Does Anonymity really improve discourse?

2024-05-24T07:30:05+00:00

By anonymity, I really mean anonymity -- not pseudonymous communities

Anonymity lowers the barrier to entry... for people who prefer
anonymous communities. But a lot of people who want to invest a lot of
real energy into a community, people who want to put work into serious
projects, are not going to prioritize an imageboard over something
like Discord or Twitter.

The main purpose of imageboards is to give a toilet to the internet.
Need to blow off steam? Vent? Post a dick pic? Get involved in petty
debates? Or are you such a brain damaged person that you get banned
from "mainstream" internet constantly -- you're the target audience
for 4chan.

Textboards and Gikopoi seem to have less tendency to go to complete
ass than imageboards, so anonymity does not automatically imply shit.
But this may just be due to the fact that these communities are very
small -- and they have less bias against pseudonymity than imageboards
As a counter-example, look at Sageru IRC for something that's generally
lower quality than /b/, /soc/, /pol/ etc

On places like IRC, Gikopoi, Mastodon, and other low-barrier pseudonymous
communities, mentally ill people and naughty children are easily blocked,
which creates a negative feedback loop that incentivizes the posters to
either shape up or get out. On the other hand, with an imageboard, when
trolling, someone can flame himself in the comments to keep himself in the
spotlight -- an anti-feature.

So my basic opinion is that anonymous and pseudonymous communities are
essentially equally good when small, and that as communities scale,
anonymous communities fare worse. This makes me think that gatekeeping
is actually not a bad thing. I can't imagine that Something Awful would
have done well without the $10 account registration fee, and something
like Reddit wouldn't work without karma. Anonymous communities have no
means by which to gatekeep, which is ultimately to their detriment

What do you think?

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2024-05-24T20:51:31+00:00

Smaller anonymous communities, like Gikopoi and some textboards and smaller
imageboards I think tend to gravitate towards a mixture of pseudonymous and
anonymous users because that's the best model that they can thrive on-- people
can still act like they "know" each other and maintain a culture without having
any strings attached, and new people either fit in, adapt, or get filtered out.

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2024-07-11T23:25:18+00:00

i like to imagine the net as a city
anonymous boards are graffiti in a culvert; culverts are for the
disenfranchised and graffiti entails beautiful works next to smiley
faces and poorly drawn snake pairs...

anonymity attracts various types of outcasts.
one of the big questions for an anonymous board is what kind
of outcasts it attracts. this culvert attracts a mellower outcast.

Agree, but how do you define gatekeeping?

2024-07-16T02:52:10+00:00

I think you make good points, but how do you define gatekeeping?
Because using it as a clutch can make communities stale.
It'll just be old heads patting each other's back until death
Sure you can encourage people how to act and discourage bad behaviours
But I view that more as guidance rather than gatekeeping.

I think a focus on gatekeeping is good for communities that want to
stay niche. Otherwise you end up with the citizen police of online.

That being said the strange world/heyuri thing linked here is
a good example of gatekeeping. I love how they discourage wojaks
and oomer talk. More sites should do that.

As for what gyudon_addict said, I think having a mix of anon and
pseudo users encourages healthy diversity. Focus on one too much
and either you get toxic hellholes or egoboo central.

For the scaling thing, I agree. It's best that anonymous places
don't get bloated so there's nothing left but bad shitposts.
It's best to spread other sites and encourage people find a
space for them instead of trying to jam everyone in one location