The "real names" myth was the biggest scam played against people in the past 15 years. The media are also wholesale responsible for perpetuating that damaging trend. Historians of the future will look at the past 2 decades with disbelief.
Yeah, it’s fine to have some public facing content online, but the first thing a child used to learn before going online was to never use your real name and to never give out any personal information like your address and telephone number. At least that’s how it was where I grew up.
I remember when Facebook launched I had a visceral reaction after seeing all the content being shared out in the open. My dad didn’t even want our phone number in the phonebook, and now I saw everyone else sharing every detail of their identity online.
I started using my real name online when I realised it was better than things that I control come up when you search for my name, rather than whatever someone else posted online with my name next to it.
My first online social experience was Usenet in the 1980s. It was very common for people to use their real names (though certainly not everyone did). My university encouraged real names, the rationale was that if you use your real name you will be more courteous, and only say things that you would want to be associated with. It's much easier to troll and engage in flamewars and generally be an asshole if you do it anonymously.
The state does not give you name, but it registers it and uses it to recognize you in various situations. Usually the name is not enough to identify a person (and fun/disaster ensues when this is attempted) so, usually, more information is needed to identify a person.
Scam? That assumes deliberately misleading people for the scammer to benefit. Who exactly is benefiting from this?
While I don't agree that it's obvious even now that that using real names is damaging (i.e. makes things worse than anonymity/pseudonymity) the assumption that it's a scam goes 100% against Hanlon's razor.
It's pretty easy to claim that using real names online does more harm than good when pointing at a data leak but we should also consider the opportunity costs, the outcome of the alternative scenario. I'd say that all the fake and troll profiles show that anonymity makes people behave in a way that's damaging to online communication (and hence is a lot, maybe most communication is online these days, all communication). You can say that fake profiles are there anyway, which is true, but it still doesn't mean that everyone going anonymous wouldn't be a lot worse. So at best it's an undecided question as opposed to being a deliberate scam.
Real names were facebooks selling point. 'Join in, all the friends you know by name are here, upload your entire phonebook to us, look everyone's doing it'. Facebook's quick growth made billions and billions to some of people
I'm not sure that was the selling point but that doesn't make it a scam, right? Especially because if it did work as a selling point it means that people were also benefiting, so it couldn't really have been a scam.
Oh, I wasn't aware that the GP comment suggested that it's something invented by FB. Anyway, how is it a scam and how is FB benefiting from the real names? Especially at the expense of the people? Another commenter above said that they think the real names were the main selling point of FB. Maybe. But then it's not a scam by definition (as FB is a very popular product and if the real names made it to be that, then that's what the people wanted most).
