Good? Bad? Trip- and capcodes only sensible for mods and admins? Useful for suggesting more contributors than just Sling!XD/uSlingU? Good for a community with no vanity and attention whoring? Or promoting trolling and DQN behaviour?
Discuss!
Many of my best posts(or those that got the best reaction) were made anonymously. At the time I wouldn't have made them if I had to use a name, because I was afraid of being wrong.
>Useful for suggesting more contributors than just Sling!XD/uSlingU?
That requires more sources of material to contribute.
>Good for a community with no vanity and attention whoring?
Yes, with some light moderation. Zero moderation and you end up with Usenet.
>Or promoting trolling and DQN behaviour?
I think trolling is only promoted as readily as the community bites the flamebait lures. I get the impression that on futaba trolling is largely ignored and/or embraced, if that makes any sense.
Anonymous wins the internet. Let people ID themselves if they want, but don't force them.
As for suggesting a big community, personally I look at the quality/quantity of posts instead of who posts them. Do people REALLY care who posts stuff on an imageboard where 99.99% of the stuff isn't by the poster anyway?
> I get the impression that on futaba trolling is largely ignored and/or embraced, if that makes any sense.
It does. There's entire boards on 2ch.net devoted to collecting kopipe (like the Yoshinoya rant), trolling material and strategies and so on. You could say that the Japanese are pretty much familiar with their usual forms of online communication (never seen anyone on Futaba ask What's sage? ^^) - somehow the same does not seem to hold true for the west / rest of the internet.
>>2
I completely agree with you about fear of being wrong getting in the way of non-anonymous posting. I'm also afraid that if I end up being right, I'll become falsely committed--obliged to being committed, even--to what I said. Even if I'm open-minded and admit to being mistaken, it'll be difficult for me to politically back down from an old stance if my name is attached to it.
>>4
The western world has few usual forms of online communication. The brand-obssessed North American culture likes to distinguish itself at every available opportunity instead of building on others' existing work.
Everyone has their own forum, their own commenting system, their own skins and interface quirks, their own unwritten rules, their own memes, and so on. Unlike 2ch's function as a huge melting pot that blends every culture into every other culture and produces a kind of meta-culture where everything more or less fits in, western online communities are less expansive and less forgiving of elements that don't conform to expectations.
If 2ch culture can be described as a de facto standard, then western online culture may be described as many warring standards (PHP/Perl, DVD+R/DVD-R, PDAs/handsets, you know the sort).
There used to be Usenet. There still is, but it's long since stopped being relevant to anyone except old Usenet people and a few people who stumble in on Google Groups.
Me, I always felt web forums were a huge step backwards from Usenet. But 2ch-style boards aren't too bad. Much more simplistic than Usenet, but that might not be a bad thing.
And Usenet doesn't require registration.
Usenet isn't as anonymous as a 2ch-style board. As long as a message can easily be traced to its source, there will be things that are left unsaid for fear of commitment or retribution.
That said, I don't use Usenet enough to know about how different newsgroups and their users interact, compete, cooperate, or such.
Any message board that logs the IPs of posters is no less anonymous than Usenet...
Heck, actually, it doesn't have to be the message board doing the logging; it can be the web server itself. Just about every web site out there logs the IPs of its visitors.
>>12
Well, yes, but then you'd have to manually sort through the server log and timestamps and correlate particular posts or posters to particular IPs, and factor in transparent proxies and all that fun stuff.
Usenet gives you an email address, a message ID traceable back to a specific user, an IP address, and a user-agent right in each message's headers.
Even 2ch logs. however, with boards like this you are still anonymous. Proxies. Mavelous things. Bounce off a couple and huzzah, tracking you down is 20x harder. Do it from a public place: even harder. The internet is more anonymous than people realise.
The only thing worth all that work is something that you can never be caught at, like child porn.
I have been considering making some sort of truly anonymous message board, with strong crypto for transmitting messages and identity proofs, plus certain countermeasures to traffic analysis (padding messages so that they're always the same size when transmitted, so that somebody eavesdropping can't connect you to a message by its length, and possibly also delayed posting to stop identification by posting time). That would still require setting up the web server not to log, and also it would require users to trust that you did this.
It's an interesting problem, but not one I have much time to work on.
>>15
the internet is less anonymous than you realize... most proxies log the ips of people who use them, and most public proxies aren't configured very securely...
as far as posting from a public place... there are fairly easy ways of tracking you down even then, but you'd probably find out someone's trying to track you down before they would find you...
Well, if you truly wanted to go anonymously, you'd probably have to look into systems like Share, Waste or Freenet, which are mainly used for filesharing - but could still be used as some vast dump of encrypted proxies, sending, receiving and hosting entries in order to create some kind of otherworld usenet.
