Both of them are conflating anonymity with its consequences. This really needs to stop, because it's preventing us from actually understanding the mechanisms in play.
moot understands that identity is "prismatic", but he misses one of the consequences of this, which is that one of the fundamental components of identity is how we are related to by others. Who we share as is a function of who we are seen as. Anonymity strips away this latter part to provide a blank slate. That's what makes the experience "raw".
Because the filters on your speech are derived from who you care about hearing you speak. If my mother is in the room, I'm not going to talk about the crime in my neighborhood, because it would worry her unnecessarily. But that's also something I'd be willing to discuss publicly under my real name with a home address attached. It's not a function of "am I anonymous"; it's a function of expected consequences.
Talking about anonymity and ephemerality obfuscates the issue. It's a simplified model easily understood by a software hacker, making it so that FOAF networks don't need to be included into solutions. One of the simplest ways to understand Google+'s early advantage over Facebook was that, if you were about to comment on a post to a limited group, you were explicitly told you who could see what you were about to say. It wasn't enough, but it was an order of magnitude better. (Yes, for the record, the real name thing was dumb.)
When we post on HN, we have certain expectations of our audience, and we often feel betrayed and indignant when commenters fail to meet them.
Anonymity and ephemerality aren't wrong. They're reasonable defaults for many situations. They're also good ways to sidestep harder questions, like how to accurately parse a name or portray an identity, when you do want to do that.
(P.S. This comment turned out as a really shitty piece of writing. Sorry for the scattered incoherency.)
moot understands that identity is "prismatic", but he misses one of the consequences of this, which is that one of the fundamental components of identity is how we are related to by others. Who we share as is a function of who we are seen as. Anonymity strips away this latter part to provide a blank slate. That's what makes the experience "raw".
Because the filters on your speech are derived from who you care about hearing you speak. If my mother is in the room, I'm not going to talk about the crime in my neighborhood, because it would worry her unnecessarily. But that's also something I'd be willing to discuss publicly under my real name with a home address attached. It's not a function of "am I anonymous"; it's a function of expected consequences.
Talking about anonymity and ephemerality obfuscates the issue. It's a simplified model easily understood by a software hacker, making it so that FOAF networks don't need to be included into solutions. One of the simplest ways to understand Google+'s early advantage over Facebook was that, if you were about to comment on a post to a limited group, you were explicitly told you who could see what you were about to say. It wasn't enough, but it was an order of magnitude better. (Yes, for the record, the real name thing was dumb.)
When we post on HN, we have certain expectations of our audience, and we often feel betrayed and indignant when commenters fail to meet them.
Anonymity and ephemerality aren't wrong. They're reasonable defaults for many situations. They're also good ways to sidestep harder questions, like how to accurately parse a name or portray an identity, when you do want to do that.
(P.S. This comment turned out as a really shitty piece of writing. Sorry for the scattered incoherency.)