| #1. Does Anonymity really improve discourse? |
| Published: 2024-05-24 [Fri] 07:30, by |
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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? |