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Comment by fragmede | Hacker News Reader

Anonymity isn’t it, or isn’t all of it. YouTube comments were deanonymized but that didn’t improve discourse. Look at Facebook and some of the “discussions” about politics there. Newspapers tried running comment sections, but either they’re a cesspool, real names or no, or they just gave up having comment sections entirely. Even locale isn’t a help - NextDoor is full of the same, or worse, combative vitriol. Sure, child porn and death threats don’t go unpunished like “back in the day”, so things are infinitesimally better, but we still have a very very long way to go.

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Anonymity doesn’t necessarily mean namelessness - it means being a voice in a crowd, it means being seemingly removed enough from your target that you, personally, won’t be the target of retribution. It hearkens back to really primal primate behaviour.

Group dynamics are crazy - you can use them to get people who might be drinking buddies to instead get into tin cans and try to murder each other, because you’re using the ultimate anonymity of a battlefield to let slip the dogs of war.

The deciding factor seems to be if the internet group (as in characteristics defining cohesion) has strong enough mores to demand acceptable conduct. wide-open commenting (anon or not): NO. Neighbourhood FB group: you'd hope so, but not always...

I'm on one forum where the only rules are "leave family other than spouses out of it" and "no n-word". It is a hobby interest forum with a gender homogeneous user base. It's one of the most civil places on the internet if you can get past the fact that any mistake will be remembered and you will be made fun of for it. There are definitely some people who hate each other over ideological differences but they seem to tire of arguing and just ignore each other. I think small enough group size for people to remember each other and no reason for people without the shared interest to stick around matter more than anything else.

> Anonymity isn’t it, or isn’t all of it.

I think people have realized what the real line of what will be tolerated in society. There isn't any repercussion for being a pos in real life or online. I think we're to polite to the people being rude.

For some groups, if they are large enough, powerful enough, or vicious enough, deanonymized is not an issue because they are the majority. For smaller groups, where having an opinion will lead to death threads etc, deanonymization will extinguish their voices.

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