What role do you think anonymity plays in this discussion? Communities would self police much better if some level of anonymity was removed from members; its less likely that “John Davidson” would post a racist rant than “xxTrump2020xx”. Removing some anonymity also comes with a huge slew of issues, but it would definitely resolve a lot of content problems if there was a real world link to online behavior.
> Communities would self police much better if some level of anonymity was removed from members
This isn't an illogical theory, but I think Facebook's real-name policy disproves it.
We could have a deeper conversation about whether or not anonymity is more important than civility (I think it is). But I think before having that conversation I would want to be convinced that anonymity significantly impacts civility, and I'm much more skeptical of that claim today than I used to be. I tend to suspect now that it's more of a "common-sense" theory than something backed up by real-world studies.
That makes intuitive sense, but hasn't matched what I've seen in real life. I have had much more interesting and polite conversations on Freenet (which provides almost complete anonymity) than I have had on Facebook, back when I used it. I'm guessing it's because the audience is smaller and less visible. I think people posture for the invisible audience they assume are watching their every post, so larger communities tend to go south much more quickly than smaller more focused ones. You also get more group-think and mob-like behavior. As another example, smaller subreddits on reddit are much more polite and fun (in my experience) than the main subs. Whenever a subreddit I'm on gets linked to r/all, I just skip that post for my general mental stability. Youtube comments are another example, which are generally terrible in my experience and are visible by a huge potential audience.
> Communities would self police much better if some level of anonymity was removed from members; its less likely that “John Davidson” would post a racist rant than “xxTrump2020xx”.
A lot of Facebook users have no problem writing racist rants using their real names.
