The real irony of these threads on HN: no one has ever run a social network. If they did, they would realize that mixing pseudonyms with real names is a formula for disaster. It’s probably the easiest way to continuously bother someone and troll groups to no end.
HN mixes the two in the sense that people name themselves what they want. While that certainly causes us no end of headaches, it also has value. The value is subtler while the drawbacks are obvious, but IMO it's well worth it in HN's case.
Well, the entire reason we kept saying "NEVER PUT YOUR REAL INFO ONLINE" is specifically so that real-life problems can't follow you online. Because it used to be an inherently different world.
Now that the two have merged irrevocably, I'll concede that you need to reconcile the ability to reach anyone anywhere at any time, with almost no reprecussion, with the fact that people are dicks.
I think there might be value in the reverse though. An online community that actively prevents people from posting personal details. E.g. you enter your real-life details, and you're prevented from revealing them to someone, and people can't post addresses, real names, etc. You can make as many accounts as you want, but they're all tied to a specific real identity, so if you start harassing someone, you can be blocked and you can't make a real new account. An effort to have your cake and eat it too - keep what made online communities great (anonymous communication and the ability to discuss things of any nature with consenting partners, without jeopardising your real life), while avoiding the problems that trolls bring.
No one on HN has ever run a social network? I think you're talking to the wrong demographic here.
I used to run an online community in the late 90s early 2000s which would now be called a social network. Some people used real names, some people used pseudonyms, and some people used both. There was no "disaster".
Seriously. Twitter gets crucified for a lack of accountability, now Facebook gets criticized for having too much. You can't embrace online anonymity only when it benefits you.
Accountability and de-anonymisation (which with enough information turns into "doxxing") are not the same thing.
For twitter, people don't need to know who the persistent abusers are on their government ID, only that there are rules and they will be effectively banned if the rules are broken. De-anonymisation enables random mobs to apply "accountability" through death threats offline. For some people this is a serious risk.
(Or in CS101: authentication and authorisation are not the same thing)
I suppose it could be in a capability-based security scheme. In such a scheme, authorization is based upon tokens that are passed around and could be owned by any user or process, making authorization separate from identification.
You allow people to block anyone with account younger them a year. And in general, you allow people to mute everyone from purple they did not approved, mute threads etc.
Generate a user name for the user. One can do that such that the probability of the generated name matching that of the user essentially zero. For example, a SHA-256 hash, hex printed, is highly unlikely to match a real name, and even if it does, it likely has a less than a billion chance of being the name of the person you give it to.
If you limit yourself to three-part 'normal' names, there may be some matches, but if everybody knows user names are doled out randomly, I don't think that matters.
For the Facebooks of the world, I doubt using pseudonyms matters, though, as they will soon discover who's behind each pseudonym, even if a third party assigned them, if only because your alias will be in the address book of your friends.
