Agreed. Lack of anonymity would only silence the true trollies, who are a minority, albeit a vocal one. But it still leaves the idiots, who are vastly more numerous.
And idiots are going to idiot.
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Unless it results on one actually knowing that some vileness is associated with a person you know or at the very least are acquainted with, a ‘real name’ is just as anonymous as ‘WhaarGarbbbbl569873’.
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I’ve been an admin of bulletin board systems, IRC channels, blogs, forums, and FB pages since the mid 80’s. Using handles, nicknames, aliases, or whatever you want to call it, has not been a problem. It protects people’s privacy and, encourages others to focus on the message, and not make a pop decision based on whose team you and they are on.
The recent FAD for forcing people to use their real names is driven by data mining practices of major social media networks, who provide detailed dossiers as products sold to government, law enforcement, and employers. The promise that it will fight “trolling” has never been seriously verified, as it is nothing more than a pretense. Good, civil people find it hard to argue against (they have “nothing to hide!”), and are easily convinced that objectors are merely “troublemakers”.
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Yeah, I was surprised to find this was the case, but it was clear as day when joining the FB group of another forum I belong to that already has a certain degree of derp. One would think people would be less of idiots with their pictures and names right there. Nope. And unlike the forum which has decent moderation, this was much less so, and it appeared to also be trolled by people on purpose. The first online community I left because it was just too toxic.
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I remember some Boingers back then vehemently defending that G+ policy and real name policies in general. I’m not sure if they genuinely thought it would improve behavior or if they just hated whistleblowers, stalking victims, people with “ethnic” names that would automatically get flagged as fake, and online privacy in general. Either way, they were and are wrong, wrong, wrong.
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This is correct. It’s not the engineers trying to solve anything. It’s also not a new debate, some of the old dial-in BBSes required real names and made the claim that people would behave better than in pseudonymous boards because of that. They didn’t though, because racism, sexism, ageism, and any other form of discrimination were there, unlike the pseudonymous places.
The difference was that on pseudonymous online places, not only was there less discrimination, but any bullying/harassment usually started and ended there. However, any that was seen was easy to headline as ‘anonymity leads to cyberbullying!’ because it was a new thing. On the other hand, with real name online places, the bullying was likely to take place in real life in addition to or instead of online, so that was nothing new and there was no story (even though it is obviously worse).
30 years ago, engineers knew that real names made things worse instead of better. But the salespeople want real names that can be sold.
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Using real names is no deterrent for ole Bigtime Bob who doesn’t give a shit what people think of him when he bellows off some country-fried wisdom. Or anyone who is truly unhinged or has gotten really angry about something. Worse, there are local sociopaths who everyone gives wide berth and respect to, who will continue to berate, bully and attack others, but they somehow never get cautioned, let alone booted.
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I remember that and AFAICT they thought were sincere and thought it would actually improve behavior. It’s one of those ‘at first thought’ progressive things where you see a problem, see an apparently quick and easy answer, and go right to making it mandatory.
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Of course forcing someone to use a real (sounding) name is good policy. I can’t think of a single reason why a scheme like that might fail. It’s not as if you can create a new Google account in a couple minutes.
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You mean, relatives? 
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Speaking of G+'s policy in particular, it never ceased to amuse me that in the help documentation produced for YouTube’s new G-plus-enated, real-names-required comment system, they blurred out the name of the person in their screenshot examples:
It’s like the documentation writers realized what nobody in Google’s engineering and marketing teams did: that throwing people’s real names all over the internet is a terrible idea.
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Google’s engineering people are notoriously incapable of understanding how a neurotypical human reacts, from Larry on down. It lead to the real name thing and I think it’s one reason they’ve never had been able to create a breakout product besides advertising - which is just cold hard metrics. And it must give their HUMAN resource type people fits.
I always imagine Kang and Kodos discussing G+ launch and going ‘The hu-mans will love this SO-cial PRO-duct we have TAI-lored for THEIR con-SUMP-tion’ ‘YES it would be IL-LOG-i-cal not to LOVE it’. ‘HA. Ha ha HA.’
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