TLDW: i think anonymity is a huge curse i think if we can do away with anonymity then we can begin to rebuild democracy and of course ultimately it comes down to all of us ultimately we need to learn to be responsible not to insult not to propagandize and i think that will only come just as we look at each other as physical people in a place like this that will only be that will only eventually be realized if we can do away with anonymity so a new social contract new ways of reinventing democracy through analog and a more creative and responsible regulatory attitude towards um to to big social media and internet companies

cool story, bob29 the 18 day old account with no profile info ;)

I'm just teasing. HN survives on a strong culture, and a moderator who appears to be inhuman, or at least doesn't need the kind of sleep and bathroom breaks we associate with human beings.

Losing pseudonymity would be a high price to pay, for a bunch of reasons. Moderation, on the other hand, doesn't scale.

Perhaps that's a feature, not a bug. Maybe the scales moderation can't reach aren't scales we benefit from having.

It depends on whether you're for or an enemy of the EFF's type of libertarian politics which he definitely is and so am I. I'd even put Jaron Lanier in that camp too. His solution is just make everyone pay. But I guess in such situations you'd have to use your card and you'd also lose anonymity but then you'd have to pay for all your services and I think that's worse. I don't have gripes about the ad model at all, most people see ads as a nuisance anyway. Also if AI is driven by the big data it gets from the people, it's people that facilitate such trends and that's what I am more worried of.

People will weaponize that power vacuum and not everyone is an engineer that just wants to build something. There are people with nationalist interests, theocratic interests, religious interests, and profit interests all in the way of that and this will never change. It's why the internet was way better when it was just engineers and smart people. Also why America on paper looks awesome but in practice doesn't live up to the hype. It's why the freedom of thought Internet got us nothing more than the degeneration into fascist, theocratic, and communist trends. You may agree with the theory that anonymity, no government involvement of any kind at all, anarchist self organizing systems, etc outweighs the bad, but I don't. Not when the central argument for such thing is turned on it's head and totalitarianism is the "fight against the man" which in this case would be liberal democracy.