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Comment by ehutch79 | Hacker News Reader

It's a matter of scale i think. In small communities, you're not really anonymous in the same way as on facebook. You might only be known as DataDog213 on some forum with a hundred members, but the people there know you and who you are as a person.

In facebook groups with thousands of members with no real bar or entry, you're really anonymous and no more distinctive than anyone else if you don't make yourself stand out. (By bar of entry, I mean things like even finding the site in the first place)

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I'm not really seeing that difference in requirements. Most of the forums were trivial to find in all sorts of Google searches, allowing thousands of people to create a new unique account, and then get banned for violating the pinned rules about asking a question by one of the <100 users that could be recognized as being a repeated chat mate on the one forum. Many of those obsessives on one forum would never be findable somewhere else where they might not have been an expert.

I find it a bit sad that thousands of people are on FB using their real names and turning person who says stupid things about several different hobbies into a permanent part of their own fairly permanent identity and I don't actually see how it helps anything. But maybe people who don't find it creepy see something I don't.

I don't know about you, but Facebook is trying to feed me groups I should join every visit. Huge difference.

Also... google hasn't existed the entire life of the web.

Isn't this in reverse??? A lot of people on Facebook know who I am. I was in TONS of forums and no one had a clue who I was in real life and my accounts weren't connected with anything other than a made up email for "confirmation" purposes and promptly deleted.

I think a more exact description is:

On social media groups and public posts, you are named but you are nobody to everyone else.

On forums, you are unnamed but you gather a reputation and become somebody.

(And on HN and Reddit, you are both unnamed AND a nobody.)

And I think it’s because on forums, it was a combination of (1) a smaller community and (2) you had an avatar and sometimes a signature, which made every post of yours memorable.

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