Ask HN: Real name vs. anonymous username – which do you use online and why? Do you use your real name or an anonymous username when signing up for and using various online platforms—such as Hacker News, Twitter, Discord, and others? |
Ask HN: Real name vs. anonymous username – which do you use online and why? Do you use your real name or an anonymous username when signing up for and using various online platforms—such as Hacker News, Twitter, Discord, and others? |
https://tim.blog/2020/02/02/reasons-to-not-become-famous/
I think it explores a lot of issues adjacent to your question.
Here, I'd only ever be anonymous because I'm not in control of my content, I can't edit or delete comments. I could only post throwaway comments in a place like this.
When I was on Reddit I was anonymous because it's not a serious place.
Anonymous username for general shitposts.
Second anonymous username for expressing unpopular/extreme political views.
(is there a way to change my username here?)
as i accumulate cruft over the years of being on the net this is more and more important.
Shame for him I kept track of him, every so often. Guys like that accumulate a long list of potential "who did this to me?" candidates after so much time, and after a decade they tend to forget. I didn't.
I also like the freedom to post my thoughts free of that reputational damage and see how people react, and ideally to understand why my thoughts and perspective might be wrong (and I know there's a certain implication there in modern times, and no, I've never done or said anything outright hurtful to people).
Then one time in 2016 I got "dox'd" for making a comment on Bruce Scheiner's facebook page during the 2016 election. The post merely stated that Bruce was allowed to comment on political topics (a previous commentor had said he should just stick to security topics).
I was then harassed at my workplace, with said commenter (presumably) claiming I was being racist and homophobic (I'm gay) via email.
Since then I've never used my real name.
I no longer post with the real name anywhere.
Do those risks exist? Sure. But it's silly to blindly forbid your employee's outside-business activities like this. However, in this job market, employers probably can easily find candidates that don't have problem with this silly restriction so they don't have incentives to allocate resources to deal with the headache.
A personal website may sound too "professional" to a legal person. I bet OP could post the same information on facebook/twitter without getting into any trouble.
"Online anonymity: study found ‘stable pseudonyms’ created a more civil environment than real user names" - https://theconversation.com/online-anonymity-study-found-sta...
They looked at an online community which moved from "easy anonymity" to "registered pseudonyms" to IDs linked to Facebook names/avatars (which they took as a proxy for "real names"). They found:
"Our results suggest that the quality of comments was highest in the middle phase. There was a great improvement after the shift from easy or disposable anonymity to what we call 'durable pseudonyms'. But instead of improving further after the shift to the real-name phase, the quality of comments actually got worse – not as bad as in the first phase, but still worse by our measure."
"What matters, it seems, is not so much whether you are commenting anonymously, but whether you are invested in your persona and accountable for its behaviour in that particular forum. There seems to be value in enabling people to speak on forums without their comments being connected, via their real names, to other contexts. The online comment management company Disqus, in a similar vein, found that comments made under conditions of durable pseudonymity were rated by other users as having the highest quality."
1. Good ideas or truths shouldn't rely on the credentials of the person talking.
2. Less information can allow more freedom of expression in a community. (For good or for ill.)
1. Verified to be X (e.g. degree in biology or over 25)
2. Claims in their user-profile to be X
In practice, #1 would be expensive and hard to enforce, while #2 will get you most of the way even though it's on the honor system. Especially if it isn't used as a hard-limit on participation but instead as a convenience to others, and if you can see history to identify people who inconsistently change their own profile.
That said, for some discussions what you want it something people are unlikely to have needed to codify before, like "actually owns the same MacGuffin 4000 that I do."
My online identity was pretty clear because both ARPAnet, and Sun Microsystems, required your username to be your actual name, and so pretty much all that was online and forever was tied to you no matter what. I've used anonymous names when playing online games because that community can be quite toxic. I counseled my daughters to do the same.
That said, I know an investigator who works for a law firm and they can pretty much unmask any name you throw at them to the real name, address, and other salient details. Which kind of weirds me out sometimes.
How do they do that?
Long story, get your hanky.
I just find it's better to use my real name, and post stuff I won't regret. It won't hurt me, and can benefit me.
Also, I kind of enjoy being the type of person that chooses not to go dark.
Years and years ago, I used my real name on Reddit. I've since deleted that account, but I'd absolutely never use my real name on something like Reddit.
