Believe it or not, there are still people in the world who are victims of violence, abuse, and/or hatred, for whom revealing their legal name, or allowing their online identities to be revealed in searches for their name, might mean putting themselves in unnecessary danger.

I come from an emotionally abusive family. Having them lie, ridicule, etc, were par for the course growing up. I've left them behind, however, have not changed my legal name for various reasons. Because of this, my family has stalked me, has lied about there being deaths in the family to try to get me to talk to them in order to continue their emotionally manipulative bullshit, and otherwise tried to pull me back into their petty gamesmanship. When I had a real name account on facebook, they had found me after a week to try to continue their crap. Being able to be pseudonymous is the only way I can keep in touch with people I actually care about, even with my family hundreds of miles away from me.

Says a person who did not register for HN with their full legal name.

What do you have to hide?

More people in real life know me by Epoch Wolf than by my real name. It's the name I've chosen for myself. It's also unique. No one else in the world had that name when I first used it 8 years ago.

It's my primary identity among my friends.

But, I don't want to change my legal name. It's easier to deal with my fellow americans having have a good, strong, and above all normal first name and a properly romanized last name with a european flavor. Being normal, white male with a normal, white male name is a Good Thing™ in most of America.

Also, my family would probably have their own objections.

Unfortunately most people are weak and have found no meaning of life outside of whining! Life is so damned short, names and labels are meaningless and irrelevant to your physical existence; they are distractions and of no purpose to our civilization. Fuck (excuse my French, but I just can't help it), even if we ban names and assign a random number to each of us, people will still whine if their ID lacks their "lucky number" or boyfriend's DOB, and so on! This civilization is going nowhere. God, please, secure-trash this universe and reboot!