I don't need absolute, guaranteed anonymity. I just want enough of it to not have to be concerned about whether voicing a controversial opinion is going to kill my future. Freedom of speech is moot if I constantly have to watch what I say or risk tainting my reputation for all time.
>most proxies log the ips of people who use them
many open proxies are actually worm infected boxes where the user is totally unaware of being used as a middleman. one can also chain the proxies so that it's virtually impossible to know what ip belongs to the original poster
Simpler is better.
Do we need a name field at all? What should it be used for?
Id'ing people with knowledge. A rep isn't always a bad thing, esp. if they need to be known, i.e. WAHA, assorted mods.
>>28
Interesting how some people's attitude will change completely when they know who they're talking to. Sounds to me like you're talking more about ownership than reputation, though.
>>30
What if I'm also an anarchist, a humanist, a behavioural psychiatrist, a plague bearer, a blasphemer, and a person who slips down slopes?
I always wanted to be a person who slips down slopes.
Also, what if I know who I am talking to even when the other person is anonymous?
> Also, what if I know who I am talking to even when the other person is anonymous?
Blasphemy!
>>Also, what if I know who I am talking to even when the other person is anonymous?
Ahh, the mysterious knowledge the interbutt imparts on us...
> Also, what if I know who I am talking to even when the other person is anonymous?
Refer to everyone and everything impersonally. The >>number equals the idea and the idea equals the >>number. There is no "who", only "what".
Zen? why not Buddhist in general? Yeah, you'd have to exempt Pure Land Buddhism, but those are a bunch of nutballs anyway.
I really like how they enforce Anonymous on Futaba's /b/: No name field, no subject field and both are missing in the actual post as well, only the date remains which can then be added to with a sage or something else through the e-mail field. Awesome!
I think it's funny how pretty much every westerner who is new to Futaba/2channel style boards is chosing a nickname by default. This can be observed pretty well at the increased posting rate on the iitran discussion board ever since they started doing the Emma anime fansubs.
There are three possible reasons I can come up with why this is the case:
> They don't want to be Anonymous
thats it, but its not like everyone acts like that.
Hey, a cool thread. Who was that guy asking where the analysis and study was..? </rhetoric> This is it!
I feel the difference between anonymity and ID is a difference in purpose. The "entities" (seeing as we're disconnecting the human from the equation) that remain anonymous are here to express pure thought and ideas. It's just like a public square where you walk into a discussion and make comment.
Part of the reason could also be lazyness, but that doesn't apply when the form autofills, and I don't think anyone here posts so voraciously that they can't stop to enter details.
And those that give an identity? As >>39 said, perhaps people don't know about the option to stay anonymous. I'd agree that newcomers perhaps don't know about the choice.
Force of habit? Sure. I know that's the case for me. But there must be more to it than that...
We don't want anonymity. I think we've definitely hit the nail on the head here.
Choosing anonymity means foregoing any sort of identification. I'm heavily interested in security, and I'm always security concious, but I still choose to take an identity, as you can see.
So what is it? Perhaps it's a sense of community? I know I like to come in and I laugh gently, something usually like "Oho, more quality posts by Sling". We like to imagine we know people. I'm sure many of you have very fucntional (open to interpretation) relationships with people online that you've never met before. It's everywhere, not just here. Online game clans, for just one example. It's there alright. But it goes deeper than that, I'm sure...
When we eschew the cloak of anonymity, we take on an identity. This is inescapable. We are someone, whether we acknowledge it or not. The fact is, humans want an identity. Nay, they need it. Humans are by their very nature a social animal. Now that, is a real meme (unless we've recently found a gene for "society").
Humans need other humans. Society is what makes us whole. But without an identity, all humans are similar. We may look different, but it is our capability for individual thought that sets us apart. If you dissolve that individuality, as tends to occur in communist society, humans lose their sense of identity.
Contrast this to a meritocracy (something like capitalism). Now, your identity is everything. Your acheivements mean nothing without an identity to associate them with; the stronger the better.
With the loss of other identifiers that the internet has brought with it, an identity is now more important than ever. Without things like a voice or a face or a body to represent you, your entire presence is within this fragile identity. Outside this board, neither you nor I exist. Not in the same way.
It's intersting to note that while an identity is needed in "The Wired" (to borrow a term), that identity is often disparate to that present in what we understand as reality. Many people are very different in the Wired. Part of this is clearly the fascination that comes from reinventing oneself. But it also further highlights the fact that humans want an identity. Many online identities are far "stronger" or overt than in reality. What we see is people struggling even harder to create an identity for themselves.
