| You've just listed several groups of people who are discriminated against. I certainly feel for these people. However, this appears orthogonal to the issue of whether YouTube (a public forum) requires posters to use their actual name, and not a fake name. I mean, think about it - is a public forum the sort of place that you would want to be posting private content you don't want linked to you? If I was an oppressed person, and wanted to talk to somebody - friends, family, counsellor - there are other mediums available. I mean, gosh, I could meet up in person? Or I could pick up a telephone? (Assuming my enemies weren't the NSA.) I could write them a letter? I could send them an encrypted email. The list goes on. What benefit do I possibly gain from publicly outing myself on a public forum, fake name or not? Why not use a private forum? If I was an oppressed person, and I wanted to vent in my own community - there are private gated ways I could do this. There are real life meetups. We could meet in a coffee shop. There are private discussion forums, where you control the servers. There are Usenet groups etc. I really don't get people's obsession with posting everything publicly by default. It's like people posting every time they do a poo on their Twitter feed - why? Or let's look at one of your examples - people with embarrassing diseases. Is this where people with symptoms refuse to see a doctor, but would rather post on a online forum, so that anybody can chime in with their opinion? Have you seen some of the idiocy that's spouted in these forums? shakes head. Dude, go see your doctor, seriously. Firstly, it's guaranteed to be confidential, and secondly, this is somebody you're paying for their professional opinion, as opposed to some guy in their mum's basement having watched too many episodes of House M.D., and posting under the alias Dr_John_Hopkin_MD. Or say you were filing a victim's report. The police aren't exactly going to say to you - oh, you need to file a police report? Gosh, you should do it in a...YouTube comment! You will go into a police station, and fill in a paper report. The world would be a better place if people learnt to live a little less online, and didn't default to public-view on everything. .... I don't see how this is related If it's public, it's public. Eventually, it will probably be linked back to you. If they want to talk among their communiti |
So, "subversive", against the status quo ideas, should only be limited to my neighbor? So that there is not enough exposure and they just die out? How cute.