
Building Kind Social Networks (2018) - rfreytag
https://postlight.com/insights/building-kind-social-networks#.69mdqenq2
======
DoreenMichele
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.

~~~
andrei_says_
Thank you for this perspective.

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.

~~~
raywu
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?

[0] [https://www.ruinedby.design/sample-
chapter](https://www.ruinedby.design/sample-chapter)

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bccdee
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.

~~~
Barrin92
> 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.

~~~
tachyonbeam
> 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.

~~~
klyrs
... think Evangelicals, Mormons, Witnesses, Catholics...

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Ozzie_osman
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.

~~~
searchableguy
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.

~~~
Ozzie_osman
Yes, on its own real-name policy doesn't work. But in connection with other
choices, it can help a lot.

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moksly
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.

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newman8r
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.

edit* - here's an invite link to take a look if anyone wants to:
[https://podaero.com/info/hacker-pod](https://podaero.com/info/hacker-pod)

~~~
cosmojg
Isn't this true in real life as well? Humans don't behave well in large groups
both online and off.

~~~
newman8r
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.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bystander_effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bystander_effect)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_responsibility](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_responsibility)

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muyuu
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.

------
iamcasen
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.

