

Show HN: Can anonymous chat within identified groups create better discussions? - akharris
http://freeversation.com/blog/2011/06/29/identified-anonymity/

======
mechanical_fish
I await the results of this experiment with interest.

My gut feeling is that:

A) To first order this won't really work. You can't really be anonymous in a
closed group. In a small closed group you can't be anonymous at all (the
degenerate case, two people, is obvious; writing style is an identifier in
larger groups) and in a really large group the stakes of letting your mask
slip are too high and will squelch serious conversation, while the lure of the
big crowd will drive trolls and comedians.

B) To second order this could work great. The second-order advantage of this
is the _useful social fiction_ of anonymity. Anonymity doesn't have to be
cryptographically strong to be useful. Think: a masked ball. The masks aren't
that highly effective - that seven-foot-tall masked woman is pretty easy to
ID, mask or no - but if everyone plays along the game can go well. Plus, you
can get _plausible deniability_ , which can be very useful in social
situations. ("No, it wasn't me who confessed that secret in anonymous chat. It
must have been some other native speaker of Finnish from a basketball team in
Toledo, Ohio.")

C) But, alas, I'm not sure use case (B) is significant enough to drive a
product on its own. Nor that it will be easy to get the site's culture off on
the right foot.

A great experiment; I hope it goes well despite my worst fears. We certainly
need many more alternatives to the "stand naked in front of the world on the
Googleable Internet" model of online conversation.

~~~
dbs11
Thanks for the interest, all good points.

Even in smaller groups though, people may be able to consciously subvert their
mannerisms and still get their point across. Not saying it will be easy, but I
wouldn't rule it out.

I agree with the plausible deniability point, but i think it can theoretically
apply equally to small (and by small i mean at least 10 ppl) and large groups
alike. There are many ideas that are not too controversial, but just touchy
enough that plausible deniability would be sufficient to overcome the anxiety
barrier. This would only work for comments that a user would have no problem
being suspected of saying, as long as noone could categorically prove it.

------
varikin
A forum was recently launched at work which allows anonymous posts and
comments. It has been both good and bad.

The good: Open discussions about sensitive topics with fear being singled out.
A good example of this is that someone posted about the company doing more to
accommodate individuals who are transgender. Obviously, the person who posted
it wanted to speak out with fear of stigmas attached. Also, it has been great
for openly discussing what we think the company is doing wrong.

The bad: There are some bad seeds that have been very negative about the
company, how we work, what we focus on, what tools we use, etc. This in and of
itself is not bad, but it isn't always a discussion. Instead, it is more in
line with trolling.

Overall, it has been good for us, but we are constantly looking at how to make
it better. Like how to promote the good aspects while trying to discourage the
bad.

~~~
bugsy
It defeats the whole point of this system if those who criticize things are
simply labelled trolls to be considered bad corporate citizens.

Chairman Mao called for a hundred flowers (opinions) to bloom. He invited
criticism of the system. At first people said "It's a trap" and no one
seriously criticized, only token critiques were offered. Perhaps similar to
modern suggestions about policies for washing mugs, what sort of free coffee
should be available in the breakroom, or if there should be a third bathroom
for transgender. Things that don't represent any serious challenge to the
existing order.

Then Mao made clear he really wanted criticism of the system and no one should
hold back. So people started talking about what was wrong, and telling the
truth about the failures of totalitarian communism. These criticisms were
considered "absurd", the people were labelled trolls ("rightists"), rounded
up, and executed in the Anti-Rightist Campaign.

If you want honest feedback from people, calling them trolls, with the
implicit threat that criticism is wrong and should be eliminated, is not the
way to get it.

The only way to have real honest feedback in a small group is to listen
sincerely, and _eliminate punishment of dissidents_. This can only be done
through trust, which is developed slowly and with difficulty. 99.99% of the
time when corporate says to trust them and it's OK to make suggestions, they
are lying and intend to identify and destroy anyone who seems to be a threat
to their agenda.

