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by ChuckMcM
4516 days ago
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Great article moot, and well said. What is particularly intriguing to me on this (hackernews) and 4chan has been how so many people conflate anonymity with "non-identity", which is absolutely not the same. Karma systems attach value to a 'handle' which is its own form of identity. So I can create an account on a forum as xyz123 and say what ever I want, but if the speech is of low value to the community I'll get "down karma" (what ever the mechanism is) and that identity will become less valuable, if instead the speech is found to be of value I will get "up karma" and that identity will become more valuable. I might find at some point that my identify as xyz123 is more valuable to me than my "real" identity. So am I anonymous? Sure, but does that mean I don't have an identity? Absolutely not. Of course this allows for sock puppetry, for whom Scott Adams will forever be the patron saint. And in that sense there is value in being able to isolate uniqueness. Which is to say these two names are the same human, versus these two handles are two different humans. And this is the point that rubs on the 'anti-anonymity' folks. As much of the conversation's interpretation can change when you know the relationship between the participants, it can completely flip one's perception of it. And not knowing the underlying relationships can make us susceptible to manipulation (which is used often enough to have its own name "astro-turfing") I keep wondering if we'll ever get to a system which has both anonymity and structure, but I don't know if that is possible as identity is often discernible by the relationships. |
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Quite a few people have mentioned this in passing, but I think it's actually the central point.
What you're called has no relationship to meanness at all. Whether your actions can have consequences for you is what has a relationship to meanness.
This holds true in real life too. The Stanford Prison experiment degenerated because the prisoners had no meaningful way of creating consequences for the prison guards, not anything to do with names. Abu Ghraib abuses occured because the mechanisms to hold the guards to account were (perhaps even deliberately) not working. They used their real names.
The rule of nature is that groups of people who can suffer no consequences for their actions will tend towards worse and worse behavior.
This is obvious. Imagine a forum where you could call yourself whatever you wanted in conversations (and different names in different conversations), but you have to log into it with a password and passwords cost $50 to acquire and for sufficiently bad behaviour they can be revoked. The fact that you can call yourself whatever you like isn't going to change the fact that people will be careful not to do things that risk their $50.
Reddit and hackernews and stackoverflow tend not to degenerate because the identities on there have history and value. If you behave badly enough, your identity will suffer loss, and you yourself will lose some of the value you've built up.
One of the most wonderful things about the internet is that you can take part in communities where race and sex and family history and class and age are subordinated to achievements, ideas, and skill at expressing them.