If you want to talk about the concept itself of removing anonymity: on HN the impact would not be huge, a lot of us are not really anonymous with links to personal sites in our profiles. Reddit is a different beast entirely.
Throw in information Reddit has (ip addresses, user agents etc) and it’s no doubt a certainty.
Edit: not sure why the downvotes, this will absolutely spur a black market for identities that less than reputable actors will exploit; just like those shady free VPNs that will use your computer as an exit node for their residential proxy network
In the US, AI incarnations of dead kids are used to lobby congress[]. You can resurrect the brutally murdered 10 year old Uzi Garcia, who's hobbies were "football, swimming, and video games" to do his actual secret hobby which is doing the political bidding of other adults and talking to congressman. There is literally a button on the page to let this AI resurrected dead relative to talk to congress.
Imagine trying to enforce it.
Whether it's actually anonymous in practice, and/or whether it starts to go further than that (websites asking for verified gender? First name? City? Full DOB?) will be a real concern but I think there'd be plenty of push back and tech will end up setting norms here through the browser APIs & permissions prompts. In theory in this is all covered under GDPR anyway so requesting or storing information that's not necessary is illegal anyway, and at least explicit requests are less secret than invisible tracking of the same thing - much easier to reject individually, and to litigate abuse collectively.
Why is it great that you should be completely deprived of the right to anonymous online communication just because a bunch of people voted on it? Democracy without rights is just mob rule.
Given the country in question, if you lived in a Greek polis participating in democratic debate required you to share the same national identity, anonymous-guy#500 from the polis down the street never had any rights to participate. That's not mob rule but the opposite. It's precisely in the mob where anonymity facilitates violence.
Government can do a lot of things to you when it controls a lot of things.
And what government is doing is harder to see when it's doing millions of things.
Exactly, and make non-anon networks the norm enough so that most people will never trust anything said on fringe social networks.
It’s clear that nefarious regimes have won on social media.
It would be interesting to understand the ratio of real human posts to manipulation on twitter for example - I’d imagine it has long ago tipped to majority bot.
Tackling this problem is existential for western democracies. This seems like a reasonable idea. There might be other options (like validated but anonymous) but we have to try something.
It’s worth noting too that many strong western democracies have laws around hate speech and libel that are being broken by anonymous people online - and the citizens of those countries are perfectly happy with those laws.
The vast majority of bots are government funded. Banning anonymity will just mean people only see bots funded by their own government and its allies, making it even more one-sided (because their own government will almost certainly still have the ability to make bots, like in Chinese internet).
More generally, many people spew toxicity under the real name. And there’s already nothing stopping a social media from only allowing verified users.
Hate speech and libel laws have already been misused against people who didn’t actually “hate” or lie. Even if Western democracies are falling, this could make them fall faster, so IMO we should try better ideas first.
Amusingly, (locally generated) LLM text becomes an anonymity mask in those scenarios.
panny•1h ago
Yeah, it's toxic behavior, I'm sure of it.
morkalork•56m ago