I guarantee that if we collect a list of all the actual "troll" things that
were said, most people outside your system will see significant numbers of
them as representing valid criticism, and therefore unmask the truth that
labeling the criticism "trolls" is an exercise of power to eliminate minority
dissent.

~~~
varikin
We want input. I know the executives want feedback. Our company has a good
history change through complaints and feedback. The founders were skeptical of
version control, a programmer said we need it. They adopted CVS even though
the founders thought it was pointless. We moved to SVN a couple years later
when another new programmer said CVS was crap. One frontend/designer told the
founders the brand and company name was crap. He created a new brand and name.
Now he is in charge of the marketing department. We now have a UX department
because one designer wanted to try it.

We have changed lots of things about our process and tools because the
managers listen to what we, the developers, designers, QA, etc, say and ask
for.

As we grow (doubling this year), our biggest challenge is maintaining the
communication. Management wants, and I believe they are sincere, to have a way
for anyone to complain or point out what we are doing wrong in an open and
safe way. Part of that means being able to post anonymously. We once had a
great discussion questioning why we are growing and why we focus on the market
we do. These are big topics, unlike washing dishes and choice of coffee.

The problem is not people complaining or questioning what we are doing. The
problem is someone anonymously saying "x sucks" then not having a discussion.
Yes, X does suck, but if the person posting this isn't willing to give
examples of why it sucks or suggest how to fix it, I consider it a harmful use
of the anonymous post.

~~~
bugsy
Thanks for the response. I'll mostly skip the first three paragraphs of use of
anonymity that is good, but I will say it is a bit weird that version control
advocacy required anonymity. If there is fear of reprisal from something that
most normal developers reasonably advocate for, then there is a culture of
fear present, which is nearly always based on past experiences of punishment.
Something to look into and perhaps fix there.

The last paragraph is where you give an example of bad use of anonymity. You
state a situation where someone says X sucks, and it is known that X does
suck. This you say is harmful use. But it is not harmful. The person says X
sucks, and X does suck. Since you know that X sucks, you yourself and others
must know why it sucks. Saying it is not only wrong but _harmful_ to _state
what is obvious and known_ at your firm is yet another indication that you
have a corporate environment of fear and reprisals. Obviously someone doing
"harm" should be gotten rid of, therefore, accepting your assertion it is
harm, the person should be eliminated. Not considered though is that the
person is obviously NOT doing harm and that stating so is unfounded propaganda
to squash an unpopular statement of truth.

~~~
ralfd
I think his point is when someone says "X sucks" but has a hidden agenda. Or
just is destructive.

------
scrrr
Perhaps you could run each message through Google translate or something
similar (e.g. English -> French -> English) to obfuscate the writing style.
Otherwise, as others have already pointed out, it is very indicative of who
the author is.

~~~
pavel_lishin
I foresee this having hilarious unintended consequences.

~~~
andrewcooke
i wonder if you could repeat with different languages and take some kind of
semantic median? interesting problem.

[just to clarify, given the replies - i am talking about repeating in
parallel, not in series. the idea being that errors might cancel out, rather
than accumulate]

~~~
ak217
I think all conversations should be run back and forth through Google
Translate until they reach equilibrium (a la Translation Party). For added
awesomeness, do a multi-way equilibrium instead of just two languages.

~~~
BoppreH
Your post in Translation Party:

    
    
      I (translation of a la carte party) have achieved a balance
      between the universal and Google, and I need to translate
      the conversation. Not only, Blip.fm, from how to move from
      the language of two additional multi balance.
    

I think two languages is bad enough.

~~~
malnourish
Tangential, but Translation Party doesn't work for me in the newest (stable)
Firefox and Chrome.

------
spking
Possibly. However, I've found that it's fairly easy to identify who is saying
what based on writing style, grammar and punctuation habits. Any HR person
will tell you that's how they identify respondents to "anonymous" employee
surveys.

~~~
bugsy
This is a good point. To date I have not had an anonymous survey in a small
group that hasn't bitten me in the ass afterwards.

I also find some anonymous surveys interesting when they are placed in my
mailbox and come with a unique identification number. When asking about this
uid, I am always told it is for quality control purposes or such. Yeah right.

Anyway, the proposed idea is interesting. I could see it being abused though.
Someone from management, A, who wants to know what you really think of them
could set up a fake discussion using several other sign ins from coworkers B C
and D (and of course management has their passwords, that's required per the
corporate contract), puppets who then ask "What do you think of boss A?"
followed by puppet accounts B-D saying A is a jerk and then listening to see
your response. This is the sort of thing that happens with the sort of jock
management that infects many workplaces.

