[HN Gopher] The End of Online Anonymity (2019)
___________________________________________________________________
The End of Online Anonymity (2019)
Author : vmoore
Score : 66 points
Date : 2022-02-06 14:18 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (pointersgonewild.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (pointersgonewild.com)
| eternalban wrote:
| If the 'state' pushes for digital identification for access to
| networks, we have a golden opportunity to create a public key-
| exchange mechanism as public utility, as a component of the
| digital id. If followed up with robust ad-hoc distributed VPN
| services/platforms, there will possibility for creation of
| impenetrable (modulo algos & execution) private virtual spaces.
| serverlessmom wrote:
| One of the singular greatest and most important aspects of online
| communities is the right to anonymity.
|
| If every poster were required to have a government ID attached to
| their online presence I worry that many of the people who need
| access to online communities the most would be unable to
| participate in them. I don't know what the solution would be of
| course, but I'm tempted to pitch the idea of a "trust worthiness"
| score attached to users that functions somewhat like karma. Of
| course currently there's no practical and certainly no bias-free
| way to evaluate the massive amount of information being posted
| daily. There's also no way to guarantee that the majority of
| people would trust such a system nor that they are willing to
| verify any of the information they consume and readily spread.
| verisimi wrote:
| Not to mention, how easy it would be for the government or its
| employees to destroy lives, by planting false evidence. If you
| have access to the system you would be able to destroy lives
| with just a few keystrokes.
| paulsutter wrote:
| > crypto-signed government ID is attached to your every internet
| connection
|
| No we need crypto-signed anonymous identifiers that establish a
| reputation over time. Weakness of online reputation is the
| problem, not the bots or spam.
| theshrike79 wrote:
| Inb4 "social score" =)
|
| We all watched that episode of Black Mirror.
| wedn3sday wrote:
| I find the sentence, "right to remain anonymous online,"
| intriguing. Since when do we have this right? Where is this right
| written, and who decided we had it? I wouldnt be at all surprised
| if a poll of the HN community found that we all thought that we
| had (or should have) this right, but when did we all collectively
| make that decision? Since some time around 2014 I've been
| advocating in private around the issue of automated inanity
| engines and their rise to prominence. IMO online anonymity does
| more harm then good right now, and we still havent seen the full
| power of things like GPT-3 in the hands of nation state actors
| (or maybe we have and just dont know it).
| [deleted]
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| > IMO online anonymity does more harm then good right now
|
| Okay, "wedn3sday", take your own advice and we'll talk.
| gtsop wrote:
| Totally agree with your sarcastic comment, but you shouldn't
| fall into the fallacy of condemning his ideas just because he
| doesn't follow through with them. let's answer critically.
|
| Do we a have such a right? Some comments in this thread
| answered it already.
|
| Does anonymity do more harm? How did they measure that? What
| are the metrics and the data. Or what is the hunch leading
| them to this conclusion?
| salawat wrote:
| >Does anonymity do more harm? How did they measure that?
| What are the metrics and the data
|
| Not everything has to be a metrics based, data collected
| thing, but if you insist. Lets do a thought experiment.
|
| I'm an individual with a radical hot take on something I
| want to exercise it in the market place of ideas... But
| then you've got that thing that led to Larry getting his
| face pulped by those guys last week...
|
| Lets do a count.
|
| Larry had a hot take last week: Larry exercised it. +1
| Beaten to a pulp. -1 It got out there, the the marketplace
| was enriched, Larry's face wasn't. As a person with a
| brain, and knowing I have my name attached to my hot take,
| I am not at all incentivized to contribute to the
| marketplace of ideas. -1
|
| If it was a really disgusting hot take, then I just go on
| with that hidden and never have it challenged or the edges
| filed off. Incalculable loss +1-1-1=-1 in the short term.
| Long term losses are incalculable.
|
| Throw anonymity into the mix. Anon X has this hot take.+1
| Nother Anon responds: That's daft and here's why... +1
| Nother Anon pulls an ad hominem adding nothing to the
| conversation +0 Another Anon goes "Hey, I see your hot
| take, but what if..." +1
|
| Up to +3 already.
|
| Now you have a plurality of viewpoints coming together in a
| mixing pot, some good, some bad, lots of garbage, but dome
| diamonds in the rough as well. And no one gets their face
| pulped!
