I have been on online networks of one kind or another since 1992. I am 100 percent behind the idea that people using their real names (the rule of some networks I have been on) promotes better online community and people taking more responsibility for their personal behavior in the community. That said, I do have some friends who have long established pseudonyms that have most of the good effects of real names, because those friends still try to build up reputation for those pseudonyms. (You'll have to be the judge of how well I'm doing here building up the reputation of "tokenadult," a screen name I brought here from two other online communities where pseudonyms rather than real names are mandatory but changing names is difficult so that reputation still accumulates for each name.)
That said, I refuse to "out" my niece's dog, who has a Facebook profile. It's important to have amusing counterexamples out there so that people don't invest too much trust in Facebook. In the last week or so a Hacker News participant (I don't know his real name [smile]) suggested that Facebook could monetize by being an online payments platform. For consumer-to-business transactions, I don't trust Facebook as a payment platform because its engineers have the attitude "Don't be afraid to break things," which just doesn't appeal to me for a network that handles my financial data. For user-to-user transactions, I also don't trust Facebook because I don't trust the users unless I know them in person--my Facebook community is enjoyable because it really consists of people whose real identity I know, and who know me. If I want to do business with strangers, I occasionally do that through Amazon Marketplace, but that is because Amazon has built up its own reputation for standing behind transactions there.
AFTER EDIT: Several comments in this thread are along the lines of
It's not hard to imagine a near future, if not a present, in which a person's identity is entirely evaluated, shaped, and determined by a monolith such as facebook.
But most people in the world still are largely stuck with the reputations distorted for them, before they can develop their reputations for themselves, by their family or their classmates in some small community. Facebook is LESS of a "monolith," because it is made up of hundreds of millions of users, than any small town anywhere. A lot of people find it liberating to find online communities based on shared intellectual interests (Hacker News works for this too, of course) rather than just being stuck with their current group of in-person acquaintances.
> Facebook is LESS of a "monolith," because it is made up of hundreds of millions of users, than any small town anywhere.
You inadvertently bring up a strong counter argument.
Suppose, in your small town, you are outed (rightly or wrongly) as <insert marginalized subgroup here>, and ostracized. Normally, after much introspection and reflection, you or your family could decide to move away, if the social effects were severe enough and unfixable.
With a real name policy and a permanent archive of the psychodrama, you cannot start over elsewhere without all of it following along with you, ripe for the next group of maladjusted simpletons to harrass you with. Not everyone can move to tolerant cultures, not all marginalized groups can find reliably-safe new places.
I think this also speaks volumes about the "dangers" of using large general-purpose social networks.
Think about it for a second: if I'm ostracized (using my name or a pseudonym, it doesn't matter) from a `Club 3.14: Raspberry Pi Hackers` message board; I can find other message boards with a surplus of R-Pi hackers.
If I say something stupid on Facebook... where am I supposed to go in order to replace Facebook?
The issue with Google+ is (<-- replace with your favorite defunct social network) that it's a graveyard.
(I say that facetiously; I actually use G+ and quite like the service. That being said, I can't deny that it is missing 95% or so of my Facebook friends.)
So the issue here isn't so much the ability to have pseudonyms, IMHO.
The issue is that Facebook is quickly becoming a "monolith", and that fact _combined_ with an inability to escape your ostracism via "moving" your online presence to a new identity is where the problem lies.
I feel the real problem is that Facebook is all-encompassing. They want to be _the_ platform for online community.
Therein lies the problem, if you're only allowed _one true identity_ on their platform, your baggage follows you to every sub-community _on that platform._
Alternatively, anonymous commentary quite often yields shallow/knee-jerk comments and trolling. As tokenadult pointed out though, there is a difference between real name and an online handle with a reputation associated with it. People not uding real names have to build / maintain their reputation just the same, but throwing a handle away and "starting over" is obviously easier than doing the same with a real identity. Not sure if that is good or bad, likely a mix of both. Though Facebook has clear ulterior motives other than "civil discourse enforced through 'real world' reputation tarnishment".
That said, I refuse to "out" my niece's dog, who has a Facebook profile. It's important to have amusing counterexamples out there so that people don't invest too much trust in Facebook. In the last week or so a Hacker News participant (I don't know his real name [smile]) suggested that Facebook could monetize by being an online payments platform. For consumer-to-business transactions, I don't trust Facebook as a payment platform because its engineers have the attitude "Don't be afraid to break things," which just doesn't appeal to me for a network that handles my financial data. For user-to-user transactions, I also don't trust Facebook because I don't trust the users unless I know them in person--my Facebook community is enjoyable because it really consists of people whose real identity I know, and who know me. If I want to do business with strangers, I occasionally do that through Amazon Marketplace, but that is because Amazon has built up its own reputation for standing behind transactions there.
AFTER EDIT: Several comments in this thread are along the lines of
It's not hard to imagine a near future, if not a present, in which a person's identity is entirely evaluated, shaped, and determined by a monolith such as facebook.
But most people in the world still are largely stuck with the reputations distorted for them, before they can develop their reputations for themselves, by their family or their classmates in some small community. Facebook is LESS of a "monolith," because it is made up of hundreds of millions of users, than any small town anywhere. A lot of people find it liberating to find online communities based on shared intellectual interests (Hacker News works for this too, of course) rather than just being stuck with their current group of in-person acquaintances.