~~~
yuhong
Of course, in the long term these problems needs to be fixed. That will of
course take time though.

------
highace
This immediately strikes me as a "why didn't I think of that" idea, but in
practice (in my workplace at least) everyone would figure out who was who
based on the writing style and general tone. In a larger more anonymous group
of people (like a class) you could probably get away with it, but then what
have you got to lose in the first place by just voicing your opinion publicly?

But good luck, I think this is a pretty cool idea.

~~~
pavel_lishin
It seems best suited for a group who are familiar, but not necessarily
friends. A class is an excellent example; close coworkers are not.

And depending on what it is you want to say, you may have a lot to lose. Have
you never taken a class with a teacher who displays blatant favoritism, or is
sexist or racist enough to make a difference to you, but not to the
administration? Being able to say something without an authority figure being
able to punish you can be pretty important.

~~~
dbs11
One of the co-founders here; we entirely agree that the concept works better
in large numbers. We're particularly interested in how the site could be used
for those larger classroom or office discussions, as a way to increase
productivity and generate more innovative ideas. It could be really useful for
social circles as well, but the group would likely have to be more than 10
people.

~~~
pavel_lishin
I think the social circle aspect might be overrated. How often do you need to
speak anonymously within a group of friends, unless you're trying to stage an
intervention or something?

~~~
dbs11
Maybe. The premise of this whole concept is that we don't really know most
people's ideas. Even our friends may have important things to say, but we
would never know about them. For that reason, I can't say it categorically
wouldn't work in a social setting.

------
raganwald
If you have something to say but fear that your writing style will "out" you,
feel free to ask me to rewrite your message:

<http://raganwald.posterous.com/freedom-of-speech>

------
athst
I think it's a cool idea, kinda like LikeALittle but for organizational stuff.

To pre-select the group of people who can participate, you might want to look
at a model like Yammer, which validates accounts based on the email domain.
This way, you wouldn't have to invite specific emails (which would make me
less trustful of the anonymity). If you go on Glassdoor, you see a lot of this
dynamic where employees will write reviews meant more for the company than for
perspective hires. It's because a lot of companies don't have a really good
feedback system where the anonymity can be trusted. Might be a good use case
to focus on in the beginning.

------
mtdev
This looks really cool, I like the layout. I have been working on something
similar, (<http://mobilethread.com>), which lets you setup/join anonymous chat
threads and is designed to run in a smartphone web browser. I got around the
emails issue by creating a unique URL for each thread which you can then
email/SMS/embed in a QR code. When joining, a user automatically gets a random
name or they can set their own. Finally, anything you post gets removed after
four hours, inactive threads get removed after a week. I decided against
Captcha but did implement thread creation/message flood limits.

------
te_platt
Makes me wonder what comments here would be like if names weren't shown until
a couple of hours posting.

~~~
city41
I made a reddit subreddit that did this. I used CSS to hide names and comment
scores (yes people can still see them if they want, it was just a prototype).
The overall response was pretty negative.

~~~
StavrosK
I changed everyone's name to "Spartacus" over at f7u12. Nobody seemed to mind
much.

~~~
city41
Yeah but f7u12 is one of the most popular subreddits with its own purpose. I
made /r/hidden expressly to experiment with anonymity. I showed it to a good
number of people and asked their opinion, whether they'd use it (assuming it
got popular), etc and almost everyone told me that either a) the anonymity
would be irrelevant to them or b) they'd prefer to not be anonymous so they
could "enjoy" their karma.

~~~
eavc
I think the problem might be that reddit is already as anonymous as someone
wants it to be, so that alone isn't a feature.

Where it's a cool idea is when the anonymity is used to nullify influence of
prominent users for a community that has that as a problem. You'd need a
sufficiently interesting topic with that need, though.