|
| And even in the case of garbage getting challenged, you
| can't fight disinfo, or horrid viewpoints without
| challenging them. They'll never get challenged if no one is
| willing to air that crap. Every now and again, someone
| comes around from an absolutely terrible way of looking at
| things. All it takes is time.
|
| All things being equal, take the route of least perverse
| incentive. Anonymity wins just about everytime.
|
| People underestimate the value of knowing the level of
| horrible people one is surrounded by. Seriously.
| tomc1985 wrote:
| It's a right insofar that comprehensive identity data is
| additional meta that is attached to the message. But all that
| is truly needed is the message itself; we don't even need a
| single field for username. The internet is anonymous by nature,
| it is only through our artifice that not-anonymous messages are
| even possible. This is what the incumbents experienced long
| before the normies took over and IMO how it should remain
| karaterobot wrote:
| My guess is that the "right to remain anonymous online" is
| probably an overstatement of what most people believe, and the
| author was using a convenient, poorly-chosen phrase. I don't
| think he'd expect that you have the right to (for example)
| purchase goods online without providing personal information,
| or file your taxes online without giving your name, or register
| to vote in elections without verifying your identity: those are
| unlikely, if not absurd expectations. What most people mean
| when they say "remain anonymous" is something more like: if
| your identity is not strictly needed to provide some service,
| you should have the choice of whether to voluntarily provide it
| or not.
|
| By this definition, "online anonymity" is something more like
| privacy: the right to act without unsanctioned intrusion. I
| know that anonymity and privacy are two different things, but I
| think they're often used to mean the same thing, and are in
| this example.
|
| Anyway, to answer your explicit question, article 12 of the
| United Nations' list of basic human rights[1] lists privacy as
| a right, and they say that protecting people against unlawful
| and unnecessary surveillance is part of providing those human
| rights on the internet[2].
|
| It is a fundamentally difficult question to answer, because who
| "we" are is hard to define on the internet. We are all part of
| different jurisdictions, with different laws. The U.N. is the
| best authority I can think of, though it's not got a lot of
| teeth.
|
| [1]https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-
| huma...
|
| [2]https://www.un.org/techenvoy/sites/www.un.org.techenvoy/file
| ...
| geysersam wrote:
| A letter is anonymous. A phone call is anonymous. A quiet
| conversation can be anonymous. These are all established
| accepted means of communication. If we had the economic means
| to read every physical letter and overhear everyone all the
| time to prevent criminal activity, should we?
| tkot wrote:
| I guess the same question could be asked in the opposite
| direction, so to speak - isn't a belief that such a right
| exists enough for it to exist, even if it's unwritten?
| medo-bear wrote:
| if things are unregulated then online anonymity comes
| naturally. on the other hand, it is anti-anonymity that is
| unnatural because it needs to be enforced. so no one needed to
| decide we have the right to anonymity, but "someone" is trying
| to decide that we don't have that right
| shadowgovt wrote:
| > if things are unregulated then online anonymity comes
| naturally.
|
| I think that, unfortunately, this statement is a bit too
| strong. An unregulated world doesn't stop private actors from
| pseudonymously using resources and lying about themselves, of
| course, but it also doesn't stop owners of network fabric or
| service providers comparing log data to de-pseudonymize a
| user.
|
| In the absence of regulation, the predominant factor is just
| what people want to do.
| medo-bear wrote:
| my point is that option of anonymity comes naturally, as
| opposed to someone needing to grant you that right. privacy
| is also a natural right, yet nothing stops anyone from
| putting an eat to your bedroom door, so to speak
| agumonkey wrote:
| In a situation like that, the system cannot sustain itself.. it
| will have to crash I believe.
| jugglinmike wrote:
| > Maybe there is a way to build a new web, a new kind of social
| media using a > hash graph to implement a decentralized web of
| trust, something that can > allow content verification without
| forcing everyone to sacrifice their right > to remain anonymous
| online.
|
| Comparisons to OpenGPG are likely to make anyone cringe, but if
| you're willing to suspend disbelief about the usability issues,
| it seems like such an apt metaphor. Where signing a key is
| vouching for the owner's humanity, not their identity. I can
| imagine websites integrating my browser to attach a "humanity
| key" to the content I post, and my browser maintaining my
| collection of keys and my preferences for divulging them.
|
| Granted, pseudonymity is not the same as anonymity. Maybe if the
| meaning (and lifespan?) behind these keys was constrained, then
| they could be sufficiently disposable to approximate anonymity.
