I think it took a remarkably long time to sink in that “I hope you know this goes down on your permanent record”.
Yeah. I remember times where web pages mostly kept disappearing after a few years. Like, you would look at an old page you made 3 or 5 years ago, click on the hyperlinks, and most of them would show “404 not found”. That is not the case anymore.
The net effect is evaporative cooling where smart, interesting, important people either withdraw from the open ’net or curate their online presence into sterility.
Yeah, it seems like a binary choice: either you expect your online record to matter or not, but you cannot go halfway.
My children will not be allowed to ever use their real names online. They will thank me later. (Problem is, 20 years later, there will probably be technology to connect you even to texts you wrote under pseudonym.)
The problem is, too many websites today insist in you providing your real name. Yeah, you can provide a fake name. And be ready to lose you account at any random moment, if the website decides to ask you to provide some information to confirm your identity. But sometimes this is not an option, e.g. when you need someone to pay you money, for example Google Play. But the Google Play account is also linked to YouTube, and Google+, and… yeah, the “don’t be evil” days are gone, too.
You can create walled gardens.
There are different ways how to implement a garden. For example, it can be open to reading but closed to writing. Or it can have a public discussion, and a private chat. This way you can announce your existence to new people who may share your interests, but protect yourself from exposing too much. You could make pseudonyms mandatory. (For example, you could have a rule that a username is a five-digit number, and also display a gravatar-like picture to visually distinguish similar usernames. After a while, all insiders would know the persona of “red triangle 48873”, but to outsiders it would mean nothing.) You could have inner-circle and outer-circle membership, where new members go to the outer circle, and have to somehow prove their worth; for example on LW it could be by writing a few good articles. (There would be a private chat for all members, and a separate private chat for inner-circle members. Or maybe a rule that outer-circle members are anonymous, but inner-circle members must meet in person. Or whatever you consider best for your group.)
too many websites today insist in you providing your real name
The only one that I know of and which matters is Facebook. Google doesn’t ask for your real name—it used to for a while with Google+ and then gave up on this idea.
It doesn’t matter, we know your real name anyway
The contemporary trend is to insist on your phone number which is trivially connected to the real name, etc.
There are different ways how to implement a garden.
All true, though it’s a fair amount of work to set up something that customized—and if you’re a non-technical person, you’re pretty screwed here.
Yeah. I remember times where web pages mostly kept disappearing after a few years. Like, you would look at an old page you made 3 or 5 years ago, click on the hyperlinks, and most of them would show “404 not found”. That is not the case anymore.
Yeah, it seems like a binary choice: either you expect your online record to matter or not, but you cannot go halfway.
My children will not be allowed to ever use their real names online. They will thank me later. (Problem is, 20 years later, there will probably be technology to connect you even to texts you wrote under pseudonym.)
The problem is, too many websites today insist in you providing your real name. Yeah, you can provide a fake name. And be ready to lose you account at any random moment, if the website decides to ask you to provide some information to confirm your identity. But sometimes this is not an option, e.g. when you need someone to pay you money, for example Google Play. But the Google Play account is also linked to YouTube, and Google+, and… yeah, the “don’t be evil” days are gone, too.
There are different ways how to implement a garden. For example, it can be open to reading but closed to writing. Or it can have a public discussion, and a private chat. This way you can announce your existence to new people who may share your interests, but protect yourself from exposing too much. You could make pseudonyms mandatory. (For example, you could have a rule that a username is a five-digit number, and also display a gravatar-like picture to visually distinguish similar usernames. After a while, all insiders would know the persona of “red triangle 48873”, but to outsiders it would mean nothing.) You could have inner-circle and outer-circle membership, where new members go to the outer circle, and have to somehow prove their worth; for example on LW it could be by writing a few good articles. (There would be a private chat for all members, and a separate private chat for inner-circle members. Or maybe a rule that outer-circle members are anonymous, but inner-circle members must meet in person. Or whatever you consider best for your group.)
The only one that I know of and which matters is Facebook. Google doesn’t ask for your real name—it used to for a while with Google+ and then gave up on this idea.
It doesn’t matter, we know your real name anyway
The contemporary trend is to insist on your phone number which is trivially connected to the real name, etc.
All true, though it’s a fair amount of work to set up something that customized—and if you’re a non-technical person, you’re pretty screwed here.