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Comment by Jerry2 | Hacker News Reader

He backpeddaled from that position fairly quickly. Moot banned Tor use on 4chan, he banned VPN use, proxy use was banned, he added ban-tracking cookies, he added unique IDs, he aded country flags to many boards that didn't want them, etc.

He supported anonymity for publicity and did a lot on his site to dissuade its use. When he gave interviews on 4chan, he used to tell everyone that "4chan is not anonymous".

About the only thing that's left on 4chan that's "anonymous" is the default username: which is still "Anonymous".

You have more anonymity on HN with a throwaway account than you have on 4chan.

People also give him too much credit when it comes to community organizing as well. He got lucky with 4chan when he copied 2chan and catered it to english-speaking audience. When he tried to actually create something from scratch, both of his apps failed miserably.

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There's a difference between anonymity of a user to other users, and tools being used by the administration to track and deny bad actors.

Besides, i'm pretty sure HN can track people across accounts as well, and if it hasn't banned proxies yet, then only because they haven't been abused enough.

How is using a default name like Anonymous or "Anonymous Coward" (or some other default name on other sites) different from making a throwaway? Making a throwaway might take you few seconds longer but to an admin, it's exactly the same thing. Your IP is tracked in both cases.

It's just that "Anonymous" username is EXTREMELY DECEPTIVE since you're NOT ANONYMOUS at all!

OK, here's a throwaway account, for which I had to pick a different user name a few times because of the name restrictions (not to mention a password).

You, on the other hand, are not using a throwaway account, so I can tell that you seem to have a rather violent dislike of moot. If this were 4chan, I would have no idea that you made 3 separate posts trying to tear him down.

I think provingmypoint here has a fair point.

The cost of registering – even if it's just 3-4 clicks away – is not negligible, and it gives a very different situation by default. I won't discuss the merits of a reputation & voting system, but when everyone has an account, the actual result is that few people are anonymous in practice. And maybe that's not so bad.

But on imageboards like 4chan, you will find very few people using names or even so-called "tripcodes" (the closest thing to an account), which means that by default to anyone that isn't a moderator, everyone is Anonymous in a sea of Anonymity.

Of course every Internet forum keeps logs of what IP posted what, but as long as it's kept private, that's entirely besides the point.

> You, on the other hand, are not using a throwaway account, so I can tell that you seem to have a rather violent dislike of moot. If this were 4chan, I would have no idea that you made 3 separate posts trying to tear him down.

It's been a while since I've visited 4chan, but didn't they add some sort of user ID to comments at some point? Like, they could still generically be 'Anonymous', but there was some sort of ID or hash you could ctrl+f to find other comments by that person within that thread.

You must be thinking of forced IDs, the feature itself is several years old but it's been turned on and off through the years.

Something that isn't very well known is that 4chan is actually a lot of smaller communities with only partial overlap, and the culture can differ a lot depending on what board you are.

A strangely effective rule of thumb is that the smaller the community is, the friendlier it acts. IDs are only enabled in the bigger and most controversial boards of the site, where people otherwise don't hesitate to abuse their anonymity.

Again, you're misunderstanding who the target of the anonymity is. Users on 4chan are highly anonymous to other users. Anonymity to the operators exists practically nowhere due to simple abuse prevention considerations.

Also note that anonymity is a sliding scale, not a binary switch.

Yes, throwaway accounts offer some anonymity. But they are decidedly less so than posting on most 4chan boards in default operation mode, since the default way of posting on those leaves no way for one user to identify another user. Meanwhile throwaway accounts require a non-trivial amount of effort for every single post made; which is much more than the zero amount of effort required on 4chan to have the same benefit.

This is covered in the article.

>He’s working on a new community site called Canv.as, which actually integrates with Facebook Connect, although users can still post anonymously. Poole said the fact that “you know that we know” the user’s real identity, even if other users can’t see it, discourages people from indulging in the most obnoxious behavior.

This is perfectly in-line with the banning of VPNs and Tor.

Interesting notes. Regardless, 4chan's stance on identity is still far from Google & Facebook's real name policies.

He tried the Japanese concept of anonymity from 2 channel ...

> > A: Because delivering news without taking any risk is very important to us. There is a lot of information disclosure or secret news gathered on Channel 2. Few people would post that kind of information by taking a risk. Moreover, people can only truly discuss something when they don't know each other. If there is a user ID attached to a user, a discussion tends to become a criticizing game. On the other hand, under the anonymous system, even though your opinion/information is criticized, you don't know with whom to be upset. Also with a user ID, those who participate in the site for a long time tend to have authority, and it becomes difficult for a user to disagree with them. Under a perfectly anonymous system, you can say, "it's boring," if it is actually boring. All information is treated equally; only an accurate argument will work.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRC@2ch

...and it was a disaster because pathological arseholes.

You and I have every different definitions of 'disaster'. There's a load of shit and a few hazard zones, but a number of great discussion arise from people discussing the merit of an idea instead of the merit of an individual.

The most I've ever learned about reverse engineering software I learned from a guy on /g/ who's dayjob was reverse engineering malware. I even made a "callsign" (a Reversi game board). If he was around, he'd post in the thread and answer questions. This kept up for several months until public interest in a weekly RE thread died out.

It's very similar to Reddit in that regard - but without certain individuals becoming "popular/unpopular" based on their username and history.

The anonymity becomes more important when an individual holds a minority opinion. As continually evidenced by the increasing number of people losing their jobs for wrongthinking or making politically incorrect jokes like "dongle forking".

Yes, that's fair enough.

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