------
gwern
Anonymous chats with verified memberships have a number of interesting
applications. For example, I seem to recall Mencius Moldbug discussing them as
a mechanism for regime change.

The idea being that in a totalitarian regime like North Korea (or to a lesser
extent, the countries of the 'Arab Spring'), it's well known that even the
elites are discontented and would support the overthrow of the regime. But
there is a knowledge problem, a coordination problem, that they cannot be sure
of the support of all the other elites and factions. If they declare their
opposition publicly, the still loyal elements will dispose of them. But
private declarations which are safe also do not reach enough people to
constitute any sort of Schelling point. (This is one of the main points of
protests: taking risks, demonstrating solidarity, and a genuine costly signal.
If there's sporadic gunfire and suppression from the regime, all the better -
scare away the pikers.)

On the other hand, suppose you had a secure anonymous forum for, say, just
military officers? With one of the anonymous e-voting schemes integrated to
get a headcount of subversive questions like 'how many of us officers would
support a regime change?' Then maybe public protests would no longer be the
best way to solve the coordination problem for coups...

~~~
bugsy
That's a very interesting post. The problem is that in such extreme cases as
North Korea, if the government is setting up this discussion list or has any
access to it there is no possibility that the conversation was really
anonymous. If the government doesn't have access, then mere silent
participation without informing would be considered treason. Even if there was
anonymous speech going on, Jung merely needs to approach each participant one
by one and have them identify which statements were theirs. By a process of
elimination, you find who the dissidents are, even if they refuse to talk.

------
rmc
Great idea. As others have said writing style, grammer, punctuation are the
biggest threat to anonymity.

As a tangent I wonder if there's some sort of lossy compression you could do
with English that would mangle this enough to make text anonymous. People have
suggest google translate a few times, that's using a translation tool to hide
some of the original meaning. Has anyone done a dedicated library to mangle
text this way?

~~~
noodle
what if a site like this integrated a system that identified an individual's
writing patterns and alerted the person to them, prompting changes in text
they submit, thus attempting to ensure anonymity?

------
luminarious
It would be fun if this approach was also used for the Google+ Circles, so you
could have anonymous conversations within a circle.

~~~
nyellin
Another co-founder here. Circles integration is a cool idea. I'll look into
implementing it.

------
nowarninglabel
Neat, I had thought about putting this same concept into action, though it
seemed like anonymity would be really difficult until you had a large enough
user base. Otherwise, you invite say 10 friends to a conversation and only 3
accept, then it's going to be pretty easy to narrow down who is who.

------
slowpoke
On a small IRC network I used to frequent, at one time I set up a channel with
a bot that lead to a very similar situation. The idea was that channel ops can
see people talk even if the channel is muted (+m). Furthermore, on unreal, you
can set auditorium mode (+u) which hides all users in that channel from /names
and /who. The aforementioned bot was the only op on that channel and was set
up to repeat everything said in the channel for everyone to see, effectively
anonymizing it. The problem was, this isn't scalable unless you remove flood
throttle from the bot (which is almost always a _very_ bad idea) and there's
still the possibility of the person running the bot looking at the raw IRC
data to find out who is saying what. It was funny while it lasted though.

------
jvandenbroeck
There's a technique to create forecasts based on this concept. The Delphi
method <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delphi_method>

If I recall it correctly, it's an iterative process: 1\. you create a question
list 2\. every expert answers the questions (anonymous) 3\. a secretary
processes the questions and makes an overview (+ creates a new question list
if there's no consensus)

Like that every expert has equal amount to say, without compromising the
identities of people.

The main disadvantage of the Delphi method is that it takes a lot of time.
Maybe you can change your concept to "Delphi on the cloud" -- cashing in on
company's that want to make accurate forecasts.

------
pacifika
I think the anonymous identified group chat idea is really great, but I think
that the concept around the experience should be more temporary, to accent the
anonymous nature - ie although maybe at any point during the chat you can save
out the contents, perhaps it should be more of a chat than a forum and perhaps
the discussions should be more throwaway (like removed after 7 days of
nonactivity). In my not expertly opinion at the moment the way it comes across
for me is a forum/newsletter look but that's not the strength of the system.

Great idea though and I think this would work great as a enterprise tool to
help honest discussion where company politics can get in the way sometimes.

------
gnosis
Could someone explain how this is different from a regular web forum, IRC,
Usenet, or pretty much any other form of communication that doesn't require
you to reveal your real identity?

