[ben_w]

While I agree that the status quo isn’t stable and must change, I don’t think what you’re suggesting will be stable either.

The internet is one place where 99.9% compliance with a social norm or law isn’t good enough to prevent the remaining 0.1% from causing enough damage to be un-ignorable, even if you manage to get worldwide agreement on updating the law. (Consider that e.g. the UK does not have American freedom of speech, and if anything considers the American way of doing things to be strange and somewhat anarchic).

I sometimes wonder it would help if social media posts had to be deleted after a short period, perhaps a few months or a few years? (The pre-internet social media, being conversations and occasionally letters, was probably >99% forgotten in hours, and most of the rest was hearsay).

Or it would help, or make things worse, if it became easy for people to change identity?

[tomjen3]

Is there a standard way to convert an encryption key into a human readable name?

Because then we could have a service where you signed everything with your key and then you were know as whatever the hash of that key is - and you can create a new identity with a new key, but your name won't be linked to any real world identity.

I barely use Facebook or Twitter compared to reddit, and I suspect it is because of the real name issues, that makes those places just not as much fun.

[swebs]

That sounds like the tripcode system you see on imageboards like 4chan.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imageboard#Tripcodes

[ben_w]

Yes, but people are leaky with regards to OpSec even when they’re trained and motivated to be non-terrible at it, and most people are not trained at all.

[kodah]

This is called PGP

[ttt0]

GPG?