There were times when internet was something for nerds they could enjoy in their free time, and suddenly it’s a place where all the village idiots gather and where your future employers will make background checks about you. I miss the times when internet was… not even anonymous, but more like you could have used your real name or a fake name and no one gave a fuck anyway.
Today, any asshole can take your quote out of context, retweet it to thousands of people in a few minutes, and they are going to contact your employer and relatives, and there is no way to stop that or explain… it feels like if the whole world is covered by hidden cameras, which can take any random snapshot of your life and show it on television screens of the whole country.
Okay, two different aspects here: -- annoying idiots; generally harmless, but can take your time and make you frustrated when they appear in your comments —the hysterical internet culture, where making a mountain out of a molehill is actually a great way to make AdSense bucks
Maybe these two are somewhat in tension. Being able to link online identities to real-world identities would help one to get rid of the annoying idiots once and for all; but it also would be a great tool for punishing people in real life for things they said online. On the other hand, anonymity means you can’t stop someone from coming back after being banned, or from making an army of sock puppets. (In theory I can imagine a hypothetical solution: such as a third party registering pseudonymous handles for people on various web discussions, but only one handle per person per website. But that would be easy to abuse: by the third party, by it’s random employees, by the government.)
In real life, I don’t use the same persona for everyone. I behave differently and talk about different topics with my family vs with my friends. I talk differently with rationalists vs with less sane people I still need to keep good relationships with. On many platforms it is too easy to link these things together. Or, they will allow me to hide in a tiny group of my friends… but of course, I can’t make new friends while hidden.
Real life sometimes provides… uhm… partial social filters. For example, if I go to a sci-fi convention, I am likely to meet other sci-fi fans I don’t know (so it’s open towards new people), but I am also unlikely to meet there my grandma or to meet people who completely dislike sci-fi (so it’s mostly closed towards people who hate the topic itself). This is what I usually want—a setting sufficiently open that I can discuss a topic with new people who care about the topic; and yet sufficiently closed that people who don’t care about the topic are not watching me. And the risk that someone at the sci-fi con would film me on a camera, and later share the movie with my grandma (or ten years later with my potential employers) is close to zero.
If people hide from public squares, they can’t be exposed to Socrates’ questions.
The historical Socrates was also permabanned from the planet for sealioning. :D
There were times when internet was something for nerds they could enjoy in their free time, and suddenly it’s a place where all the village idiots gather and where your future employers will make background checks about you. I miss the times when internet was… not even anonymous, but more like you could have used your real name or a fake name and no one gave a fuck anyway.
Today, any asshole can take your quote out of context, retweet it to thousands of people in a few minutes, and they are going to contact your employer and relatives, and there is no way to stop that or explain… it feels like if the whole world is covered by hidden cameras, which can take any random snapshot of your life and show it on television screens of the whole country.
Okay, two different aspects here:
-- annoying idiots; generally harmless, but can take your time and make you frustrated when they appear in your comments
—the hysterical internet culture, where making a mountain out of a molehill is actually a great way to make AdSense bucks
Maybe these two are somewhat in tension. Being able to link online identities to real-world identities would help one to get rid of the annoying idiots once and for all; but it also would be a great tool for punishing people in real life for things they said online. On the other hand, anonymity means you can’t stop someone from coming back after being banned, or from making an army of sock puppets. (In theory I can imagine a hypothetical solution: such as a third party registering pseudonymous handles for people on various web discussions, but only one handle per person per website. But that would be easy to abuse: by the third party, by it’s random employees, by the government.)
In real life, I don’t use the same persona for everyone. I behave differently and talk about different topics with my family vs with my friends. I talk differently with rationalists vs with less sane people I still need to keep good relationships with. On many platforms it is too easy to link these things together. Or, they will allow me to hide in a tiny group of my friends… but of course, I can’t make new friends while hidden.
Real life sometimes provides… uhm… partial social filters. For example, if I go to a sci-fi convention, I am likely to meet other sci-fi fans I don’t know (so it’s open towards new people), but I am also unlikely to meet there my grandma or to meet people who completely dislike sci-fi (so it’s mostly closed towards people who hate the topic itself). This is what I usually want—a setting sufficiently open that I can discuss a topic with new people who care about the topic; and yet sufficiently closed that people who don’t care about the topic are not watching me. And the risk that someone at the sci-fi con would film me on a camera, and later share the movie with my grandma (or ten years later with my potential employers) is close to zero.
The historical Socrates was also permabanned from the planet for sealioning. :D