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Comment by zimpenfish | Hacker News Reader

> We should debate idea's not authors.

This only works if you guarantee that both sides are going to argue in good faith and, well, gestures at the world, that just isn't realistic right now?

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Trolls existed back in the days of Aristotle as well, so "the existence of trolls" is not quite sufficient. The part that is new is the ability for trolling to have hugely asymmetric impact. Before it was a voice in the town square everyone knew to ignore, now it's troll farms from the other side of the world.

But I'm starting to think even that doesn't really get to the heart of the issue. I think there's something about the network effects that leads to a dumbing down even if everyone thinks they are arguing in good faith. I feel like I've noticed a negative difference in discussion quality even over the past year. I can read a reddit headline now and feel more confident I can predict the content of the top two or three comments, the lazy popular thoughtless replies. And I've seen emergence of widely upvoted opinions that you know people adopt not because they've thought through it themselves, but because they've seen it two or three other places and thought it sounded good, irrespective of truth or accuracy. So I think we're seeing behavior that appears trollish even though it may not have come from actual trolls. Call it structural trollism, maybe.

Reddit becoming horrible is a function of how it's set up, with "community" moderators being able to ban anyone for any reason and the admins putting pressure on the mods or outright removing/replacing them where they see fit in order to only allow correct speech. If HN can be described as an autocracy with benevolent dictators at the top, reddit is a crazed totalitarian system with Red Guards on the loose all around the communities looking for wrong opinions to report. The voting and some other mechanisms they've set up makes the echo chambers complete. It progressively gets worse and worse, the main subs are already unusable and while there are niche communities that might still be worth visiting, their number keeps shrinking. Not that they literally disappear in most cases, they just get infected with reddit thought.

OK, if you're wondering why you get downvoted, my advice is thus. When any normal, healthy human being reads a sentence like this:

> reddit is a crazed totalitarian system with Red Guards on the loose all around the communities looking for wrong opinions to report

..they immediately think to themselves "right, there's another loon", and move on. At worst they get annoyed at their once-mature community getting infested with loons, and they downvote it.

If you want to have an interesting conversation, I would start with not moaning about 'totalitarianism' because you got downvoted on a social media site. You can just say that you're frustrated that the site is moderated by people who don't share your political views. That's all.

Yes but it’s never been so profitable to be a professional troll. There is no need for basically anyone to ever subject themself to a critical media who might ask, “You tweeted this horrible thing, what did you mean by that!” so they simply don’t. Their twitter / youtube / facebook become largely insulated to the extend that they want so there’s really no debating anything anyway.

We've had anonymous speech for a long time, at least in the West, and things haven't exactly fallen apart. Quite the contrary, the last 50 years have seen unprecedented reduction in poverty and violence. You could easily gesture at the world, and say it wouldn't have been better had anonymous speech been suppressed.

We have real life examples of "Real names" polices simply creating further extreme rhetoric canceling out Moderate voices. Anonymous Speech enables moderate voices, contrary to the popular narrative that is only enables extreme voices.

I think there’s a misunderstanding here: anonymous means you can’t know who wrote what, which does enable extreme voices. What you’re talking about is pseudonymous speech.

Assuming people don’t use multiple accounts and don’t share accounts with others, the current state of Twitter and all major social networks is pseudonymity, not anonymity: you know that all tweets by @someone were written by the same person. Their "real" name doesn’t matter as long as they always use the same pseudonym.

Anonymity has a lot of obvious benefits, especially if things get heated up and personal. But the main thing is to stop those regularly demanding consequences for speech, which certainly are not arguing in good faith either.

Yes, there are scammers and bots and a e-commerce platform would need to evaluate identities for transactional purposes. But to discuss ideas? Please more anonymity.

It works even if neither side is arguing in good faith, because in that case the audience can throw them all out.

I think this is absolutely true. If discussions on Twitter were like this one here on HN, then I'm all for it. But.. well Twitter can be very toxic.

lol - sunlight is the best disinfectant.

If your ideas can't stand up to anonymous criticism I'd postulate your ideas are the problem, not the anonymous speech.

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