
Anonymity has real value, both in comments and elsewhere - ignifero
http://gigaom.com/2011/06/20/anonymity-has-real-value-both-in-comments-and-elsewhere/?utm_source=social&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=gigaom
======
econgeeker
Do my coworkers need to know that I'm a fan of internet memes and exceedingly
cute cat pictures? The presumption often seems to be that people are anonymous
because they want to hide something, or be jerks. I want to be anonymous
because my interests are esoteric and I know my co-workers wouldn't
understand, or would tease me.

HN is sorta anonymous, but the core purpose of anonymity is undermined. The
purpose of anonymity is that it shouldn't matter if I'm a dog, my arguments
should be what matters. Anonymity prevents punishing people with
discrimination.

Meanwhile, on Hacker News the tying of all comments to an account leads to
easy censorship. A previous account of mine had accumulated 1200 karma over
the course of 6 months. One day I reset cookies and came here and looked at a
thread I'd been participating in, only to notice that none of my comments
appeared! Turns out I'd been silenced by the censors of HN. I wasn't trolling,
I wasn't engaging in personal attacks, and I got no warning... in fact, they
made it appear to me like I was still participating, wasting a significant
amount of my time.

The community liked my comments over all. My average score per comment was
just a bit under 6. Clearly I was a contributing member of the community.

My best guess is that one of the mods at HN didn't like an opinion of mine and
so they silenced me... rather than rebutting me.

After investing all that time in a community, to be so unceremoniously
censored, I will not make that mistake again.

I will only make comments places where I can be anonymous, and don't have to
create an account. I only created this account because of a moment of weakness
where I saw people missing a piece of history that was painfully obvious to me
(and that thread has since, itself, been censored. The entire discussion
removed from the index of HN for no apparent reason. It was actually a pretty
good discussion before it got censored.

I know that revealing the censorship on HN will result in this account being
destroyed as well. But like a soviet citizen being hauled off to the gulag, I
just hope that a few who think this is a just society will hear my story and
be wary, lest they invest time in the community and have it taken away as
well.

Now, please excuse me as I log off to see if this account really appears in
the discussion, or if I've just wasted 15 minutes writing and editing it.

~~~
loup-vaillant
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2670772>

Dead, but not forgotten. (At least for logged on users who set their showdead
option to "yes".)

------
beambot
For those who are interested in the trade-offs between anonymity and
accountability online, here is a really great talk by Vint Cerf:

[http://www.livestream.com/internetsocietychapters/video?clip...](http://www.livestream.com/internetsocietychapters/video?clipId=pla_2cca9d62-b68b-4827-a3b5-850e2893c165)

In particular, I found the distinction between "identity" and "identifiers"
(with strong cryptographic verification of the latter) to be enlightening.

------
dreamdu5t
There's a demand for anonymous identities that isn't being exploited.

People want the value of reputation without the cost of exposing their person
information.

Facebook comments forces you to expose personal information. I want to leave
comments with a reputable identity, just not linked to my real one.

~~~
Astrohacker
There is a solution to this problem. Websites should allow people to log in
with their public key. You can create a new, internet-only identity with a
public key. This would be a little cumbersome at first, but if browsers
supported this ability, it could be just as easy as logging in with a
password.

Here's how it could work: There could be metatags that specify where to submit
the public key. The website will then send back a message that can only be
decrypted with the private key. The browser has the user type in the password
to access their private key, decrypts the message, and sends it back to the
website. The user has now started a session with their public key.

Since you would use the same public key on all websites, your identity would
be the same. This would not require a central server like OpenID.

~~~
barkmadley
I imagine simply assigning your users a unique key as a cookie would get you
90% of the way there. The chances are good that if a person is returning to
your website then they are using the same browser.

The 10% you miss are cleared cookies and different browsers/private browsing.
This could be seen as a feature however since extra anonymity is gained
through existing means.

------
BarkingMoon
I love being pseudo-anonymous on the Internet. The only issue I have ever had
with maintaining it is using PayPal.

------
WiseWeasel
Must... resist... anonymously trolling his comments. Not gonna be _that guy_ ,
not this time.

~~~
jmandjfunk
heh yea Im glad HN does not have anonymous comments. It would turn into a
crapshoot.

