Suggestion: Being able to post psuedo-anonymously.
I don't know if I'm the only one here but sometimes I want to say something but I don't want it tied to my account, my reasoning being the more details I let slip eg:
I've worked in IT
I've lived in that town
I own a labradoodle
..these things all piece together till you can profile it down to one person, you essentially de-anonymize yourself the more comments you make. Being that this is a public forum anyone can scan this information now or in the future building a profile on users possibly identifying them as a person, this is an unintended side effect as we don't post online comments expecting them to be traceable to our person. Consider the fact that advancing computing power and AI may eventually make it trivial to do such a thing.
Sure you can regularly create new accounts but then you reset the trust system.
My suggestion is having the ability to post a comment but not display your username, you would still be accountable to the trust system it's just that outside Tildes's server you wouldn't be identified. This would still discourage people from being a jerk because they're still affected by the trust system.
Agreed.
And as they say, recursion is fun!. ;) There are a couple other threads about it, but I don't have the links at hand. Hopefully search will be implemented soon.
While you're here, I suggest you also take a look at other recursive topics that might interest you.
To be honest I didn't think to search, not that I could.
I wish I could have searched because Deimos is already considering it so my suggestion is redundant, thanks for linking to it.
Edit: Also I like your idea of the 'anonymize' button giving a random name to continue a conversation under the same anonymous alias.
No problem. And don't worry, I think it's a good thing this discussion comes up from time to time. I'm sure there's more to discuss than what's on that thread and I'm sure different people will have different ideas that will complement each other, so redundancy is not bad in this case, I think. And it also works as a reminder of the fact that people care about this issue.
I just wanted you (and anyone else interested in the topic) to be aware of points previously raised and of the dev's answers. At least that way discussion will be more even and build on top of previous ideas.
Regarding the anonymizing button, I believe it was mentioned on that link on the comments, but I think it should be something done before posting, so as to avoid scrapers and giving real anonymity against bots. Trust would still be tied to the real account to penalize bad behavior but any links would be wiped after a while (once the trust system has done its job).
I don't like this idea at all. I think this place is supposed to be somewhat reputation based. You can use one of your invite codes to create a second account if you want, or a third if you want to hide the invite trail a little more.
Your name wouldn't be at stake but if you made troll posts then you'd still get flagged by other users and still incur a loss of reputation, not by word-of-mouth but by the 'trust' scoring system.
I like the idea, but what about lying for points?
There are things that can be easily disproven if they are tied to a popular account i.e. "As a black man..." when they've posted a picture of themselves with their white family. Not to encourage profile sniffing, but sometimes it can have its uses to tear down someone trying to start discord.
Now if I had no way of knowing they are lying, I would not flag them. I have no reference of who they are and what their beliefs are, so why draw conclusions with no data? It just seems easily abusable.
I think on this type of thing we would err against profile sniffing. some posts like what you've mentioned might slip through the cracks, but who's to say that the picture of the white person with their family wasn't the real lie?
I think we would be here to address the validity and presentation of arguments and not the character of the person making them. good discussion can come from crap sources.
An interesting point but I think the actual cases where people bother to profile sniff is going to be few and far between. That being said it is an interesting thought experiment, are people more likely to lie if they're not tied to their avatar? Hard to say. But I think it's fair to say privacy conscious people will comment more freely if they don't think there's a ledger holding them accountable.
You could remove any reward of "lying for points" by simply not applying vote data on anonymized posts yet retain negative flags as a disincentive to be a jerk.
Also coming to mind now I'm wondering how this might apply to shills/astroturfing, to hide their tracks they might take advantage of anonymizing their dishonest posts, though I would be highly skeptical of an anonymous person endorsing a product.
But surely this approach maintains the reputation link (at least in a technical sense) better than the alternative, which is that users will make throwaways ?
Once the site is opened up to the public, users will create throwaway accounts, just like they do on reddit and the reputation system wouldn't make a difference. At least with this proposal it would be much more straightforward to mask your username to other users if you wish, but still accrue (or lose) reputation against your main username.
At some point, throwaways are going to have a hard time getting noticed, though - since they'll be starting at the bottom of the trust system as 0. If someone is posting anon from their main account, we can still factor their trust rating into the system, so they'll maintain their trust advantage if they use the anon feature and lose it if they do a throwaway. That should help incentivize people to use it over throwaways.
Absolutely, I think that's the main benefit of a system like this, it allows people to post pseudo-anonymously when necessary, while maintaining the advantages of the trust system.
I see the idea, but equally, this dilutes the likely quality as it allows for anonymous trolling etc. Then again you can just make a throwaway...
The only semi viable variant i can see is basically sub accounts which are bound to the main account, in a way which is invisible to users but visible to the site admins (or maybe mods, unsure). Censure to the 'main' account is inherited by the sub account. Still, it seems messy and not hugely effective.
only psuedo-anonymous trolling, you're still penalized by the trust system it's just your username isn't displayed. I mean I can already shit post, are you going to remember my name among thousands of other posters? Highly unlikely. So I'm essentially already anonymous to you through obscurity, but I'm not anonymous to bots.
I'm not inclined to agree with this. As @MindsRedMill says, it's more prone to trolling, shitposting etc. I think it would eventually become that everyone would do that and we'd have 4chan 2.0 on our hands. Perhaps exaggerating, but you can see what I'm getting at.