|
| This system is either fundamentally flawed or already
| implemented, but I don't know how determine which. Can anyone
| here share writing along these lines?
| dane-pgp wrote:
| "Proof of humanity" is an active area of research, and there
| are several attempts at it out there. One that's worth looking
| at is BrightID[0] (although some people might be put off by it
| being blockchain-adjacent, in that it uses a DAO as part of its
| consensus-building system).
|
| As for the difference between pseudonymity and anonymity, it's
| worth noting that once everyone has a cryptographic identity,
| we can start layering on clever things like zero-knowledge
| proofs, for example, which would allow people to issue
| themselves new pseudonyms that carry the same level of trust as
| their core identity, without ever revealing what that core
| identity is (or which other accounts vouched for the core
| identity to give it that level of trust).
|
| [0] https://www.brightid.org/
| [deleted]
| josephcsible wrote:
| I'd rather have a permanent problem with fake news than force
| everyone to tie all of their online speech to government-issued
| IDs.
| blakesterz wrote:
| This is from 2019.
|
| The author says fake content is going to be too hard to identify
| so there is only one effective way to stop it, and that is to
| verify that everyone who posts content is in fact human. And that
| least to the end of anonymity.
|
| " Ultimately, one possibility is that online platforms will begin
| requiring a verified government ID in order to register. We could
| even end up living in a world where a kind of "e-passport",
| crypto-signed government ID is attached to your every internet
| connection, and tracked everywhere online."
| logicalmonster wrote:
| > The author says fake content is going to be too hard to
| identify so there is only one effective way to stop it
|
| I strongly disagree with the author that there's only one
| effective way to stop misinformation.
|
| Remember, the real problem isn't the existence or proliferation
| of misinformation, which is both incredibly subjective and
| impossible to prevent without a central source of truth which
| is fraught with ethical problems.
|
| The problem is that many people uncritically believe anything
| they read, see, or hear.
|
| You could solve the actual problem of misinformation tomorrow
| if there was a concerted societal messaging that said something
| like the following: "Everything you read online, from any
| source, may be inaccurate. People with money and power try and
| manipulate you for even more money and power. Verify everything
| with multiple sources, consider all possibilities and peoples'
| motives, and use your brain."
|
| This will never happen because powerful people want to have
| their cake and eat it too: politicians want you to believe all
| of the words that come out of their mouth, but not trust the
| naughty "conspiracy theories" about them being insider traders,
| for instance.
| yissp wrote:
| I think everybody already knows that you shouldn't trust
| anonymous, un-sourced information you read online, and I
| doubt simply reminding them of this would do much good. It's
| just really hard to constantly be vigilant. Even on this
| site, I've caught myself casually reading an article or
| comment and taking the claims at face-value, and then reading
| a response that actually does cite reputable sources showing
| it was complete bull-shit.
| logicalmonster wrote:
| > everybody already knows that you shouldn't trust
| anonymous, un-sourced information you read online
|
| * Your comment makes no sense in light of the establishment
| freaking out about "misinformation" online. If everybody
| already knew what not to trust, then why are they freaking
| out about misinformation spreading wildly on social media?
|
| * You yourself claim that you find yourself believing
| unsourced claims at face value, so there's a contradiction
| there too. I thought you already knew what you shouldn't
| trust.
|
| * There is no definitive source of truth that exists. Even
| if something is sourced by a "verified source", it can be
| false information, if even just by lying by omission. CNN,
| Fox News, Snopes, all politicians, and Facebook's fact
| checkers get things wrong or tell falsehoods. Trusting an
| "official source" is not a prescription to avoiding
| misinformation.
| baremetal wrote:
| not sure how that would stop misuse and abuse on the internet.
|
| not like the bad guys are suddenly going to respect the law.
| JauntyHatAngle wrote:
| That's a rather handwavey statement.
|
| The hypothetical presented is essentially a highly regulated
| walled garden. "Bad guys" would be blocked or cited. If all
| content is tied to an ID, yes it would work.
|
| China has shown that for the most part you can regulate the
| majority of discourse in an online space if you wall it off
| to the bit you control. Not sure how this is different.
|
| Not that I agree with it. Not a fan of the suggestion myself.
| mtgx wrote:
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| And Facebook has demonstrated that requiring real
| identities doesn't stop misinformation at all.
| TigeriusKirk wrote:
| If it's too hard to identify fake content, how do you
| identify bad guys, even if you know their IDs? What
| difference does it make what ID is attached to information
| if you can't identify it as fake?
