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Comment by PostOnce | Hacker News Reader

Facebook was made large by the fact that you can find people you used to know, or haven't spoken to in a while, or aren't that close to.

You can find anyone, it's easy.

Removing the real names policy does away with that, and I would say seriously threaten's facebook's business/growth/future. If you don't know your old girlfriend or your cousin or your highschool bandmate's username, how are you going to get in touch with them?

I'm not saying that's a bad thing, or that I think facebook should have real names, but I'm saying that I seriously doubt they are going to change that policy because it'd cost them too much in the long term.

EDIT: People, I understand the arguments against real names. Facebook's counterargument is money. Which argument do you think they support and will listen to?

Downvoting me is crass, I'm not even stating a position, I'm just stating the obvious reasons for Facebook's continuing denial of a chosen-name policy.

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First, the most common use of a "chosen name" policy would be to let you find someone by the name they actually use - stage name, pen name, drag name, or unofficially changed name.

Second, the less common but equally important use of a chosen name policy would be to make it hard to find someone who doesn't want to be found eg: by an abusive, dangerous ex.

That can all be dealt with by making your profile private, and not public. Additionally, you simply block the bad/dangerous/stalking party (assuming you are aware of them).

I see countless individuals making their Facebook profiles entirely public, and it's quite frankly scary. At that point they have no control over what the internet sees of them. You can't even change it after the fact, as it's probably been indexed in search engines and cached in internet archives.

Abusers make new accounts, and they search you from public computers. Abusers are human, they can think around incomplete protections. Honestly I'm personally of the opinion that the best way to deal with abusive people is to shoot them, several times, and possibly stake and burn the corpse, but the law gets grumpy. So second best is taking a new name and making a new life, and I don't agree that people ought to have vanish themselves from the internet just to preserve Facebook's fetish for government-issued names.

That view is incredibly short sighted. People get better at being good people and killing them instantly destroys and chance that they can become better people. Killing them also doesn't allow for mistakes or for learning. Also what about the people dependent on the person who is abusing for survival. The abused should never be exposed to abuse but if their abuser provides for them and is killed then they have to go through another hellish situation by being homeless. I don't know what the solution is and what we have in place is barely better than killing them but it does sometimes allow for the growth of individuals.

I was thinking something along those lines. I think the strenght of Facebooks is that people use their real name. I wasn't even thinking about searchability, but that's potentially going right out the window.

3rd. parties that are using Facebook for logins are frequently using/allowing Facebook precisely because you're relative sure that it's "a real person". I know that's one reason why we're using it.

I might be wrong, but it certainly seems like people are less likely to engage in trolling or extremely bad behaviour if things are linked to Facebook, and I suspect that the real name policies are the reason.

It's not that I don't understand some peoples need for privacy or the use of pseudonyms, but you are playing in Facebooks walled garden, they make the rules. You don't have to be on Facebook, nor are you entitled to a Facebook account. Maybe you would be wise to avoid Facebook if you have the need to hide your identity.

  > certainly seems like people are less likely to engage in trolling or extremely bad behaviour if things are linked to Facebook

People do jihadi recruiting on Facebook, despite obviously being under surveillance. I think we'd need figures to back up this idea that "real name" policies reduce abuse, rather than content policies, codes of conduct and IP bans.

YouTube tried this and it didn't fix anything about how awful YouTube comments were.

I try to point out that real names policies only affect

1.) People who aren't using a fake but real-sounding name 2.) People who say something that someone else doesn't like (this can be everyone from a future employer who found something not very PC to jihadis who want to kill you) 3.) People who are smart enough to understand the above (I see grown up people shouting about how certain countries should be nuked, yes. signed Full Name, Teacher at such and such childrens school)

But if I want a fake account, it is no problem to pick a name that is a totally standard name that won't raise any suspicion, so the real-name policy doesn't add anything.

Facebook profiles use names that look reasonable, but they aren't necessarily real names.

I have at least three friends who don't use their official names in normal life, and have Facebook profiles under slightly modified versions of their names [1] to make them look "normal". (Contriving an example, change "Tall David" to "Taal David" and everyone that knows Tall David can work it out.)

[1] name = what they call themselves, as far as I'm concerned

> name = what they call themselves

That ability to call yourself something at your option is more than just a name - it's the very definition of privacy in the modern age.

It used to be that you had privacy when you moved away from society. Acquiring privacy was mostly an exercise in hiding information. In the modern world where logfiles exist forever and the difficulty of getting away form all network-connected microphones is rising fast.

When you know you cannot hide from eavesdroppers, the tactics switch form concealment to steganography. You have the possibility of privacy if-and-only-if you have the effective capacity to misrepresent yourself.

Unfortunately, real-name policies are de facto attacks on privacy and the right of to chose how to present yourself to the world. Worse, suggests a new interpretation for the "real-names make social interaction more polite" argument, societies without privacy resist experimentation because of chilling effects.

As for the proposed workaround of using a fake name: I guess they are supposed simply hope that Facebook doesn't ask about their name, everybody they know doesn't tell them the truth

This is a very good point. Perhaps their drive for a "real names" policy is not for the actual real name, but rather to not have an obviously fake name. E.g. in your scenario an obviously fake name would be "Taal TheSexMan David". That's the sort of stuff that killed-off MySpace, if you ask me.

If that's their motivation (which IMHO would be way more acceptable), then they aren't doing a very good job implementing it.

A relative of a friend of mine uses a pseudonym to escape harassment they suffered due to being gay. They're Facebook friend of their parents, their sibs, and other relatives.

How does that work exactly? They were already harassed, so the harassers already knew their real name, I take it? How would abolishing the real-names policy help them in this scenario? Genuinely confused.

Edit. Word missing.

> the harassers already knew their real name, I take it? How would abolishing the real-names policy help

Without the policy they don't have to use their real name, which means harassers can't find them (as easily) on Facebook. The ability to use a real name that is not your actual name is just a clunky workaround for the policy, not a proof that the policy works.

> Facebook's counterargument is money. Which argument do you think they support and will listen to?

The heavy hand of law! I don't understand why people are so worried about introducing regulation. Asking to argue against money is like asking to argue against gun. You can't have a meaningful argument with such an entity, because convincing on arguments assumes the other party is not a psychopath.

That aside, there are many options. I think "having a choice" is a good argument. Or they could allow to actually use pseudonym which you could link your real name or not (so the FB would know the connection but other people wouldn't).

I don't think that's an issue, they have enough data that as soon as you can find one person they can probably extrapolate the rest of them. It's kind of creepy but whatever.

> People, I understand the arguments against real names. Facebook's counterargument is money.

Care to explain how forcing people to use their legal name instead of the name other people know them by equals less money?

You're asking the wrong question. You should ask the question of how forcing people to use their legal name instead of any old random arbitrary name they might make up equals less money.

And I think that's reasonably obvious. Facebook got to be as big as it is by forcing people to use their real names, so that all their acquaintances could find them easily.

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