~~~
icegreentea
In this case, you have full knowledge of the pool of people you are talking
to. It wouldn't be a 'regular' forum or IRC, but rather... say you and 5 and
your friends all signed into a single IRC channel (so only the 6 of you), but
all with randomized names, so you don't know exactly who you're talking to.

As for how the interaction would differ? Depends completely on the people
involved.

~~~
gnosis
_"It wouldn't be a 'regular' forum or IRC, but rather... say you and 5 and
your friends all signed into a single IRC channel (so only the 6 of you), but
all with randomized names"_

I still don't see any difference between this and regular IRC.

There's no requirement on regular IRC to use your real name. Make up a random
name if you want.

If you're too lazy to pick a random name yourself, you could automate it with
something like this:

    
    
      #
      # IRCUSER is set to a random dictionary word
      #
      BIG_RANDOM=$(echo $(($RANDOM * 2))) # A number between 0 and (32767 * 2)
                                          # Note, this will not be regularly distributed
                                          # but who cares?
      export IRCUSER=$(head -n $BIG_RANDOM /usr/share/dict/words | tail -n 1)

~~~
bricestacey
The whole point is to make it easy to get n specific people chatting together
where they can speak anonymously.

Yes, it's not different than IRC... so long as you had a bot that could create
a room, invite n people, install an irc client on their machines, get them in
the room, teach them how to use it, etc, etc.

This is an attempt to make it easier. This is like the dropbox of inviting
specific people to an anonymous irc room. It's nothing new, nothing
innovative, but it makes it easier.

~~~
gnosis
Web-based IRC clients have existed for a long time. To use them all you have
to do is point your browser at a website. The usernames assigned by these
clients are usually something like "guest0", "guest1", etc. That's probably
anonymous enough.

You could connect to any number of public IRC servers already set up all over
the world. Then simply join the channel of your choice. No bots necessary.

As far as invitations go and teaching people what to do, you're going to have
to do that any way. With existing web-based IRC clients it's as simple as
pointing your friends/colleagues to the website and telling them to join
channel #whatever.

~~~
nyellin
Your friends would still know who invited them to the discussion.

~~~
gnosis
Well, they could also join without being invited. In fact, most of the
communication happening on IRC is between people who've spontaneously joined
without being invited.

------
veyron
Tried, failed miserably. Look up bored at butler.

The general course of events is: Person A will make a comment about person B,
person B will complain (under some misguided expectation that the site should
be moderated), and you will have to handle the problems. And if you are in a
place with a draconian internet policy, you will be paying dearly. Then the
site warps to something which loses the original idea of anonymity

------
uast23
For the bigger picture of use case mentioned here, what's wrong with IRC. And
for the specific use case mentioned in the blog as in School/College, I don't
understand how hiding in a closet can relate to productivity. This instead
might encourage people to single out someone who is already low and take a
dig. As mentioned, people can log in as anonymous but nothing stops you from
taking someone's name out there!