|
| If you can identify it as fake, the whole premise
| evaporates.
| piptastic wrote:
| I don't think the premise evaporates. There's a solvable
| difference between checking an ID against a database of
| IDs you control, vs identifying the fakeness of any other
| piece of random information.
| superkuh wrote:
| Platforms can do anything they want and most already do require
| real name verification. But platforms are only the tiny,
| centralized, commercial part of online. There are vast expanses
| of niche communities and individual's webservers out there that
| will never require anything like that.
| sharikous wrote:
| They could easily be forced to by some law
| smitty1e wrote:
| Laws can be written to do anything, including repealing
| gravity.
|
| But if there is no enforcement mechanism, then all the
| lawmakerd achieve is diluting their credibility.
|
| We need to ask if any freshy anonymity law (no matter the
| content) is an improvement.
|
| Because bad law will worsen the issue that it attempts to
| address.
| d0gsg0w00f wrote:
| I think that people have pretty good BS detectors built in. If
| online communities start to get a funny smell they'll just double
| down on their small trusted in-person networks. We're already
| seeing this in smaller WhatsApp, Discord, Slack, Group Text
| communities. Anyone who thinks that a Twitter or Facebook thread
| is "real talk" is just fooling themselves. The promise of the
| internet to break down barriers has backfired and the social
| walls have just just gotten higher.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| After reading some of the all-bot
| https://www.reddit.com/r/SubSimulatorGPT2/ that OP links to...
| many of the comments right here in this HN thread are starting to
| look like bots to me too. Have people actually sic'd bots on this
| thread, or am I just over-triggering now?
|
| Crap, now my _own_ comment is starting to look like a bot to me.
|
| This may be a testament to the very low bar set by internet
| forum/social media discussion, maybe we humans all write
| uninspired generic word salad comments all the time.
| carapace wrote:
| I commend https://xkcd.com/810/ to your attention.
|
| Bots or humans? It doesn't matter if the memetic fitness
| function selects for constructive signal.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| >> Since when do we have this right? [...] but when did we all
| collectively make that decision?
|
| December 15th, 1791. As explained by SCOTUS as recently as 1995
| (McIntyre v. Ohio Elections Commission) anonymous speech is baked
| into the first amendment, putting it at the core of american
| freedoms:
|
| "Anonymity is a shield from the tyranny of the majority. . . . It
| thus exemplifies the purpose behind the Bill of Rights and of the
| First Amendment in particular: to protect unpopular individuals
| from retaliation . . . at the hand of an intolerant society."
| (Cut from EFF.)
| CyanBird wrote:
| I shared this already below to another user, but will certainly
| be up your alley as well
|
| "the overlooked congressional right to privacy"
|
| https://youtube.com/watch?v=gg4dJ8nyiPo
|
| https://congressionalresearch.org/PartisanshipCitations.html
|
| Ill certainly look further on the comment of the pennames,
| because it is absolutely true, mobs and lynching used to be far
| more common then, and pen names were a safe way to avoid
| getting "on the wrong side of the mob"
|
| It is probably exactly because this contrast (individual vs
| furious mob) is less explicit today that anonymity is itself
| then seen as a problem
| throwthere wrote:
| Agreed. Read any periodical from the 1600s onwards and you'll
| see a lot of pen names. And to people who think discourse was
| more civil back then (sort of assuming that people were more
| responsible when being anonyminity)-- they're wrong. some of
| the most vile filth, slander and gossip was published.
| mjreacher wrote:
| Do you have any examples of such vile content that would be
| worse than what we see today?
| falcrist wrote:
| There was a particular instance where Thomas Jefferson
| called John Adams a hermaphrodite (via a supporter with a
| newspaper) [0]. Adams apparently responded by spreading a
| rumor that Jefferson was dead. I believe that technique was
| learned from Benjamin Franklin, who "predicted" the death
| of a rival almanac publisher. [1]
|
| There's much more in the way of antics among the founders
| of the US, but this isn't unique to them. Classical
| antiquity even has stories of some of the childish stuff
| that politicians got up to.
|
| EDIT to add example: IIRC Cicero accused Clodius of incest
| and a number of other things [2]. Clodius responded by
| accusing Cicero of acting as a tyrannical king while he was
| consul. Some of the insults don't hit the same today, but
| this is supposed to be seriously petty stuff.
