Why are you using what I presume is your real name here?
I’m not actually interested in whether or not it is your real name, mind; mostly I’d like to direct your attention to the fact that the choice of username was in fact a choice. That choice imparts information. By choosing the username that you did, you are, deliberately or not, engaging in a kind of signaling.
In particular, from a particular frame of reference, you are engaging in a particular kind of costly signaling, which may serve to elevate your relative local status, by tying any reputational hits you may suffer as a result of mis-steps here to your real identity. You are saying “This is me, I am not hiding behind false identities.” The overall effect of this is a costly signal which serves to elevate your status with the tribe here.
If it isn’t your real name, why are you using a false identity that looks like a real identity?
Hang up, though. Let us say instead that you, instead, see false identities as a form of dishonesty; this isn’t signaling, this is sticking to principles that are important to you.
Well, if that is the case, another question: Would you use this identity to say something that does have strong reputational costs associated to your real identity? Let us say that you would, you just don’t have any such things to say.
Well, it is convenient for you, some might observe, that you are willing to stand up for principles that don’t cost you anything. (Hence some part of why signaling tends to be costly; it avoids this problem.)
I will observe there is an important political dispute about anonymity on the internet, which has major communal aspects. The fewer users who insist on privacy, the more that commercial websites can exclude those who do. Oh, you don’t want us tracking you? You don’t get to use our website anymore. Observe the trend in websites, such as Twitter, of becoming increasingly user-unfriendly to those who are not logged in, or of excluding them altogether.
“Everything is political” is an observation that this phenomenon is, basically, universal.
Once we observe that there -is- a political implication in your choice of username, we must ask whether you -ought- to do anything about it; a lot of people like to skip this question, but it is an important question. Do you “owe” it to the people who prefer anonymity, to yourself remain anonymous? The pro-anonymity side would be really well served if everybody was forced to be anonymous; they are certainly better served if the choice is explicitly served (hence the EU rules on website cookies) instead of anonymity being opt-in instead of opt-out.
However, there are also people who don’t want to be anonymous, or who don’t want to interact with anonymous people; certainly there’s the potential for some power imbalances there.
We’ve happened upon some kind of uneasy mostly-truce, where anonymity is contextual, and violating another person’s anonymity is seen as a violation of the cultural norms of the internet. This truce is eroding; as fewer and fewer people choose to be anonymous, a higher and higher proportion of anonymous actions are those which would impose costs on the speaker if the speaker chose not to be anonymous, which makes anonymity an increasingly sinister-looking choice.
Imagine being a writer in a group of blogs with a common user system, moderating comments. To begin with, all the blogs allow anonymous comments. However, after one too many abusive comments, a blog bans anonymous commenters; some percentage of previously-anonymous commenters value commenting there enough to create accounts, reducing the number of “legitimate” anonymous comments in the ecosystem as a whole. This makes anonymous comments look worse, prompting the next blog to turn them off, then the next.
Look, the pro-anonymity people say, you’re making a choice to oppose an anonymous internet; you’re against us.
Well, there’s definitely an “is” there. What’s missing is the “ought”, the idea that the political implications of an act create individual responsibility. There’s a very deep topic here, relating to the way certain preferences are also natural attractor states, whose satisfaction rules out opposing preferences, but this comment is already long enough.
Why are you using what I presume is your real name here?
I’m not actually interested in whether or not it is your real name, mind; mostly I’d like to direct your attention to the fact that the choice of username was in fact a choice. That choice imparts information. By choosing the username that you did, you are, deliberately or not, engaging in a kind of signaling.
In particular, from a particular frame of reference, you are engaging in a particular kind of costly signaling, which may serve to elevate your relative local status, by tying any reputational hits you may suffer as a result of mis-steps here to your real identity. You are saying “This is me, I am not hiding behind false identities.” The overall effect of this is a costly signal which serves to elevate your status with the tribe here.
If it isn’t your real name, why are you using a false identity that looks like a real identity?
Hang up, though. Let us say instead that you, instead, see false identities as a form of dishonesty; this isn’t signaling, this is sticking to principles that are important to you.
Well, if that is the case, another question: Would you use this identity to say something that does have strong reputational costs associated to your real identity? Let us say that you would, you just don’t have any such things to say.
Well, it is convenient for you, some might observe, that you are willing to stand up for principles that don’t cost you anything. (Hence some part of why signaling tends to be costly; it avoids this problem.)
I will observe there is an important political dispute about anonymity on the internet, which has major communal aspects. The fewer users who insist on privacy, the more that commercial websites can exclude those who do. Oh, you don’t want us tracking you? You don’t get to use our website anymore. Observe the trend in websites, such as Twitter, of becoming increasingly user-unfriendly to those who are not logged in, or of excluding them altogether.
“Everything is political” is an observation that this phenomenon is, basically, universal.
Once we observe that there -is- a political implication in your choice of username, we must ask whether you -ought- to do anything about it; a lot of people like to skip this question, but it is an important question. Do you “owe” it to the people who prefer anonymity, to yourself remain anonymous? The pro-anonymity side would be really well served if everybody was forced to be anonymous; they are certainly better served if the choice is explicitly served (hence the EU rules on website cookies) instead of anonymity being opt-in instead of opt-out.
However, there are also people who don’t want to be anonymous, or who don’t want to interact with anonymous people; certainly there’s the potential for some power imbalances there.
We’ve happened upon some kind of uneasy mostly-truce, where anonymity is contextual, and violating another person’s anonymity is seen as a violation of the cultural norms of the internet. This truce is eroding; as fewer and fewer people choose to be anonymous, a higher and higher proportion of anonymous actions are those which would impose costs on the speaker if the speaker chose not to be anonymous, which makes anonymity an increasingly sinister-looking choice.
Imagine being a writer in a group of blogs with a common user system, moderating comments. To begin with, all the blogs allow anonymous comments. However, after one too many abusive comments, a blog bans anonymous commenters; some percentage of previously-anonymous commenters value commenting there enough to create accounts, reducing the number of “legitimate” anonymous comments in the ecosystem as a whole. This makes anonymous comments look worse, prompting the next blog to turn them off, then the next.
Look, the pro-anonymity people say, you’re making a choice to oppose an anonymous internet; you’re against us.
Well, there’s definitely an “is” there. What’s missing is the “ought”, the idea that the political implications of an act create individual responsibility. There’s a very deep topic here, relating to the way certain preferences are also natural attractor states, whose satisfaction rules out opposing preferences, but this comment is already long enough.