this post was submitted on 01 Apr 2024
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Anonymity enables you to speak the truth if you want, but it also enables you to lie whatever, if you want. No one can hold accountable an anonymous person if their lies produce something tragic.
While people speaking openly under their identity are more likely to speak the truth when they do it, as they have much more to lose if they're caught lying.
That depends very much on what they have to say.
You assume that people are more likely to speak the truth, but it depends very much how socially acceptable the truth is. People lie all the time because they know their real opinions wouldn't be accepted by others.
So what you get with real identifies are everyone falsely agreeing with eachother. Look at linkedin for example of what happens when people don't discuss their true opinions in front of their employers for example. You get lots of upvotes, cheering and general faked positivity and self promotion.
You will never see an employee being critical of his employer there, because of real names. If you go to glass door, you get the true opinions, because of no real names.
@1984 That is because of the purpose of those networks. On more general purpose networks like Reddit it is not uncommon for people to simply take advantage of the anonymous system in order to farm karma by posting stuff that is simply not true.
And I'm saying this as a person who genuinely liked Reddit at first, because of the reasons you mentioned.
And it probably was like that before.
But things got a bit more complex. Even on LinkedIn and Facebook, while you should theoretically be public, many people are chosing not to. While on Reddit, you could clearly recognize some people, even public persons.
Even so, the issue is more complex than that of anonymity. It's more about motives and other things, and anonymity does not ipso facto bring the truth, no matter how socially acceptable is it.
I tend to view most of the stuff that is posted online nowadays as rather a personal opinion of the poster - which can be true, or not. You decide.