Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Re: vision: purposeful online community for all human beings

Author:Paul Snively
Posted:7/9/2000; 10:23:56 PM
Topic:vision: purposeful online community for all human beings...
Msg #:18426 (In response to 18423)
Prev/Next:18425 / 18427

Steven Vore: I just wouldn't want to see things degenerate into another Usenet (I love usenet, but the signal-to-nose ratio due to anonymity all but kills it for me).

I'm against censorship. I'm for flame-resistant communities. I don't know that they can happen where complete anonymity and chaos are allowed. And yes, that does make me sad.

This is why anonymity is the wrong approach and pseudonymity is the right approach: it needs to be possible, as an author, to have your privacy protected while still being accountable for what you write. This pseudonymity needs to be associated with a public-key cryptographic system so that a) you can digitally sign what you write so the recipients can ensure that it hasn't been corrupted in transit, and b) you cannot repudiate what you've written by claiming that you didn't write it; you can only be more intellectually honest and claim that you've changed your mind. Engage in enough pseudnomyous communication and you'll evolve a reputation, just as in any other context. This may be informal, as in offline communication, or more formalized, as in the "web of trust" of epinions.com or, for that matter, PGP's web of trust model for validation of public keys. In any case, dissidents and whistleblowers have their privacy protected, while those of us reading them can still gauge any given communication in the context of all of their other communication, and, ideally, the rest of the community's reaction to their communication taken as an aggregate.

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