> I hate this argument, because the argument has never been that no person would be rude under their name, it's that there would be less rudeness:
The counter-argument to this is that real names policies oppress the very people that were enabled by pseudonyms on the internet: women (especially in tech), minorities, and whistleblowers, because they're at risk of being ostracized in real life based on their online comments if their real names are associated with said comments.
That said, I think the Real Names argument here is a red herring -- hundreds of employees at Facebook and Google have rehashed this argument over and over again to death. The real uproar here is the change in the "social contract" between users and YouTube; similar to people being upset about ads being added to Twitter or about developer APIs being shut down or when a free service goes to a paid model.
The counter-argument to this is that real names policies oppress the very people that were enabled by pseudonyms on the internet: women (especially in tech), minorities, and whistleblowers, because they're at risk of being ostracized in real life based on their online comments if their real names are associated with said comments.
That said, I think the Real Names argument here is a red herring -- hundreds of employees at Facebook and Google have rehashed this argument over and over again to death. The real uproar here is the change in the "social contract" between users and YouTube; similar to people being upset about ads being added to Twitter or about developer APIs being shut down or when a free service goes to a paid model.