[notyourwork]

Although I don't support it, would the internet be a better place with people being identified? For this to be a constructive discussion, can we assume companies have a proper and secure way to validate identities and store your data? A lot of the extremism we see online is because people hide behind their keyboard. I sometimes wonder if the internet as we know it and social medias pervasive influence would be much different if people were less anonymous.

Please convince me I'm crazy or provide anecdotes that suggest this to be a terrible idea.

I grew up with internet access in the early 90s and have been behind a keyboard ever since.

edit: Downvotes are not for disagreement, please provide constructive discussion to a reasonable question.

[t-writescode]

> would the internet be a better place with people being identified?

No.

Marginalized groups __need__ their anonymity to be safe.

Should a teenager in Utah be doxxed by a message board where they're working through their gender identity?

What about a kid in Georgia that's working through whether or not they believe the religion they were raised in?

How about a wife who is beginning the research process and asking questions about whether what she's experiencing at home is spousal abuse or not?

Anonymity protects those of us most in danger.

[notyourwork]

You bring up a good point. How were these problems addressed before the internet?

[sen]

Anonymous phone lines. There was (and still are) many services you can call up anonymously for help. If you’re worried about it being traced back to your phone then you’d just go for a walk and use a pay phone.

The internet made it a lot easier though, and lets people get a lot more help from a wider variety of services (and communities).

[novok]

A lot of things were not recorded, there were no mass video recording, no cell phone location tracking, no ALPR, low credit card use with high cash usage and what was recorded was in the bottom of some basement cabinet of some government office.

Libraries had very strong privacy protections culturally and legally.

If you lived somewhere with good transit and didn't have a papers please id culture, you could also travel without any identifying information on your person!

If you had half decent opsec, the only thing to worry about is people you know noticing you somewhere, and even that is reduced by driving somewhere 1 hour away.

We have lost a lot of effective privacy today.

[jachee]

They weren’t.

Kids and wives were beaten into line.

[philipkglass]

I have seen little correlation between absence-of-extremism here on HN and how much information people provide about their identities. You can see that brand new throwaway accounts are more likely than others to post extreme rants, but I don't see much difference between year-old accounts that are totally anonymous and year-old accounts that link to personal web sites, GitHub profiles, LinkedIn profiles, etc.

Our local newspaper used to allow people to comment on stories with a Facebook account. People who were using real names and had publicly posted enough information that you'd be able to quickly locate where they lived frequently went on extreme rants.

The newspaper eventually just got rid of Facebook-powered comments, but I see the same behavior (terrible comments under real names, easily linked to employers/homes/schools) on the neighborhood's Nextdoor discussions.

[janalsncm]

> A lot of the extremism we see online is because people hide behind their keyboard.

Maybe this is true, but we also have to think about the perfectly reasonable things we nevertheless wouldn’t want pinned on us. Political opinions, of which many of mine are half-baked and I am writing to test with other smart people, but I don’t want to necessarily be associated with them forever. I don’t want to worry that simply saying tech workers should unionize will impact my employability in the future.

[autoexec]

> Although I don't support it, would the internet be a better place with people being identified?

Better for who?

Any system secure enough that a person could never face consequences for posting something unpopular would also be incapable of accomplishing the goal of censoring things online that are considered "bad".

You say that even our current pseudo-anonymous communication enables "extremism" but any system that would prevent it could be used to stop a whistleblower, or a protestor, or an atheist, or anyone else with an unpopular opinion. I don't see that as making the internet better, and I question how much it would even stop the things most people today would agree to want abolished.

[Nathanba]

People will be even less likely to tell you their real opinions online if a data breach can uncover the real identity behind all their posts

[caskstrength]

> Although I don't support it, would the internet be a better place with people being identified?

I don't believe so.

> For this to be a constructive discussion, can we assume companies have a proper and secure way to validate identities and store your data?

What?! No, we absolutely can't assume that. In fact, good default is to assume that data stored will be eventually compromised with high probability. Assuming otherwise is like believing in some magical backdoors in cryptography that only "good" guys can access and other such nonsense.

> I sometimes wonder if the internet as we know it and social medias pervasive influence would be much different if people were less anonymous.

Social media as we know it today mostly stems from FB which has a real name policy. Don't think FB is much better than others (by any measure that interests me at least).