These identities are naturally transient. Nothing lasts forever on the internet. Not really. Posts will age and be pushed off this board. Companies and websites collapse; people change. Nothing will compare to the length of a human life. Is it this temporary quality that makes our identites in the Wired burn ever so much brighter?
Anonymity is a concept. It is a tool, it is a weapon, it is a shield (it may well save your life, depending on your actions and where you live). But it is not absolute. Humanity can never embrace anonymity; not totally. Otherwise, humanity would cease to exist.
I wish. How about we just say I think too much?
>>41 would fail sociology if he studied it.
> Humanity can never embrace anonymity; not totally.
I guess you need to take a trip to 2ch.net.
>Contrast this to a meritocracy (something like capitalism). Now, your identity is everything. Your acheivements mean nothing without an identity to associate them with; the stronger the better.
Or something like an image board, where your only worth is in the text or images you supply to the whole. Only in this case anonymous achievements can mean something, if an idea can catch on.
>Humanity can never embrace anonymity; not totally.
Internet forums hardly encompass the entirety of the human condition.
People want to be the big name, the well-known poster. They want to be recognized by their online buddies and lord it over the "noobs". On almost every forum of that other kind, postcounts and registration dates become a mark of seniority which influences the reaction to anything put forward by the author. Now, not every member in any forum behaves this way, but enough do to make the pattern noticeable. In most general discussion forums you'll often find one or two extremely long threads dedicated to inane little games that are little more than an excuse to keep traffic flowing. They are usually dominated by a small circle of regulars who seemingly have little to do but play message board games. (see also shii's second bullet point http://shii.org/shiichan) Recently this kind of thing has expanded into posts earning points towards RPG-like stats, displayed under their names for all to see as if to say "look at me! look how much time and effort I've dedicated to this! respect me!".
There are a lot of people with tripcodes on 2ch. They even introduced a system recently which enables you to register an account on the site.
>>46
Yes, but mainly the tripcode users are registering, and it's still 70-90% anonymous.
> They don't even know about the option to stay Anonymous on these kind of boards.
I think that's a lot of it. They're prompted for name and email (or recently "link") so they fill in the form because they're not sure how the forum works. It doesn't say those fields are optional.
> People want to be the big name, the well-known poster. [...] respect me!".
What was your point with this? We already know trinket-laden forums encourage junk posting... it doesn't mean that's the only way things can be.
and I suspect >>41 would consider a telephone number to be an "identity".
>>44
Like I said, I don't study it. But I am going to proffer my thoughts on the matter.
>>45
Yes, or an imageboard. I was highlighting the differences between (for example) capitalism and communism, of which imageboards could be considered a hybrid in terms of the ideologies found there.
Movements/ideas/concepts don't need a figurehead, but the gist of what I was saying is that people feel the need for recognition, if not reward, for their efforts, whatever form that may take. Note that this is dependent on their social background. I'm going to say that I assume such behaviour (desire for recognition) is more common in capitalistic societies.
Correct; internet forums don't encompass the entirety of the human condition. I was making some very general statements about human behaviour here; not specific to imageboards. Apologies if that wasn't clear. If one were to state it mathematically, it could be said that the uptake of anonymity is a proper subset of the human condition as we see it. Imageboards are also a proper subset of the human condition. Clearly there is some intersection of these two sets, but neither is a subset of the other. (apologies again, my analogies suck, and contrary to how things may appear, I'm not particularly articulate)
> People want to be the big name, the well-known poster. [...] respect me!".
Just futher affirmation of what we believe, I think. I hate to say it, but I don't think we can squeeze much more out of this one, unless the direction changes.
No, I don't consider a phone number to be a discrete identity, but I think it's certainly a significant facet of one, for many people nowadays. Last I heard, mobile phones were quite popular with modern youth. Your phone number is how your friends reach you, talk to you, and send you (shudder) indecipherable fragments of perl. ^_^
People make relationships, get fired, get told about someone dying, etc. by SMS nowadays. If you want to talk about phone numbers, I certainly think mobile phone numbers are an important part of an identity. I don't want to say it's part of the identity directly, it's just a path to communicate to someone, but the fact that it's there changes how we communicate with each other, and indirectly affects our identities.
I think an identity is what you make of it. If a phone number is all that identifies an entity, that's an identity. An identity is what you present, but is absolutely subjective. The way we interact with other people means that we have a different identity for each person we communicate with, though similar as most of them may be.
Point in short: there's nothing that says an identity is a true and accurate representation of an entity. But my identity here as "someone called Furi who wants to blather about the human condition" is no less valid than my identity for which I have a house address, credit card number, and if you're American, an SSN.