The point I was trying to make was that, because you're not anonymous to the website, trolling and shitposting would still incur a penalty because you would be flagged by other users and then you would get pushed to the bottom of the comments. Reading how the trust system works it appears this would be an accumulative affect so indeed there's a disincentive to troll and shitpost.
Breaking rules and trolling even as an 'anon' poster will still give you the same reputation hits as if you were doing it openly. Just because the site hides your user identity, that doesn't mean the trust system doesn't know who you are. In fact, we could even look at 'double damage' systems for people who use anon to troll, and make the hits much more severe.
I think this is a very good suggestion. I am not sure how it would be best implemented.
You see, people could register an official account and then spam or insult people anonymously (so, you'd have to ensure that admins or moderators can de-anonymise the account. That, in turn is somewhat dangerous, but at the same time, if you are trolling or insulting people, you should be giving up that right to anonymity anyway).
I like it! On Reddit I'd have to constantly manage multiple accounts and throwaways for this exact reason.
Case in point, try this with your Reddit account: https://snoopsnoo.com/
Indeed. That's what I was trying to say, it would be exactly like this post here except the username would be invisible(except to the website, the website knows who it is.)
I too have multiple accounts for the same reason. Something I didn't raise in my post(perhaps a more futuristic problem) is the problem of Forensic Linguistics. i.e the language and pattern of speech you use, mannerisms, unique phrases you use and spelling all form a linguistic fingerprint which can be used to trace your real identity across different accounts.
It seems like this is the type of thing AI will do really well, I wouldn't be surprised if in the future it's common-place or if it's already in use.
Yeah, there is a bit of an arms race incoming. (https://petapixel.com/2018/06/04/researchers-create-privacy-filter-for-photos-that-defeats-face-detection/ )
I think the same may start to happen with text scramblers, which keep the original meaning of a message, but change up the patterns so that forensic linguistics tools get confused.
Wouldn't surprise me at all and I would use it immediately.
That's a possibility, but also remember this - reputation decay will be a natural over-time process. If you have five alts, and you don't use them every single day they are going to lose rep and become equivalent to a new user. Alts are basically gimped by design here - or will be, once we build out the system. Meanwhile, if you use anon from your main account, it'll still have your reputation intact even though no one is seeing your identity.
But that doesn't magically go away by not implementing this. If this isn't implemented, people will just make throwaway accounts, if it is implemented, a majority of those users would likely use it and thus any reputation/trust linked to those anonymous posts, positive or negative, will reflect on the original account, making things more accountable, not less.
My point is more that this approach doesn't seem to weaken the trust model anymore than the existing system, but may make it slightly more accountable and at the very least allow your pseudo-anonymous contributions to reflect on the reputation of your main account in a positive way.
Yes, sorry I'm looking at this from the perspective of Tildes public launch, when it seems like it will be just as straightforward to set up an account as Reddit.
Another forum I talk on has an "Anonymous" tag, and when a post is made using that tag, all users posting in the topic just show up as "Human #1", "Human #2", etc (so you can keep track of who's saying what, but no way to know who actually posted it). I really like this system, as it allows discussion of any topic without needing throwaways. Those posts also obviously don't show up in the user's post history, and the site rules have a zero-tolerance policy for guessing at, alluding to, or otherwise trying to discover or reveal another Human's identity.
I could also see "Serious" discussion being handled this way, allowing posts anywhere to be restricted to [Serious] discussion (a'la some subreddit's rules).
I like the idea of setting a default visible tags by thread or group. A good example is /r/science which disallows jokes, it would save a lot of moderation overhead if joke flagged posts were hidden.
I'm all for this. You have my vote.
I think being able to participate in a discussion without linking personal information to your username is a good idea, but it'd be difficult to implement without simultaneously creating a way for trolls to anonymously post spam. Perhaps your username could be visible on the post, but only to admins, so they would be able to moderate you by looking at your real account name.
My suggestion for implementation would be to allow users to post under their usual username, not hidden or anything, but not show that post on their profile. That way, you're still accountable for your words and can receive votes, etc, but it's much harder to scrape your user page for information related to you.
Harder but not impossible, there's an entire archive of reddit submissions and comments uploaded online, consider the same possibility for Tildes and anyone who wants to can download it and link all your posts by username, or otherwise someone can make a website hosting the data for each username.
I just picked up the habit of keeping the personal info out there for the least time needed to get my message across.
Someone from my town posts something, I share that I live there, receive a reply, talk for a little, then delete the comments.
On Reddit, I delete my whole profile every 2-3 months and start over.
I think 4chan gets it right in the anonymity department. Fast-paced posting washes everything away in a matter of minutes to hours. It'd be better if it wasn't infested with insults and underaged anime girls.
The downside is if everyone picks up this pattern then you get threads full of deleted comments, the archive value is minimal. Plus the effectiveness of this technique is dependent on how frequently the site is being archived, for example there's a complete archive of reddit submissions and comments(text only). Despite deleting your profile your data is still out there(minus any you deleted fast enough to miss the daily archive.)
I endorse this idea.
side note: I think that "anonymous" posts should assign a random string like "bJsis&yw2763gdue" within the thread so that conversations within the thread still have continuity