|
| The Cicero example wasn't anonymous, of course, but then
| again anonymity in classical antiquity would have been a
| good way to make sure your story didn't survive to the
| modern day. Having said that, there are stories about some
| of the stuff that was written in graffiti in Rome.
|
| I'm not sure if I'd call any of this stuff "worse" or not,
| though there was more political violence in the ancient
| world. I guess it depends on what you include under the
| term "discourse".
|
| For what it's worth, the origins of our word "invective"
| apparently come from Latin [3][4]. Apropos if true.
|
| [0] - https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/are-
| presidenti...
|
| [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titan_Leeds?wprov=sfla1
|
| [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publius_Clodius_Pulcher
| #Sex_an...
|
| [3] - https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/invective
|
| [4] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invective
| froh wrote:
| Pen names are known to the publisher, though. They are
| pseudonyme s not complete anonymity.
|
| The current full anonymity of targeted taylored communication
| allows for unprecedented levels of deceit, systematic and
| controlled disinformation of the electorate, in unprecedented
| ways, leading to e.g. Brexit.
|
| This current systematic abuse of anonymity to deceive the
| people is not comparable to the pseudonyme books and articles
| and leaflets of the pre-facebook era.
| yanmaani wrote:
| If people can't tell truth from lies, why even bother
| having elections?
|
| You mention Brexit. If it was a foregone conclusion that
| people weren't sharp enough to vote either way, why not
| just ask Queen Elizabeth whether they should stay or leave?
| dane-pgp wrote:
| > why not just ask Queen Elizabeth whether they should
| stay or leave?
|
| There is an alternative, of course. The country could be
| mapped out as a few hundred distinct contiguous regions,
| and the people who live in each region could vote for one
| of their fellow inhabitants to represent them.
|
| So, rather than each individual having to weigh the
| complex arguments for and against Brexit, they could make
| a much more "human" decision of deciding whether a
| candidate seems honest and competent. To aid them in that
| decision, they can look at the candidate's past record,
| and the potential endorsement they may have from a
| political party (which itself will have a record of good
| or bad policies).
|
| Then the winning candidates (hopefully under some
| sensible voting system) can all get together and debate
| the issue, and commission reports from experts, then vote
| on the big question themselves. Of course there's still
| no guarantee that the right decision would be made, but,
| for the record, in the 2019 general election, 52% of the
| popular vote went to parties that were in favour of a
| second referendum (which could have had a better set of
| options on it).
|
| https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/election-
| resu...
| Gollapalli wrote:
| You're just mad that the proles and rubes disagree with
| your politics.
| fallingknife wrote:
| If disinformation is able to sway public opinion, and
| people are unable to distinguish it from the truth, which
| you clearly believe, then how do you know that your
| opinions are not also based on disinformation?
| [deleted]
| jodrellblank wrote:
| > " _The rise of bots could render many online communities simply
| uninhabitable._ "
|
| Is that uninhabitable in the sense "nobody goes there anymore,
| it's too crowded"? Why would people make bots to post online
| comment threads, if not to attract real people? And why would
| real people go there if it wasn't interesting or enjoyable or
| clickbait rage-engaging?
|
| And why would Governments be interested in stopping you engaging
| with bots, anymore than they stop you engaging with fiction books
| or fiction TV or playing video games against computer characters,
| etc?
| maxime_cb wrote:
| > And why would Governments be interested in stopping you
| engaging with bots, anymore than they stop you engaging with
| fiction books or fiction TV or playing video games against
| computer characters, etc?
|
| Because they're afraid that foreign actors (or other bad
| actors) will try to systematically influence online discourse
| to manipulate public perception. That could mean affecting the
| result of elections or just fuelling the fire when it comes to
| political disagreements.
|
| If they do come for online anonymity, they'll use the same old
| rhetoric that they're doing this to protect you, to protect the
| children, etc.
|
| Here's an article about the Australian government trying to do
| precisely this:
| https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20210405/23025046557/austr...
| motohagiography wrote:
| Imo, the basic problem with how the internet has played out so
| far is that what began as a sparse network that required co-
| operation via some mutual dependency on things like a base level
| of competence and intelligence, collegiality, respect for certain
| individual boundaries like pseudonymity, and other conventions
| has, by making it user friendly, become a battle ground for
| people who are incapable of those necessary things. These are
| just eternal september problems.
