Comment by postexitus
2 days ago
Back in FidoNet days, some BBSs required identification papers for registering and only allowed real names to be used. Though not known for their level headed discussions, it definitely added a certain level of care in online interactions. I remember the shock seeing the anonymity Internet provided later, both positive and negative. I wouldn't be surprised if we revert to some central authentication mechanism which has some basic level of checks combined with some anonymity guarantees. For example, a government owned ID service, which creates a new user ID per website, so the website doesn't know you, but once they blacklist that one-off ID, you cannot get a new one.
Smaller communities too.
I grew up in... slightly rural america in the 80s-90s, we had probably a couple of dozen local BBSes the community was small enough that after a bit I just knew who everyone was OR could find out very easily.
When the internet came along in the early 90s and I started mudding and hanging out in newsgroups I liked them small where I could get to know most of the userbase, or at least most of the posing userbase. Once mega 'somewhat-anonymous' (i.e. posts tied to a username, not like 4chan madness) communities like slashdot, huge forums, etc started popping up and now with even more mega-communities like twitter and reddit. We lost something, you can now throw bombs without consequence.
I now spend most of my online time in a custom built forum with ~200 people in it that we started building in an invite only way. It's 'internally public' information who invited who. It's much easier to have a civil conversation there, though we still do get the occasional flame-out. Having a stable identity even if it's not tied to a government name is valuable for a thriving and healthy community.
Sounds good!
A German forum I'm on allows members limited invites based on participation. The catch is, you are responsible for the people you invite. If they get in trouble, you will share a part of the punishment.
Honestly, having seen how it can be used against you, retroactively, I would never ever engage in a discussion under my real name.
(The fact that someone could correlate posts[0] based on writing style, as previously demonstrated on HN and used to doxx some people, makes things even more convoluted - you should think twice what you write and where.)
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33755016
This is a subset of "I don't have anything to hide" argument - if we use our real names, I think we'll have more responsibility about what we say. Of course, that's assuming our seemingly democratic governments don't turn authoritarian all of a sudden, as a Turkish citizen, I know that's not a given.
id.me?
Not government owned, but even irs.gov uses it