Absolutely. My unsolicited advice is to proceed with caution. I was there, many years ago, when the Internet changed from University access to a flood of the public. It has become known as the ‘Eternal September’.
From most person’s experience, during that transition, we all knew each other in real life. There wasn’t anonymity.
And, all of a sudden, there was anonymity. Thus, people could just say anything that they wanted without consequences.
Fast forward to now, and it’s a complete shit show. Where do we turn?
Interesting. People on Facebook happily spout insane and hateful stuff, with their whole everything on display
I feel it’s less about anonymity and more about being part of a tribe. When you identify as part of a tribe, anonymous or not, you’re more likely to follow social conventions within that tribe. When the tribe grows and nobody recognises anyone any more, suddenly you’re among strangers, tribal norms break down, and being an asshat is on the table for some. We saw the same thing happen recently with Reddit (anonymous) and Facebook (known).
Facebook has recently gone anonymous, they’re now letting people create additional accounts that “don’t need to use your real name”… can’t wait to see what 3 Billion anonymous users pushed together into a single place, can come up with.
I always kinda liked the idea of this kind of closed networks
Only with anonymity will you hear the truth, so I don’t think it’s a downside. Google and others wants to end anonymity since then they make sure nobody will speak the truth under their real name.
Only people who has nothing socially challenging to say will talk under those circumstances.
It’s like we have forgotten that social change starts by hearing uncomfortable things.
I think the problem is not anonymity, it is what you might call astroturfing or, to borrow the wikipedia term, sockpuppetry.
Pseudonymity and astroturfing are related to an extent - effective astroturfing means inflating ones own voice (and drowning out others) by interacting with lots of pseudonymous personas. It can also mean that when one pseudonymous identity of an astroturfer is identified and banned, they come back under other identities.
Astroturfing is about manipulating people’s perception of the truth, drowning out the voices of the true majority to allow for the real people to be misled and exploited by a minority. It takes away agency to block people who are not engaging in good faith. It sucks the oxygen out of real social change.
That said, there are also legitimate reasons for pseudonymity. Never before today has there been an age where people are tracked so pervasively, where every word is so durably stored and difficult to erase. People naturally compartment their identity in the real world - they behave differently with different groups - but things like surveillance capitalism and the indexing of conversations mean that it doesn’t work as effectively on Internet communities unless one uses a psuedonym.
I think zero-knowledge cryptography, coupled with government-issued digital identities, could provide a middle ground in the future that allows people to compartmentalise identities, while reducing astroturfing.
For example, imagine if I had a government issued ID number (call it x) that must never be shared with anyone except my government and me, but which will also never change even if the certificate is re-issued / renewed. And imagine I had a private key k that only I have access to (with a corresponding public key K), and cryptographic certificate C signed by the government linking K to x. Suppose I want to interact with a community that has a unique namespace identifier (e.g. a UUID) N_1. Then, using modern zero-knowledge cryptography (e.g. zk-SNARKs or zk-STARKs), I can generate a proof that for some y = H(x | N_1) (i.e. hashing, through a one-way hash, my government issued identifier with the community namespace), I know the value of a C signed by a particular government key, and the K included in the certificate, and a k that is the private key corresponding to K, and that I also have a signature D signed by K linking it to a new public key L. And since it is zero-knowledge, I can do all this without revealing the private inputs x, C, K, k or D - only the public inputs N_1, y, and L. What does that get us? It ties my new identity (backed by the public key L) to a y, and without convincing the government to change x for me, I can’t change my y. However, if I also interact on a different community with namespace N_2, I would have a different y_2, and it wouldn’t be possible to link my identities between the two communities (under this scheme, the government, who has access to the database of x values, would be able to link them, but ordinary people wouldn’t - that is necessary if you want the government to be able to re-issue in the case of lost private keys unfortunately). Some people might have multiple IDs under different governments of course, but abuse would be limited - instead of having to ban one person a thousand times / having them have a thousand identities, they might have a few if they are citizens / residents of a few countries. In practice, communities might want to rotate their namespace IDs every few months to deal with leaked credentials and to allow people to have a clean break eventually (banning a few bad actors every few months is still a lot better than if they come back multiple times a day) - and some might allow any one of several namespaces to allow people to have multiple pseudonyms up to a maximum number. Governments might also rotate x values every year to minimise the privacy impact on people who have accidentally leaked their x values.
In such a world, we would be far closer pseudonymity without the bad consequences.
What if you do end up accidentally or negligently sharing this never-to-be shared identity? What if you’re unlucky enough to live somewhere where the government is one of your principal adversaries, like a Palestinian in Israel or a gay person in any number of jurisdictions? And how would you prevent the proliferation of plain ol unsigned data?
All it takes to create a perfect space on the Internet is good, consistent, 24/7 moderation. Easy to do when the space is small; impossibly difficult beyond a certain size. But I can’t fault anyone for trying to achieve it.
