Real name policies may (or may not) foster civil discourse, but they do so in a way that favors the already privileged.
It's a burden for marginalized people and a barrier to them resolving their issues.
I was molested as a child and women generally tend to have less agency over their lives than men. When I first got online, I used my real first name and last name. I eventually moved to middle name and place as my default semi anonymous handle for privacy reasons because my first name plus last name is so distinctive. I'm back to using my full name online, though my handle in most places is first name plus middle name.
It was a long journey of getting there. It included a divorce, figuring out how to talk publicly -- which I think men tend to get inculcated with early and women don't -- and assorted other factors.
The perfect is the enemy of the good. If you only want civil discourse in your space and that's all that matters to you, you can achieve that by limiting it to very privileged people with no serious personal problems. Insisting on real names is a polite means to exclude anyone for whom speaking publicly under their real name might be a problem, so I'm sure it can help keep things superficially civil in your little corner of the universe.
I am also sure it helps further narrow the lives of people with already narrow existences by ever so politely silencing them online in ways they are already silenced offline. Which isn't actually all that kind, imo.
I’ve been reading Mike Monteiro’s Ruined by Design. In one of the chapters he points out how tech companies’ policies for the communities they create are set by “tech bros” - predominantly white privileged males, who have never experienced life as a poor person, or as a woman or as a person of color, or as a non-heteronormative person or a combination of the above.
He quotes a conversation with a female designer friend of his, discussing twitter’s anti-abuse policies added a few years ago. She said that if there were any women on the team, Twitter would’ve never had launched without tools to solve abuse.
But that problem never existed in the universe of the original decision makers.
I am interested to hear more about Ruined by Design. I read the sample chapter on Uber on the website [0] after reading your comment. The author seems very biased against any sort of good that might come out of Uber. Is the entire narrative anti-VC and anti-SV and deems the issue a systemic problem, or does the author provide counterpoints and examples where good decisions are made and can be made?
I think that boys are encouraged to express their opinion from a younger age as a "show of strength". As a young man, you're supposed to be strong enough to withstand disagreement and occasional social shaming. The pressure for girls is the opposite, be more like the others, don't stand out.
No doubt that people make assumptions about you if you make it known you are a woman online, but, I it's not necessarily just about privilege in the social justice sense. I am a minority, and I am very uncomfortable with identity politics, but I know I have to be careful with that I say online, because my current and future employers might be watching.
Forcing people to use their real names will favor discourse that's more mainstream, that fits in the overton window[0]. Anyone can be bullied online if they disagree with the mainstream, whether they use a nickname or their real name, but if your real-world identity is known, that bullying can translate into the real world, you could lose your job, etc.
I'm plenty opinionated and I've always been comfortable expressing my opinion. It gets perceived differently than when men do the same and people react differently to a woman doing it.
I had other issues rooted in being female. I've concluded that the world typically teaches boys from an early age how to have a public reputation and public relations and girls generally don't get the same info to the same degree. It becomes a self reinforcing problem because a woman behaving "normally" is behaving in a way that is more appropriate for private spaces and personal relationships and the rest of the world will expect that of her.
I've had a really hard time figuring out why I had such an extremely hard time interacting with the public. It took a long time to get any kind of handle on that.
> I've concluded that the world typically teaches boys from an early age how to have a public reputation and public relations and girls generally don't get the same info to the same degree.
That would be contrary to popular wisdom, which says that girls are taught to be much more social from an earlier age, and as such, they generally have a better understanding of social dynamics, whereas boys tend to be more socially obtuse.
> I've had a really hard time figuring out why I had such an extremely hard time interacting with the public. It took a long time to get any kind of handle on that.
Just my two cents but: just being different from the norm will often get you weird, unfriendly looks.
From what I read in your discourse, I get the impression that it seems to you like boys have it easy/better, socially, but I can tell you, having been on the other side of the fence, that when boys are "out of line", they literally get beat up, repeatedly... And society somehow accepts this, "boys will be boys".
Being opinionated is not always well-received, both for men and women. Generally, people like opinionated if those opinions are just reinforcing their own... I do agree that men can get away with being more opinionated in some situations, but I don't think it's just a free pass. It only works if you're at the top of the social hierarchy. Maybe this is where we are in agreement. Society has difficulty accepting women being opinionated because it has difficulty accepting women being at the top of the social hierarchy. To fix that, it helps to fix gender norms, but we should also strive to live in a society where everyone can express their opinion, not just those at the top of the hierarchy.
I'm not talking about social skills. I'm talking about public relations skills. They are different skill sets.
I'm not saying boys have it easy. I'm saying boys generally get expected to have a real career and they are shaped accordingly. Women are generally not expected to have a real career. We are expected to be defined by being a wife and mom. And we get shaped accordingly.
That doesn't mean men have it better. It does mean the topmost positions of power in the world are male dominated and that pattern gets reinforced by the way we teach women to interact with other people and continue to expect them to interact with other people at every step of the way.
I don't think that a use-real-names policy is conducive to good conversation, because it means that everything you say has to be something you would be comfortable saying in front of your family and your employer and the whole rest of the world. That takes a lot of topics off the table -- sex, politics, anything that is controversial, anything that might become controversial in the next ten years... Discussions become very bland when everything you say has to be designed to protect your real-life reputation from every audience that will ever have power over you.
It's better to create a system of reputation independent of real-world identity. If new users have limited privileges until they've been around for a certain amount, or if only one account is permitted per IP, even an anonymous account with a name like XxX_FakeName_XxX becomes an identity with value and a reputation. By engaging in bad behaviour, that identity would lose reputation, and might even be banned. Because of the loss of privilege or technical challenge associated with creating a new account, bad behaviour is disincetivized without actually attaching real-world identity to anything online.
There's a balance to be found between lowering barriers to entry and raising barriers to re-entry, but if the balance is done properly it can make a big difference.
Of course, none of this works without moderators doing the legwork of throwing out bad actors, but this is the difference between effective moderation and token moderation that is too swamped to actually do anything.
This also works better in smaller communities, but I think smaller online communities are just healthier in general. This is part of why monoliths like Facebook and Twitter are so toxic -- there is no "Twitter community," rather there are a thousand Twitter communities all of which are bumping into each other constantly because they occupy the same space.
> means that everything you say has to be something you would be comfortable saying in front of your family and your employer and the whole rest of the world. That takes a lot of topics off the table -- sex, politics, anything that is controversial, anything that might become controversial in the next ten years...
different suggestion: learning how to talk about that stuff with your family is a better long term solution. I don't know if this is a cultural thing but in my country talking about sex or politics with your family is pretty normal, if you don't have a raging political discussion over family dinners it's not a good conversation.
I think anonymity or pseudo identities are pretty broken. We're social animals, our identity is what gives us stake and it keeps us responsible.
I don't think anonymous opinions are more "real" because they are unfiltered, I think they are more likely to be thoughtless. If we don't stand for something with our name I don't think we're more intelligent but rather we just care less about what we say, I don't think the youtube comment section is known for its great insights.
The only reason I don't have my real name here and on a few other sites is because in the past I repeatedly ended up with angry people who had an axe to grind spamming me on my personal mail, so I feel you can't really unilaterally disarm, but I think collectively we'd be better off.
> different suggestion: learning how to talk about that stuff with your family is a better long term solution.
I agree, but unfortunately, for many people that's just not an option. Think abusive or mentally ill parents. Think people living in the middle east. It's normal for people to seek spaces where they can speak more freely, without needing to change the whole world to make that possible first.
I've seen news articles that Drudge has linked to that have Facebook comments where people use their real name. This may surprise some people but -- they're not usually very polite!
And every evil subreddit I've come across was the result of "effective moderation", they moderated everyone who isn't evil.
Lax moderation, the good ole downvote button & find some way to discourage circle jerks, that's probably all you can do. You're never going to make the Internet not be a sewer though.
Evil people are allowed to have communities. In an evil community, it's probably the "good" user who is usually a troll, so it makes sense for them to be unwelcome.
