[kbenson]

The problem is that now people dedicate time and effort to "doxing" people so there's no real way to ensure that you're safely anonymous for any extended set of interaction as a persona. Unless you're for some 4chan like system where everyone is anonymous for every message, people will invest in their online personas and will be upset or devastated if they are attacked or destroyed.

The real difference now compared to the past IMO is that as a society we haven't really internalized that will large, possibly global reach and the benefits it may bring come an associated set of dangers. The larger the audience, the larger the possible benefits of your interactions. Linus Torvalds leverages a global audience into a volunteer workforce for what is likely the greatest software engineering product of the human race to date. Another person makes a poor decision or hurtful comment or is just interpreted wrong, and is the zeitgeist of a day or two, but a day or two of almost the whole world's ire. That can have major personal and professional consequences, as we've seen.

Managing a one-on-one interaction and explaining yourself to someone is generally trivial, for mature people. Doing so for a group of 10 is harder, but also possible much of the time. For 100, adequately assuaging them all is unlikely, some will retain reservations you'll likely never know are directly related. It worsens at every level. At the point where thousands or millions of people have negative impressions of you, many will never even see counterfactual evidence to what was initially presented, and your reputation may be tarnished, possibly to a sizeable fractions of the human race, and there's not much you can do about it, because the novel situation that got information about you in front of them initially is extremely unlikely to be repeated.