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On the contrary, I advise everyone to use real-name identities wherever they can. I understand that pseudonymous and real name accounts have fundamentally different approaches, but I think, for the majority of people, pseudonymous accounts are a mistake. The reason is simple. In 2020, everybody is a brand. Things have become competitive to the point that the inevitable happened: business has occupied free time. We could lament that, or we could accept it, because it's the reality today, and I don't think we're ever going back. Personally I think pseudonyms are a legacy of a time when the Internet was not taken seriously and whatsupdoggg69 was a perfectly valid username in a place where nothing mattered and Internet work had no monetary value. That's changed, a lot. That viewpoint - which, to be honest, was probably questionable, even then - seems definitely wrong now. It seems more and more like the wrong path, and you don't have to go down it. You need to start posting under your real name, and then keep doing that, so people know they can go to your advice, expertise, friendship, a place to pay attention, etc. That has a lot of monetary value. My philosophy here is: unless you intentionally chose to leave money on the table, you should never leave money on the table. So if you're working in 2020 at a prestigious or a first-mover startup (which covers a lot of startups), don't go on reddit and post memes under some name that will always be worth $0. Instead, go on Twitter, post under your real name, and start becoming known as the go-to person for your niche of the industry. If you are working at a startup, and building a name launched out of a startup (no lawyer is going to attempt to claim your real name social media handle), you can launch a consultancy, just off that. Assuming your consultancy brings in 100k a year and businesses often sell for 10x revenue (a pretty reasonably assumption), then doing that over 10 years can build you a $1,000,000 consultancy. Given those numbers, I think it's positively stupid to turn down $1,000,000 for the sake of a few forgettable jokes and political opinions that, let's face it, in the case of the average person, are not changing anything. Instead, do the smart thing, claim that $1,000,000, and get used to using real names & real name content for everything. |
As you say, using your real name builds your brand. However, you must then be very careful to avoid saying stuff that damages your brand. And as you basically say, you must therefore censor yourself online.
So why not do other stuff using pseudonyms? That's exactly why I started using them. I'm retired now, so there's really nothing about my meatspace identity to protect. But when there was, having the freedom to express myself honestly online was important to me. In particular, because I had to police my meatspace behavior so carefully.