|
| However, the necessary condition for all these kinds of total
| social surveillance controls is a network of authorities who have
| physical impunity from the people they ostensiby serve, govern,
| or rule, and I'd bet this decade will be defined by resolving
| that question of how far are they willing to go. We're already
| post-truth in public and political discourse, so there is no
| basis for mutual trust, and the real world conventions about
| basic freedoms have been largely recast as privileges, as though
| they are both somehow granted by critics and subject to their
| political schemes. Some very clever people are still trying to
| find alternatives to a civil confrontation that seems both
| catastrophic and inevitable, and they're doing it in the form of
| growing new platforms, cryptocurrencies, privacy and security
| technologies, energy storage and efficiency techs, even
| vulnerability research as a hedge, but what I can only now call
| the leviathanists are co-ordinating to bar any and all exits for
| people, and in particular minds, that would generate any value
| they cannot subdue and spend themselves.
|
| Indeed, meaningful anonymity is just probably just about done
| online, but what I don't think authorities understand is that
| they think people misbehave when they are anonymous. The trouble
| is, what they may be about to discover is that it was the
| anonymity that was the civility, and what is left without it is
| something altogether more serious.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Large-scale social media platforms are far from "user
| friendly"; they're advertiser-friendly and influence-peddler-
| friendly. Big difference. True user friendliness is now to be
| sought in federated platforms (where you can pick a 'server'
| that follows your preferred policies) and niche-focused spaces
| like HN itself, where standards of competence (however
| defined), collegiality and respect can still be meaningfully
| enforced.
| autoexec wrote:
| Yep. the moment the internet stopped being about sharing
| information and became about making money and controlling
| populations it all went downhill.
| ephbit wrote:
| As every aspect of the world that humans interact with, the
| internet too is shaped by all interacting people
| collectively.
|
| Some sites that are heavily used by people have grown away
| from their original purpose toward simply generation
| revenue for shareholders. Google was once a handy search
| tool, not a data collecting/selling platform.
|
| I rarely use Google anymore and many other people too are
| fed up with services based upon shady business models.
|
| Facebook is seeing a decline in its number of users .. such
| exoduses have all the power that's needed to transform even
| the biggest companies.
|
| The internet is full of striving communities of those who
| turned their backs on shady business models. I believe that
| this striving portion of the internet will always exist.
| Only its size will simply depend upon how many people
| decide to stop feeding the hoarders their data.
| fallingknife wrote:
| Yes but the fact that non technical people can use them at
| all makes it infinitely more user friendly than the early
| internet.
| throwhauser wrote:
| > it was the anonymity that was the civility
|
| I've noticed this as well. People fight like animals when their
| reputation is at stake. The way that the internet lures people
| into making public, attributable statements means they can't
| back down in any disagreement without serious loss of face.
| eternalban wrote:
| > ... I don't think authorities understand is that they think
| people misbehave when they are anonymous. The trouble is, what
| they may be about to discover is that it was the anonymity that
| was the civility, and what is left without it is something
| altogether more serious.
|
| Considering the scale of funds thrown at think tanks post WWII
| to brainstorm precisely these types of developments, I'd
| question that assumption. What is being normalized is precisely
| the mechanism that will tamper any such outcome.
| CyanBird wrote:
| > The trouble is, what they may be about to discover is that it
| was the anonymity that was the civility
|
| Really good excerpt, thank you for it
|
| You might enjoy this as well
|
| "the overlooked congressional right to privacy"
|
| https://youtube.com/watch?v=gg4dJ8nyiPo
|
| https://congressionalresearch.org/PartisanshipCitations.html
| cpt1138 wrote:
| On all these sites, including this one, why is the engagement
| model to comment on things? At family gatherings, prior to COVID,
| I always noticed real life chit chat to be bizarrely opinionated
| and biased as soon as it veered from the weather or traffic. What
| is the value we are getting from commenting, that makes it "worth
| it" to us to give up anonymity?
| ILMostro7 wrote:
| We are social animals
|
| Sense of gratification from reinforcing our understanding of an
| issue, our world
|
| Sense of accomplishment for being upvoted or proclaimed to be
| smart or even popular
|
| Appeasing a yearning to be noticed
|
| Short-sighted distractions to alleviate other pressures and
| hardships in daily life
|
| Making little etchings on cyber cave walls to mark that we were
| here
|
| Some other unknown reason that we may understand at a later
| time in history
|
| ...
