Comment by naravara
7 hours ago
You’re trying to engineer a social interaction. Stop that!
People remembering your handle is persistent, and people remembering if they had good or annoying interactions with you is persistent reputation that exists in the minds and interactions between different people. These are things people naturally do. If people don’t recognize your name and see it come in a trusted spot they just don’t trust you.
How tech breaks this is deprioritizes the people in the interactions. Instead of sending messages you use a “like” button to be intelligible to the platform. You don’t see the people putting stuff on your feed, it gets fed to a timeline that cuts it off from all context and atomizes it for your consumption. It’s the UI/UX that drives this. Even compare Reddit and HN with old forums. On forums like 25% of every post is just static bits of self-expression. There’s a PFP, the username is bigger, there’s often a big signature block. All of this makes the peoples’ posts feel like a person talking to you rather than text blocks that happen to have a tiny username and timestamp on it.
My point is that you don't own your handle. Therefore you aren't your handle.
Edit: to clarify: You aren't your handle, because it can be taken away from you, can be injected, blocked, overridden, etc.
My technical rambling then went on about how or when we can make this "handle" decentralized so it cannot be taken away from you. Hard. As proven in practice. Almost impossible.
My name is maintained by a government. It is a "handle" that could be taken away too, but is governed in lots of rules, systems and regulations. My face (an extension of my DNA, I guess) is decentralized and owned by me: its the only handle that afaik no one can take from me.
So in social interactions, you're right: reputation, bound to "me", my face, my DNA is all that matters. But online we don't have this. The closest we can probably get is "my name", controlled by governments.
> My point is that you don't own your handle. Therefore you aren't your handle.
This is a good point. I wrote a self-deprecating post to Reddit one time that got flagged by AI or someone who isn't a native English speaker as a "threat of violence." This is almost word for word the exchange that triggered it:
Me: [some in-depth discussion of electrical wiring in a house]
Other person: Wow, thank you so much! I would hire you to fix my wiring!
Me: haha oh I'd probably find some other way to burn your house down
The final line was meant to be a humble way of dismissing the compliment by playing down my expertise. But someone with the power to ban accounts parsed this as "I am going to commit arson."
And so I lost the ability to DM any of my friends. My entire reputation was gone. This was a nearly 20yo Reddit account.
And I can't make a new account and tell people "this used to be me" because then Reddit bans your new account because it's against the rules to create a new account if you've been banned.
Yes, I've created other accounts since then. But I can't ever link them to my old one because Reddit will just ban the new ones. (I tried this, and that's exactly what happened.)
I can't even participate on the same subreddits because there's some algo that recognizes if two accounts have similar subscription habits and does some kind of analysis to guess at if it's a person evading a ban.
I was shocked at first (I was in the mid of organizing an event using Reddit in part for communications, and had to rely on an IRL friend who was helping rn it to speak for me), and then angry, and then just sad.
It's one reason I've begun using one moniker everywhere, and I own that domain name as well. It's the closest I can get to fully owning my handle.
I'm "berkes" almost everywhere. And my domain is my handle as well: berk.es.
So I do the same as you. But I am quite sure e.g. The Great Musk In All His Wisdom will one day either find me annoying and hand over the now discontinued x.com/berkes to someone who agrees better whith His views. Or decides his politics are better served by raising accounts from the deaths and making some AI voice act like me, that spew political messages.
I own "berkes" about everywhere. But nowhere do I really own it. Not even the domain name. The only handle I truly own is some bc1q....... address. One that has -by design- no reputation and one that's impossible to write in pen on the back of a beermat after a nice discussion in a bar.