knew where to look, there was ridiculous amounts of information about me online under various forum handles and blogs.

If you have really serious fame of the sort that means millions know your name, you may find it hard to obfuscate your activities. If you are doing something so bad that some government wants your hide, yeah, they may find you.

But for most folks who just, say, don't want their "respectable clients" to know their porn habits or something like that, having a nickname that your friends know you under separate from your "public"/professional identity can have loads of value and can be sustained for a lot of years without much effort at all.

[sandworm101]

If that were true, a great many more people would be locked up, or disappeared, across the world. Pseudonyms have been essential long before the internet, long before electricity. They should not be looked down upon.

Nor should they be a privilege. It is cute when a celeb adopts a "stage name". We don't really consider that hiding, but politicians use stage names too. When you want to actually research a person, say to find out if they have a criminal background, cute "stage names" become barriers to legitimate research. If the wealthy and powerful get to use pseudonyms, everyone gets to use pseudonyms.

[noobermin]

Any devoted individual with sufficient will and power can track you down. Even with a little less power, will can do it. We rely on the fatigue of adversaries and limits on their time and resources. Any sufficiently motivated entity can find out who you are.

[gambiting]

Any sufficiently motivated entity can easily bypass any kind of lock on my front door, no matter how much money/effort I put into securing it. Doesn't mean I should leave my door unlocked though.

[noobermin]

Of course not. I don't think it need be stated on HN but just in case, security is all about probability, and part of that guess is how motivated your adversary is. If you do a good job of making it too much of a hassle to target you, you can get away with not worrying about being successfully attacked.

If you are a high value target, then you need to step up your game, but people always make mistakes and don't appreciate unusual attack vectors.

[sandworm101]

>> Any sufficiently motivated entity can find out who you are.

Then the CIA and FDB have jobs for you. There are a great many people who very effectively hide their online activities from even the best and most determined adversaries. Encryption, obfuscation, old fashioned trade craft, it isn't all that difficult to hide online. Anyone who deems the fight unwinnable has accepted an end to privacy.

[noobermin]

I don't think it's unwinnable, but why would you put out the impression that it's not actually very hard to thwart any adversary? Note that the people who can truly get away with it are a very small bunch or they aren't valuable enough to target.

See Dread Pirate Roberts for a good example. People eventually get caught if they make enough mistakes and are sufficiently valuable to powerful adversaries.

May be we actually agree about how hard it is, but are saying different words, like when you say "a great many" and I say "very small bunch" (like a "great many" in light of the power of actors like governments and ubiquity of surveillance). But such a perspective of complacency expressed here could only lead poor folk to being too lax, and thus, eventually finding their security compromised.

[keerthiko]

The most impressive pseudonymous technology person I can think of to date is IceFrog, the brains behind the longest iteration of DotA 1 who Valve somehow unearthed to lead DOTA2 design.

People have tried to discover who he really is for over a decade, and only have a guess for his real name and age. Given that people have known of him since 2006 (for a twitter account with ~100k followers and known lead for a game with a million MAU), in this era, that's super impressive.

[sincerely]

Didn't a LOL dev give IceFrog's name on the forums or something like that?

[pjc50]

> true hackers don't hide behind pseudonyms

If there's one thing I'd associate with hacker culture it's pseudonyms, especially l33t ones.

[notacoward]

Is it really about what they write, or about what they read? People were putting out information that all of the parties you mention could read long before Facebook existed. I still remember "NSA food" on Usenet. Those privacy concerns, while valid, have never become foremost in most people's thoughts, even among technorati.

Out there among the Great Unwashed, I suspect the issue is more about the value they get from reading. People read a lot more than they write, after all. People were already getting tired of watching all their friends' highlight reels. Then since the last election there have been far more fights in comments, and the feeling of being manipulated, and people pretty naturally start to wonder whether this is time well spent.

I'm not dismissing your concern, but I don't think it's particularly relevant to the OP. Barely makes a dent, really.

[beat]

I love Facebook - or perhaps, I'm addicted to it - and have been for many years. I recently quit using it temporarily for a variety of reasons, and realized a few ugly things. First, it amplifies my own tendency to be argumentative. "Someone is wrong on the Internet!" seems more true on FB than anywhere else. Second, when I did go back, I realized I was just endlessly scrolling - a behavior the UI encourages - looking for anything interesting in the sea of memes, selfies, and nonsense.

Now, I allow myself back on only from a computer at home. I've removed it from my phone. It's still bad, but it's less bad. It saddens me, because I do like keeping up with old friends and new (it's especially great to see people that I lost contact with decades ago, and to keep up with the lives of my sisters and nieces and nephews some).

In the place of all that FB time, I've developed a love affair with my Kindle. I carry a paperwhite with me, and also the Kindle app on my phone, so I have two books going at once. It's so much better for my mind!

Today's two books: Strange Stars: How Science Fiction and Fantasy Transformed Popular Music, by Jason Heller, and The Better Angels of Our Nature, by Steven Pinker.

So yeah, the "value they get from reading" matters a lot. And Facebook has poor value relative to the addictive qualities and bad social habits they design into it. When I came back after my hiatus, FB put me through a quiz, and in an open answer section, I said flat out that the addictive nature was a serious problem. A little hook is good, but not too much! I think I said they should be selling candy, not heroin.

[notacoward]

There's a model/theory out there about many of the problems in modern society coming down to our all being trapped in low-energy low-reward activities like watching TV or surfing the internet. They're just rewarding enough that we keep doing them, but also just taxing enough that they sap the energy we need to do or explore etc. I think there's some truth to it, though I wouldn't oversell the idea.

Facebook is clearly in the low-effort category. It's designed to be. That doesn't mean it should be shunned entirely - we all need to relax somehow - but it does mean it should be managed. For some people that means limiting time. For others it means increasing the reward side of the equation, which might paradoxically mean more engagement. I have a friend who's a moderator for a very large and active group there. She has made lots of friends that way, and it makes her happy. Good for her. For still others, a complete separation might indeed be the right answer.

The important thing is that no size fits all. Kids need to be taught how to make these decisions for themselves, and in the better school systems they often are. Given the newness of technology, I think a lot of adults also need such education, and sadly won't get it.

[marchenko]

Your point about low-effort/low-return activities is interesting. Do you remember where you encountered this idea?

[xeromal]

Reddit has become that for me sadly.

[gaius]

Second, when I did go back, I realized I was just endlessly scrolling - a behavior the UI encourages - looking for anything interesting in the sea of memes, selfies, and nonsense.

You pull down... something spins... sometimes you get a reward.

Can it really be pure coincidence that Facebook and one-armed bandits have exactly the same UI?

[monetus]

I suspect for most people you are right, but it isn't like we can measure and quantify either disincentive.

I know the chilling effect of the widened pool of viewers is real. I also know the quality of the feed is generally terrible.

What keeps me there is the quality of the groups (mostly people I don't know) and the somewhat reliable means of contact. I don't know anyone who keeps a phone number for more than a few years, but very few change social networks frequently.

[feocco]

Agreed. I'm far more concerned about how I behave at the local pub.

[cryptozeus]

I think this is the core point. Surely drove me away from Facebook

[johns]

Don’t forget advertisers!

[throwaway5250]

Indeed, but not just pseudonyms, as over a surprisingly short time, you'll almost certainly uniquely identify yourself. You really need to be using and rotating "burner" usernames on a quite regular basis.

Unfortunately, some sites forbid this to varying degrees. HN perma-banned my primary IP address because I was rotating several times per year. As is their right. But savvy people will generally stay in lurk mode as a result.

Maybe that's the future: Most posts by bots, most humans reading only.