What's interesting about Reddit is, to what extent is a subreddit its own community vs part of the Reddit community? Probably better for evil people to set up their own forums, or preferably to not be evil at all.
So, a forum with a complicated sign up process, IP filtering and effective moderation?
Lots of communities like that used to exist. Some still do, but for some reason everyone thought they needed to tell everyone on the internet their name and personal information.
I helped build a (acquihired and now defunct) startup in this space. Totally agree that if you care about kindness / civility, you have to bake it into the design from the get-go.
We ended up sticking with a real-name policy, which does have some downsides (examples like the one in OPs post where someone can come out as gay in a country where it's illegal obviously wouldn't fly), but having people use their real names meant less ability to hide behind anonymous identities.
Obviously, that wasn't enough on its own, so we tested a few other dynamics that also helped. For example, you had to commit to a pledge before writing anything. It did end up being really civil and thoughtful, but we never got beyond thousands of active users and never figured out a business model.
Real names have little effect imo otherwise why my dad's facebook feed is so crazy.
Compare github/hn/discord to places where people use their real names.
It's a moderation problem. As networks grow, moderating them becomes harder and why popular things end up becoming toxic. They just don't have enough people to set a community expectation or tone.
I think the obvious solution is to give users power over who can comment on their stuff. My Facebook feed could easily pass as a “kind social network” because I only follow blood bowl interest groups and only have friends I actually like in the real world.
Don’t get me wrong, I too had a friendslist full of anyone I’d ever met, I followed news and stuff like that. And it drove me to the point where I was ready to quit Facebook. Then I got into blood bowl and needed Facebook for our national league, and I had to figure out how to make social networking not suck. The answer was to remove all the people I didn’t actually care about.
These days my feed is relatively slow, and usually rather boring, but I use Facebook more than ever because of my blood bowl interest groups. These groups too are moderates in a way that would get the average Twitter commenter banned by their first post. Sure we might as well use some phpBB thing, and we might as well use IRC instead of discord, would be nice for a privacy and anti-advertising concern, but Facebook is where people are.
My experience with podaero.com has been that things are very civil in small groups where everyone gets to know each other - regardless of whether real names are used (users there have the option between real name or pseudonym).
I think it's when the groups get so large that nobody really knows each other - that's when things become less civil.
Yeah, I'm reminded of the bystander effect and diffusion of responsibility. Then there's also the phenomenon of lynchings, which I believe are still a big problem in some countries.
Trying to enforce characteristics for the network at the global scale is incompatible with the most basic degrees of freedom of expression. However, at some point all large corporations - so far - want to weaponise their control of the network to steer its characteristics at a global scale. This is why all large social networks suck so badly. They all try to be a one-size-fits-all social overlay to the Internet, and this is a fool's errand.
The double edged sword here is groupthink. If you are trying to have a discourse about being gay in a social network comprised of people from Saudi Arabia, they might flag your very loving and helpful posts as being hostile. Thus banning you from their network.
In the end, I think it would result in even tighter bubbles where all information we find uncomfortable is eventually filtered away.
I think a better angle would be to figure out how to create an environment that encourages open mindedness and willingness to let others be themselves without forcing anyone into our own views. Easier said than done, I know.
I was molested as a child and women generally tend to have less agency over their lives than men. When I first got online, I used my real first name and last name. I eventually moved to middle name and place as my default semi anonymous handle for privacy reasons because my first name plus last name is so distinctive. I'm back to using my full name online, though my handle in most places is first name plus middle name.
It was a long journey of getting there. It included a divorce, figuring out how to talk publicly -- which I think men tend to get inculcated with early and women don't -- and assorted other factors.
The perfect is the enemy of the good. If you only want civil discourse in your space and that's all that matters to you, you can achieve that by limiting it to very privileged people with no serious personal problems. Insisting on real names is a polite means to exclude anyone for whom speaking publicly under their real name might be a problem, so I'm sure it can help keep things superficially civil in your little corner of the universe.
I am also sure it helps further narrow the lives of people with already narrow existences by ever so politely silencing them online in ways they are already silenced offline. Which isn't actually all that kind, imo.