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Comment by deltarholamda | Hacker News Reader

Part of the "new Web" that that I'm not a fan of is, with the massive reach of the modern Internet, some person's infelicitous comment or ribald joke can permanently end a career. The force multiplier of these corporate silos of information make this situation worse.

I would like to return to a more HTML-ified Web, with less reliance on JS frameworks that scatter spinny loading icons all over, but IMO the worst aspect is a social and cultural problem, not a technical one.

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When I started using the web back in the 90's, everyone used to use a handle/nickname and so it was never easy to link an online person to a reallife individual.

These days everyone is encouraged to enter their real name, DOB and telephone number (see Facebook, Twitter, YouTube) which then creates a link to a real person.

I think the web was better because it was anonymous, rather than anything else really. If you had "SuperHardLord" posting abuse at you on IRC, it didn't really matter. However if you have a Twitter user with full photo and details doing the same, it feels much more personal.

People say this, but before the web, on USENET in the 1980s and early 1990s, it was standard protocol (at least on serious newsgroups dealing with science and technology) to not only use your real name but even include a signature explaining where you worked and what your job was or if you were a student studying something or whatever. It was helpful in evaluating the responses -- a university professor, a professional in industry, and a student in a field each would have different viewpoints on a new technology or method, for example.

Still is this way. Just because 1 billion people jump off a bridge, are you going to do the same? There are many of us online who have never used Facebook, Twitter, etc and never signed up with real names. The only thing that gets me is I submit to using a credit card and online purchases. The express reason the web __is__ going to such lengths to become advert-laden trash is that too many common users all agree to these traps. It's ruining the entire world, I for one am eagerly awaiting most of these "constant growth" web plagues to tank and dotcom bubble 2.0 and won't miss these tyrants.

I'm not on Facebook or Twitter and know very well not to post my real name or other information if I can help it... Mainly to reduce the chance of fraud.

While yes, social media encourages identity ownership for obvious reasons, in modern forums like discord, reddit, and hn, most people use anonymous aliases like you describe. That hasn’t changed. I decided to not use social media and have no problem engaging with the world on the modern web.

But no one is complaining about discord or Reddit, it's all about Facebook and Twitter.

Discord and Reddit are just modern incarnations of USENET and forums.

Yes, this is definitely a concern: while the public nature of most content hasn't changed (even in the 1.0 days, your blog could be read by anyone who could access the URL), what public means has changed as the userbase has grown from several hundred thousand or a few million to billions of people.

I don't have a great solution for this other than for people to remember / realize that everything they put online is that visible (including this comment. ;) ).

Well, part of the solution is to enable anonymity, on the legal, technical, and platform levels. Just reminding everyone that "everything you say online can be publicly tied to your real identity" causes a chilling effect when you have opinions on anything remotely controversial.

Very true, and I simply don't believe that humans are wired to deal with what is, essentially, a permanent Panopticon. Most people understand on some level that gossip is destructive, but also a lot of fun. Now that gossip can circle the globe twice in seconds, and combine that velocity with the fact that nearly everything online is gossip, it's like some kind of destructive psyop that nobody could have ever imagined.

Even if you could have some flavor of anonymity, the cozy relationship that the big tech corporations have with national governments around the world means that only the most paranoid and OpSec-savvy can avoid having that anonymity pierced.

We just quietly slid from "you shouldn't say that," to "you can't say that" in less than a generation.

People that only have an artificial online presence can evade these negatives while not missing much in my opinion.

Facebook, Instragram and Twitter have all a specialized demographic and all these platforms are orientated around people instead of topics. This is why I would not compare them to irc, reddit, 4chan and similar consorts as the parent did. Given, that probably does have much to do with a difference in audiences.

Problem with Discord is that it swallows content. Nothing is searchable (cannot crawl discord, only relies on internal search), I believe that will cost many communities in the long run. It is convenient for small indie developers, but discoverability is extremely inhibited.

But the major difference is personalization. Now everyone gets their own search results. In favor of advertising against general education. This is a huge factor why the net is worse. Also, if you look up any term that is part of the news cycle, you only find shitty news rags that pushed their presence with nepotism and have a direct business relationship to search engine providers.

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