> so many people conflate anonymity with "non-identity", which is absolutely not the same.
Quite a few people have mentioned this in passing, but I think it's actually the central point.
What you're called has no relationship to meanness at all. Whether your actions can have consequences for you is what has a relationship to meanness.
This holds true in real life too. The Stanford Prison experiment degenerated because the prisoners had no meaningful way of creating consequences for the prison guards, not anything to do with names. Abu Ghraib abuses occured because the mechanisms to hold the guards to account were (perhaps even deliberately) not working. They used their real names.
The rule of nature is that groups of people who can suffer no consequences for their actions will tend towards worse and worse behavior.
This is obvious. Imagine a forum where you could call yourself whatever you wanted in conversations (and different names in different conversations), but you have to log into it with a password and passwords cost $50 to acquire and for sufficiently bad behaviour they can be revoked. The fact that you can call yourself whatever you like isn't going to change the fact that people will be careful not to do things that risk their $50.
Reddit and hackernews and stackoverflow tend not to degenerate because the identities on there have history and value. If you behave badly enough, your identity will suffer loss, and you yourself will lose some of the value you've built up.
One of the most wonderful things about the internet is that you can take part in communities where race and sex and family history and class and age are subordinated to achievements, ideas, and skill at expressing them.
> Imagine a forum [...] but you have to log into it with a password and passwords cost $50 to acquire and for sufficiently bad behaviour they can be revoked
You don't have to imagine it, take a look at the Something Awful forums. People still get banned but the discourse is better, from my limited experience.
Quite a few people have mentioned this in passing, but I think it's actually the central point.
What you're called has no relationship to meanness at all. Whether your actions can have consequences for you is what has a relationship to meanness.
This holds true in real life too. The Stanford Prison experiment degenerated because the prisoners had no meaningful way of creating consequences for the prison guards, not anything to do with names. Abu Ghraib abuses occured because the mechanisms to hold the guards to account were (perhaps even deliberately) not working. They used their real names.
The rule of nature is that groups of people who can suffer no consequences for their actions will tend towards worse and worse behavior.
This is obvious. Imagine a forum where you could call yourself whatever you wanted in conversations (and different names in different conversations), but you have to log into it with a password and passwords cost $50 to acquire and for sufficiently bad behaviour they can be revoked. The fact that you can call yourself whatever you like isn't going to change the fact that people will be careful not to do things that risk their $50.
Reddit and hackernews and stackoverflow tend not to degenerate because the identities on there have history and value. If you behave badly enough, your identity will suffer loss, and you yourself will lose some of the value you've built up.
One of the most wonderful things about the internet is that you can take part in communities where race and sex and family history and class and age are subordinated to achievements, ideas, and skill at expressing them.