|
| Thanks for the question, btw. It made me think more than I had
| anticipated
| froh wrote:
| Does the HN hive mind have pointers to some kind of trusted
| pseudonymity infrastructure?
|
| Something along the lines of a network of pseudonym issuing
| authorities, which allow two things:
|
| Individuals can generate pseudonyms and use them to act online to
| their heart's content.
|
| However some kind of nuanced "reputation" is propagated back
| through the network and is "sticky" to the entity behind their
| pseudonyms.
|
| As reputation is relative, the evaluation needs to be relative to
| the crowd you interact with. And the big big challenge is to
| protect the real life individual, so the pseudonym can only ever
| be uncloaked by the individual themselves.
|
| Is that possible at all? Where are the communities researching
| about this?
| drexlspivey wrote:
| check out keybase.io
| Tistron wrote:
| keybase seemed so incredibly promising to me with some really
| cool features.
|
| the company was bought by zoom though, right? and the team
| tasked with fixing the encryption of zoom calls. Does anyone
| know what is expected to happen to the keybase software and
| infrastructure?
| Cynddl wrote:
| > We could even end up living in a world where a kind of
| "e-passport", crypto-signed government ID is attached to your
| every internet connection, and tracked everywhere online. [...]
| The rise of bots could render many online communities simply
| uninhabitable.
|
| > We are moving towards a model where the internet is dominated
| by a few centralized content providers and their walled gardens,
| and generated content may unfortunately make it even harder for
| grassroots online communities to survive and grow.
|
| The author makes a good and fair analysis of the situation, yet I
| don't see how advocating for e-IDs is going to make the Internet
| a better place. This is a very 'platform-focused' critique that
| assume that the Internet tends toward more centralisation, where
| communities are packed together in massive platforms that
| regulate who communicates to whom and how.
|
| Where do we see a need to regulate 'fake news' and artificially
| generated content? Facebook Pages? Twitter? Youtube? These are
| all hyper-global platforms focused on content monetization. On
| the other hand, local Facebook groups and the feed of your
| friends, Github repositories, Mastodon... may not face the same
| future. Maybe there's a lesson to learn here?
| tomrod wrote:
| It's FUD. So long as applications in any form can connect to an
| internet, people can route around The Internet. Gopher as an
| example shows that alternative protocols can be created outside
| the modern approach. Mesh networking as well.
| maxime_cb wrote:
| OP here. Surprised to see an old blog post resurface like this.
|
| Just to be clear, I am not in favor of a centralized e-ID type
| of system. I think that would be a very ugly world to live in.
| I don't think that an e-ID is a good thing. This is why I talk
| about a web of trust at the end of the post. We need a better
| solution that doesn't rely on centralized control.
|
| > On the other hand, local Facebook groups and the feed of your
| friends, Github repositories, Mastodon... may not face the same
| future. Maybe there's a lesson to learn here?
|
| The way I see it, right now, bots are just not capable enough
| and it's not cost effective enough to try to gain access to
| these smaller communities. Facebook is a prime target because a
| single account gains you access to billions of users. That
| makes it worthwhile to farm out account creation to actual
| humans.
|
| I do think smaller and more niche platforms will probably
| always be less subject to influence, but, there's money and
| power to be gained by influencing public opinion on any
| platform. So it's just a matter of time. Eventually there will
| be bots that are smart enough to create an account on any
| platform without human supervision and that are much less heavy
| handed and obvious. These bots will be able to auto-generate
| profile pictures and play more of a "long game" in terms of
| gaining your trust.
| hunglee2 wrote:
| the premise is clearly correct, the implementation could
| certainly be more nuanced however.
|
| Rather than a blanket ban on anonymous accounts, how about read
| only until you verify ID? Or perhaps some way to tar pitting
| posts based on the degree of authentication of the account?
|
| This way you can retain anonymity on sign up, but incentivise
| celebrity by increasing reach
| maxime_cb wrote:
| OP here. I edited the post to make it crystal clear that I'm
| advocating against centralized e-IDs. The post is meant to read
| as a warning, not an encouragement to go in this direction. If
| you read this and you're feeling revulsed at the idea of a
| centralized license attached to your internet connection, good.
| You should be.
|
| I really hope this doesn't come to happen, but there has
| recently been an attempt by the Australian government to do
| just this:
| https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20210405/23025046557/austr...
|
| I didn't come up with the idea of centralized e-IDs, it was
| already out there. It's a terrible idea, but it's exactly the
| kind of solution governments could be likely to go for.
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