If I’m networking with other mostly-realname people for professional purposes or writing something to support my professional identity, it’s real name and what I post is carefully curated.
If I’m working on a hobby, it’s a pseudonym that someone who was really determined might be able to trace back to my real identity.
For any other expression of opinions in public forums, it’s pseudonyms all the way.
The official HN policy[1] tries to maintain balance between managing content and privacy. But when it is trivial to access archived HN content [2] [3], it is not worth the risk.
1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23623799
2. https://huggingface.co/datasets/nixiesearch/hackernews-comme...
where I think it's safe and want to present my views transparently and think something positive could come from it, my real name.
That is so far the case here on HN, though I've been reconsidering that, since recently I've been harangued whenever I've mentioned my business/app in comments - having my business called scammy and so forth. Then I go and see who is doing the haranguing and often it's a profile that does not have a real name, and has a zillion karma for some reason even though you go through their comments and a lot of it is a bunch of negativity being spread and that makes me a bit miserable.
I'm curious about this question, because my app relates to games, and on one hand I really like the idea of real names (esp given my personal experience e.g. above), while on the other hand I see a huge % of comments here preferring anonymity, and generally get the feeling that 'real names' is perceived as too serious for gaming - that the expected thing would be pseudonyms/handles/avatars. One direction we've gone in is that if you want to monetize/earn money on our app, then you need a real name (verified with ID). But any suggestions/ideas very welcome.
I don't mind people being able to find out about all the stupid stuff that I said when I was younger because I wouldn't have much interest in those who don't understand that people can change over time.
Exceptions: Github, maybe Stackoverflow, but it’s been a while since I’ve posted there.
I grew up on the internet in the 90s and early 2000s and the general rule then was not to give out your name and info. So I just keep following that.
That might not be the right choice for everybody, but it has proven a good choice for me.
For the evolution of how I arrived at this: I started BBSing as a teenager in the 90s, and there pretty much everyone used handles instead of real names. So for a while I used a particular handle, until I decided I was embarrassed of the name, so I chose another. Eventually in the late 90s as email (and the internet in general) became a lot more common I was embarrassed a bit when I'd give my <handle>@juno(or wherever).com email address out to people, so I set up an email with my real name. Then I figured since I was already providing an email with my real name when signing up for places, I might as well use my real name for account names. But, like I said before, I prefer a short username, but someone was already using my first,middle,last initials that way, so I started using "joem" as many places as I could, which was easy at first, but became much harder as time went on and I had to expand to my current system noted above.
There are a few reasons for this:
1. My username is actually less common than my name is, so it's more likely to be available on a service and less likely to get confused with everyone else.
2. I've always been taught that you should be careful with your personal info online, and consider it a good opsec to be such. Why give random strangers information that they can use to track you down for god knows what reason?
Especially in a world where death threats, swatting, people trying to get you fired and extremist lunatics are a reality.
3. I just prefer traditional pseudononymous sites and forums over modern social media, and going by a username keeps that feeling alive just a little longer.
If I were to use my real name, it would actually be more confusing because other people share the same real name. It’s not super common, but by no means is it unique.
Of course it takes hardly any effort at all to link my username to my real identity. I understand fully the risks of not being entirely anonymous online. Thankfully it has yet to be a problem. And if there were to be a danger, I wouldn’t rely on something as fragile as digital anonymity to protect me anyway.
Anywhere where I think my opinions might affect my income I stay anonymous. My name combo is very unique, so anything I post would be related to me.
Honestly it's a small world and anything could be sourced, just making it less casual.
The theory behind it is that my first name is common, and having that one common element shared between so many people that make usernames creates a barrier to gathering information easily. If my name was too unique, then it would be easier to find and identify my activity, but as-is, I am not the only person on the net with my username, so anyone performing research has to spend extra time weeding out those people.
Also, I generally don't post anything I wouldn't stand behind anyway.
But I don't recall the last time I used my real name (on something other than things like banking). It's a combination of an overabundance of caution (I'm almost certain that one user who threatened to report me to the FBI and swat me wouldn't go through with it, but I'd prefer peace of mind) and my uncommon, probably unique, first and last name combination.
One of the things that I like about the internet is that you create your own persona, and that starts with using a name you make up.
That being said, I use a real name on Facebook and LinkedIn; and where it's "generally preferred" to use real names.