~~~
dbs11
The issue of anonymous slander is obviously a big one, certainly not limited
to our site alone. Having some aspect of identified group information may in
fact limit that type of trolling, but that remains to be seen. Everything can
be used irresponsibly. Your first point speaks to the question of anonymity's
overall purpose. Wanting to be anonymous isn't always a sign of weakness- it's
a reality for a lot of confident, intelligent people. Productivity, in our
view, is hampered by the absence of contributions from people who have great
ideas to share.

~~~
uast23
Oh yes, the word is "anonymous slander" and I also appreciate the fact that
many a times ideas don't come out just because you are too scared. I was just
trying to point out the irresponsible use which is kind of bound to happen if
given in hands of irresponsible people.

I see that you are a co-founder. So curious about this - did launch of Google
circles affect your decision to launch or not to launch? I am asking because
Google circles kind of deals with similar group bound problem, though it's not
anonymous but very helpful!

------
ryan_brunner
To lend some credence to the "it's easy to tell who's writing what", we
recently used Rypple as a team review aid for team members to anonymously ask
for feedback from the rest of the team.

It was immediately obvious who was writing what. Granted, we had a relatively
low population of people writing feedback (5), but I'd imagine it wouldn't
change much until you had at least twice as many people.

------
owenmarshall
This reminds me of an anonymous variant SGI & Netscape's bad-attitude
newsgroups:

<http://everything2.com/title/Bad-Attitude>

Failures of those newsgroups were attributed mostly to changes in company
culture. I'd be very interested in seeing how this works anonymously.

------
terio
We at spottiness.com are very interested in this line of work. I can see the
appeal of the simplicity of the solution you propose. On the other hand, in
many cases the invitees would prefer to not have their emails associated with
their comments anywhere (your service would have that information internally).
That is an interesting problem.

~~~
dbs11
just to clarify, we don't associate emails with individual comments even in
our backend. Emails of those invited appear at the top of the discussion page.
Each comment can be posted independently of whatever email is up there.

~~~
terio
But the participant would have to take your statement at face value.

~~~
dbs11
that is definitely true. I think a major part of developing this type of
discussion space is generating user trust. Besides trusting us, we also need
users to trust each other, to keep comments responsible. It's a big task no
doubt.

------
windexh8er
You'd think a service revolving around privacy (i.e. anonymity) would go to
greater lengths to use SSL across the entire site. Otherwise, fantastic idea.
Can't say I haven't bounced the idea around of the "groupthink" need lately.

~~~
nyellin
I disagree. SSL is always nice, but end-to-end encryption isn't magic. SSL
protects you from targeted man in the middle attacks by governments, isps, and
users on the same network. Your friends are neither.

~~~
ljlolel
they can be if they're on the same college LAN

------
rgbrgb
This is creepy. I'm working word for word on the exact same thing.

~~~
rgbrgb
Why is this down-voted? I literally worked on this idea for the entire summer.
People I had talked to sent me links to this and asked if it was mine. I'm in
no way insinuating that this guy stole it but you can probably understand why
this feels a little spooky.

------
eavc
I love this kind of attempt at innovation. I hope you are able to stick with
this enough to find a userbase for it.

~~~
dbs11
Appreciate the support. We're doing our best to get it out there and see how
people actually use it. We created it because we think it's important, simple
as that. So we definitely plan on sticking around.

~~~
eavc
Well, best of luck. It's a cool project, and I think marketing is going to be
the decisive battle for you guys.

FWIW, I wanted to chime in on the issue raised by others. For use in smaller
groups, much of the issue of identifiable style could be obfuscated by
instructing the users on using generic sentence structure, word count, rate of
input, and synonyms.

Or, you could even have a list of commonly useful expressions, and typing
isn't an option or is limited to filling in blanks as with MadLibs. The list
of stuff that's hard to say to directly is probably not all that long.

Best of luck.

------
kragen
I've used anonymous groupware before, and yes, it was pretty cool.

------
laglad
I can see useful brainstorming apps being born from this concept.

------
Omnipresent
very nice idea. I had an idea similar to this but it didn't involve the
anonymous aspect you bring in.

It would be good if you included markdown

~~~
nyellin
Duly noted. Markdown isn't a priority, but it's been added to the wishlist.

------
bxc
real world analogue: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chatham_House_Rule>

------
jpr
How many times does irc need to be re-invented before it's considered fully
invented?

~~~
elrodeo
As long as it makes fun :)

Here is my quite private project for friends and family — it works pretty well
for us for instant discussions on a concrete topic: <http://getch.at>

------
ignifero
This is what scientific journals do with anonymous paper reviews. It works for
specific situations but in many cases you can tell who the reviewer is by the
content of their review.

------
drivebyacct2
Is everyone anonymous or pseudo-anonymous (My messages are attributed to
anonymous35 or something)? If so, as people leave and email/anonymous names
disappear you can identify people.

~~~
nyellin
Freeversation is a forum, not a live chat site, so the names never disappear.

