13
votes
Alts?
So at the moment I'm guessing most people probably have just a single account, but eventually people are going to start wanting multiple accounts. How is this going to work? Only when public signups are allowed or can we use our invitations to invite ourselves in as it is? (since they're specifically allowed in the Terms of Service, but there's currently no way to get them except by invitation)? Are we going to require a certain amount of reputation to allow alts? Or will we introduce a nicknames or "identities" feature on top of a single account?
It's minimal (like so many other things), but I wrote a section about this specifically in the Code of Conduct:
We also talked about it a bit recently in this discussion (link to my comment there). Specifically, I think I'd like to have a "make this post anonymously" kind of function so that people don't need to create throwaway(s) whenever they want to post something that they don't want associated with their "real" account.
In the early forum days I used to manually add a "Post this anonymously" tickbox to forum posts, and it was always a huge hit. Of course it's not true-anonymity because the admins can connect it to an account, but as long as nothing in the front-end code gives it away I think it's a super useful feature rather than people always having to make throwaways/alts. Then for true anonymity (whistleblowing, etc) an alt account is worth making.
Please do add this feature. So many times I hold back from posting because I don't want it tied to my persona and cbf relogging to an alt.
Pseudo-anonymous posting would be an awesome feature to have! There are many times when I've completely deleted a comment while on reddit because I decided that I didn't want to have it publicly tied to my account, and I'm far too lazy to make throwaways, so it would make things significantly easier!
If you're going to officially tolerate alts, and allow anonymous / pseudonymous submissions, why not go all the way and support multiple profiles officially?
When voting, commenting and tagging, they could only do it from one profile per thread (as soon as you've used one to interact with a thread, you can't use the others - exceptions might occasionally be needed, but admins may give permission on case by case basis).
So then you don't need multiple accounts, and you literally can't abuse double voting / tagging.
Moderators wouldn't see that the profiles belong together, just admins.
Something like that is possible, but can also start getting extremely confusing and causing issues in other ways too.
The creation of alts would certainly be difficult to control. I don't see any reason for it now, and I think it would be frowned upon at this stage in the website since it doesn't seem necessary.
Using invitation to create alts seems like an abuse of the system.
That was my thinking too, but I couldn't find a rule explicitly for or against it which is why I asked in this post. Although Tilde is quite small right now, it will eventually expand, and for example I prefer an account to save more personal or private posts on, and then this one which is more public and tech related. I know some other people do too, so I was curious if this is something that still has to be decided or if there is already a policy on it.
I think at the moment, there isn't a clear need to have alts here, but as the site grows, alts will be used more frequently. As others have suggested, an "anonymity" button might be good, however on other sites this false sense of anonymity seems to make people more likely to abuse it, such as to send a nasty reply, or to harass a user. At this stage it would be easy to find and discipline these people, but as the site grows this could become more difficult.
I honestly don't see any need for alt accounts - either on tildes or even other sites like Reddit.
Most cases get used for evil such as brigading and trolling. The cases when it's not that are vanishing small. You should be able to talk about anything with one account.
I would probably make an alt if there would be a significant amount of NSFW content in here... So yeah. An alt that is specific for NSFW content... Should there would be one here...
But as Deimos said, the make this post anonymously function would be nice.
Discussion about drugs, discussion/advice about sex lives, discussion about fetishes, advice for first times, I can think of many reasons to allow NSFW and therefore anonymous posting :)
I don't want to allow porn, but discussion of NSFW topics would be fine. This is a comment I made on HN last week when someone asked about this: