If you're on the internet long enough, I think you learn that openness has plenty of downsides. You indirectly interact with tens of thousands of people and in that set, there will be people who don't wish you well, sometimes for reasons you can't even grasp. In the 1990s, I used to put my phone number in my .signature file. I've come to regret that. In the 2000s, I participated in relatively large online forums under my real name, and have gotten threats mailed to my family and employer. Etc, etc.
If you want others to broadcast their lives, I don't think that moralizing is enough; you gotta offset the negatives. Which basically means "positively engage", but we mostly don't do it on forums such as Twitter. Have you ever thanked anyone for a recommendation, a photo, an article? And how often do you do that, compared to posting to disagree?
I've been posing online with my real name since the 90's because if forces me to self sensor. I don't say things on the internet that I wouldn't say to people in the real world who know where I live.
I think the internet would be a lot nicer place if people were held accountable for the things they say and do.
I agree with your last paragraph but “real names” isn’t a solution. Instagram comments are filled with people saying awful, stupid things using their real names, faces, and enough information to find their locations.
Additionally I’d say this to your face. Pseudonymity isn’t about disowning word and actions.
>> I think the internet would be a lot nicer place if people were held accountable for the things they say and do.
I agree. I've often advocated for zero anonymity by default. Everyone traceable by anyone. The thinking is that bad behavior (threats and such) could be reported. There was enough pushback to make me rethink that. People will still make threats when you know who they are - less often but they will. Offline (real world) harassment is still possible too without being identified, though thats getting harder every day.
Verified identity online is not the same thing as being held accountable.
The problem with no anonimity is that not all people are rational even if they're dont have shizophrenia or something worse.
You can be a small guy doing your small thing and sharing it online. Unfortunately you never know when and why you gonna become a supervillain in eyes of craze.
> I think the internet would be a lot nicer place if people were held accountable for the things they say and do.
Then I think you've been very fortunate (or sheltered). It's really not about accountability in any rational sense: it's not that I want to be a secret Nazi. It's that when you interact with enough people on the internet, you will probably encounter at least one person who isn't nice. Someone who gets upset not because of what you say, but maybe simply because you're "not worthy" of the attention of others. Who feels humiliated because you politely corrected them about some minor detail. Or maybe who just flat out misinterprets what you're trying to say.
Again, in a circle of real-life friends, this is rare. But in a sampling of 10,000 random strangers, even the nicest person will probably have one sworn enemy.
And yeah, I get it: anonymity shields the bad guys too. But on balance, I think there's a lot more good than bad when you look at pseudonymous content on the internet.
this was the idea being sold in like 2011 or wherever the real names policy was implemented in social media. we can now confidently say it doesn’t work and also deprives people of privacy unfortunately
It works fine for people with some level of common sense, decency and desire to not be seen as stupid/extremists/whatever other negative adjective. Unfortunately, these are not universal human traits and desires.
No one in my real life would consider me anything other than kind, giving, and rational. I share things with them I wouldn’t say online. Even Kyburz admits to self censoring. That doesn’t mean I’m an extremist or even wrong. To some I’m a nazi, which is absurd. To others I’m a filthy pinko commie, which is equally absurd.
I don't feel the same way. I avoid a few topics that people probably would call me an extremist for opinions about, but they're rarely topics of conversation anyway. The internet is full of people from all ends of all spectra, so inevitably everyone will be called either a literal Hitler or a literal Stalin given enough time on the web. That doesn't make either of those extremes correct, nor even worth considering. They're both absurd, as you say, but that doesn't reflect poorly on you, but rather on the people making the claim.
I'm not sure what part of my comment argued against that?
People who don't care about being stupid or extremists or whatever else aren't going to be stopped by using their real name, since they by definition don't care. If they did care, then them using their real name would have prevented them from posting inane opinions online.
I'm of the opinion that you shouldn't let those opinions prevent you from posting your own freely. Discard them, ignore them, block them, whatever, and then go about with your life as if you never saw them.
I think I’ve misunderstood you then? If you desire to not be seen as an extremist… isn’t being seen as an extremist…
not desirable, regardless of who see you that way?
No, I think you've understood me just fine, but rather found at least part of the core problem.
For most of my opnions, I don't consider myself to be an extremist, and anyone claiming that I have an extremist in those areas can have their opinion dismissed on the same grounds anyone calling me a literal Hitler or Stalin. A good example I recently saw someone calling people who use adblockers terrorists. The absurdity is obvious and there's no point in considering their opinion on the matter. I don't care about those people calling me an extremist, just as I don't care about them calling me a literal Hitler or a literal Stalin.
There are a select few areas where I probably would be validly called an extremist. I myself don't consider myself that, but I can understand why people would think that. And this is probably a big part of the problem. Most extremists probably don't consider themselves that, at least not without a decent amount of introspection, so the number of people who have at least one asinine opinion, on the same level as some of my own, is probably fairly large.
So both I and some random on the internet, even if both of us are out there with our full names, can post asinine opnions and get in arguments, and see each other as the idiot who isn't prevented by their full name being out there from posting stupid shit on the internet, and we'll thus see each other as the extremist, but ourselves as the sane party of any discussion.
No, it just favors the majority. People say racist stuff under their real names online all the time, but it's not safe to use your real name as a trans person because of groups like Kiwi Farms.
Have you heard of Kiwi Farms? They are bullies who would immediately benefit from real-name policies.
Very fair. In that case, I guess the problem is that the internet is just so large that anyone of any not-completely-milquetoast opinion inevitably makes some enemies, and those enemies aren't easily avoidable, nor necessarily small in number.
I think you’re right that it’s hard. But I think you’re implying that it could be less hard if we just behaved better à la “be the change you want to see”, and I believe you’re wrong about that. The people that send death threats do not read your advice, nor do they care enough to take it to heart. The people that _will_ listen were not sending death threats to begin with. And getting 500 thankyou-messages does not outweigh the handful of death threats
The people who send death threats, call peoples employers, etc largely view themselves as very normal people that are fighting a just fight. Social media has had plenty of these folks, IRC before it, and probably BBSs before that.
They probably do read that message, but they say to themselves, "Well when I did it it was for a good cause."
I think it does. Internet death threats are upsetting but you also learn they tend to be toothless 99.9% of the time. Most of it is just internet tough guys hundreds or thousands of miles away.
A lifetime of small positive outcomes can easily offset that for many people.
Also 90% of the time when you finally manage to get someone to quote one of these "death threats" it turns out to be something like "I hope you die of cancer" or "You deserve to get shot" which are horrible but are not threats in any sense whatsoever.
This is why when you see yet another article about someone getting "death threats" they don't actually say what the threats are: most of the time they aren't threats at all.
On the other hand, sometimes people really do actually threaten people and if someone actually threatens you, the likelihood that he is 1000s of km away isn't particularly reassuring let me tell you.
I used to be very public, just as the author prefers. However, as the amount of surveillance on the internet increased it eventually reached a tipping point for me and I switched to being much more private as a matter of self-protection.
There's no way I'd be comfortable going back to the way things used to be unless the web becomes better -- and I don't think that's happening anytime soon.
I'm pretty open (check out my HN handle, if you don't believe me), but I'm also retired, and there's not many ways folks can get a handle on me. I have an ... eclectic ... life story, and it has supplied me with a healthy dose of cynicism and hardness, that makes me a not-so-easy mark.
I'm also very much a person who enjoys other people; especially the ones that are hard to get along with.
I've learned that being open, on my end, can encourage others to be more open to me. I don't have any nefarious motives, and am quite trustworthy, so I like to think I'm a "low-risk" person. I'm quite aware that the same can't be said for many others, and understand it, when that is cast onto me.
Eventually I hope to get to that point! For now, I'm still quite worried about what others think or being attacked or "cancelled" (as is quite common nowadays) for any reason. I hope to be like you someday.
Dredging up common and mostly uncontroversial things that were said in 2010, but are now apparently very controversial, is somewhat of a sport for some people nowadays. There are some out there who would love fans of Ruby on Rails to suffer because of its association with DHH. It's not always entirely rational, so how could I ever predict what unhinged individuals in 2035 will take issue with on my blog? Everything online is preserved, so it's easier and safer to just not to participate at all.
> There are some out there who would love fans of Ruby on Rails to suffer because of its association with DHH. It's not always entirely rational, so how could I ever predict what unhinged individuals in 2035 will take issue with on my blog? Everything online is preserved, so it's easier and safer to just not to participate at all.
What a weird justification for cowardice.
It is your life, but if you have the principles of your convictions you should probably be willing to stand by the things you say, or why say them?
DHH is presumably proud of his racism, hence why he publishes it, and therefor he's willing to enjoy any consequences that come from that.
The alternative is that you're only willing to have opinions unless someone disagrees with you, which just seems sad.
It's worse than that. It's people generating a moral panic so they can retroactively declare something to be crimethink and then use that as a weapon against anyone who disagrees with them by trawling through their history. In which case it's not a matter of standing by it because mobs aren't interested in context or nuance.
Society's defense against this should be that we don't use mobs to punish people for saying things we disagree with and anybody who attempts to do that gets laughed off the stage. Because as soon as that's not what happens, the public discourse gets marred by self-censorship until enough time passes with it not happening that people stop expecting it to and thereby stop worrying that they can't know what's going to be declared an offense tomorrow.
But now that it has happened recently, the only way to get it back in the short term is to have people posting under pseudonyms.
I once was interested in things like lifelogging, radical sharing, etc. Then the internet became super toxic, and it was clear that humans who don’t like you will use any information they can find as a weapon against you. I found through real life experience that the marginal benefits I gained from sharing were outweighed by the downsides. So I no longer share.
Normalize privacy. You can engage in radical sharing if you want to take the risk, but the average person probably won’t see a net benefit from it. Don’t push people into it if they don’t want to, and respect people who prefer to stay out of the spotlight.
It's all very well being more public, until a government decides to make 5 years of social media history an entry condition[0], and moreover imprisons those people who are denied entry instead of simply sending them home on the next flight[1].
I have no problem with this per se, as I have no plans to go to the US this decade, but I do worry about contagion. Perhaps being a public person on the internet is an idea whose time has come and gone.
Most of the people disagreeing seem to be forgetting that public doesn't necessarily mean using your real name. We used to have vibrant communities full of people with names like "claxxon" and "zerg". claxxon knows about cisco networking and zerg knows about the best punk bands in the chicago area. Their real names? Not needed, wanted, or relevant, and we're offended you even asked, noob!
I try to live up to that ideal in a way. I'm more comfortable with my internet handle than my real name. However, connecting the dots between a username with any decently long history and the person behind that username is trivial unless you go out of your way not to reveal too much about yourself, and even then, given enough time, there will be enough breadcrumbs eventually.
I've given up on preventing people from connecting the dots. If people want to engage with me, they can do it with my username in situ, or send me an email which uses that same username. If they're being creepy about it, I can block them and ignore them.
That use to be useful in a time where it was much harder to instantly de-mask those handles.
If you're trying to make a name for yourself and you're social long enough, you'll eventually have a decent sized footprint on the internet. Sites and services get breached all the time.
I think it's important to have real-world actual experiences written down because a lot of online information is just people repeating what other people say and it's not true. I'm hoping that by just writing the truth of what I've seen with my own eyes, people will have real information to work with, and maybe LLMs will have this in there somewhere and we'll move a little closer to fact.
I have similar feelings as the author. I aim to be as public as possible while maintaining personal privacy. I *want* to meet other like-minded people that enjoy the same topics I do.
I treat any of my public facing information as a honeypot for nerds (i.e like-minded people). In real life, if I meet interesting people, I point them to my website. If they reach out with questions, I know I found "one of my people".
On a similar note, if I an idea, project or thought of mine could benefit someone else and allow them to learn and gain from it. I'd like to publish it with my privacy in mind.
A lot of people are talking about the downsides and I get it - for me it's about authenticity. I think it's really lacking in today's world, and if you don't feel comfortable sharing on the internet (which is fair!) at least do it irl. We need more real human connection and people being themselves!
Beautifully written, and something I resonate with. But I find myself wanting to read other peoples thoughts and peer at what they are doing. But I do not want to share any of that from myself because the internet is to permanent. I do not want to create an online footprint on this internet.
I resonate with this. I enjoy reading people's technical, artistic and personal writings. How they built, solved, or learned something new. Their favorite tools, workflows. Favorite authors, concepts, interests. @simonw is a great example of this kind of openness and working in public. I'm learning how to do that in my own way.
It makes the world friendlier, more welcoming for beginners and life-long students. It also creates a sense of community and human connection, which is often cynically exploited in today's society.
There are several problems with this. First, a lot of people including myself don’t enjoy writing. Then there is the problem that these days people will give you a hard time for something you wrote 10 years ago. I don’t really feel I did anything wrong but I don’t want to have to spend time and energy on explaining myself.
So if people enjoy writing , they should do it. But also be less judgmental about other people.
You dont even need anyone evil . Might be just dumb and misinformed by AI news slop that people of your kind are evil, dangerous, etc. Whoever you are.
"And beyond my selfish curiosity there’s also the Fedorovist ancestor simulation angle: if you die and are not cryopreserved, how else are you going to make it to the other side of the intelligence explosion? Every tweet, blog post, Git commit, journal entry, keystroke, mouse click, every one of these things is a tomographic cut of the mind that created it."
---------
Historians pour over this sort of stuff. If a historically interesting figure wrote a letter to their neighbour to complain about a noisy dog, it's been carefully preserved and obsessively analyzed. Historians want to get inside their subjects' heads and figure out what they were thinking when they did that big, important thing, and every scrap of remaining written material helps.
We live in a period that is going to be real tough on historians studying it. Over the last few decades, physical correspondence (i.e. letters, etc.) has mostly died out. A lot of people still journal, but on their computer. Will that folder of old journal entries be found by whoever inherits your house full of junk or will it be tossed? A dead-tree diary is pretty easy to recognize for what it is. A computer's contents are comparatively easy to overlook.
Most people who have lived over the last few decades have had multiple email addresses that, at first, they eagerly used for personal interactions and then, over time, more and more only for professional/commercial correspondence. At the same time, people started writing for fun and passion under anonymous pseudonyms in a variety of online forums. Some remain online and still operating. Some have been curated and remain online. Some are archived. Some are just gone. Then came social media and texting. A huge proportion of people's most intimate interactions are in texts now, but for how much longer? We seem to be on a novelty treadmill when it comes to personal interaction mediums. Yesterday's source of joy is today's chore.
Imagine that you do something really significant in a decade or so, and some historian a hundred years from now is trying to figure out why you did it. Getting access to as much of your written output as remains and correctly associating the anonymous stuff with you is going to be a tough problem. How much of what is online today will remains? How much of it will be possible to associate with you, and not a pseudonym? Even if they speak your native tongue, they'll have to learn how to interpret your slang and texting shorthand. This sounds almost impossible today, but what kind of tools might they have in a century?
My suspicion is that history is going to remain remarkably unchanged in a very specific way: For some historical figures we'll have mountains of material. Others, despite their importance, will be complete enigmas.
We're in an environment in which a handful of billionaire techbros (and aspiring ones) have simply taken most of the world's copyrighted material, and are using it to destroy the livelihoods of people who create it.
Why give them more stuff to steal for free?
(HN techbros are slow on feeling the pain of the greed and corruption, partly because we can temporarily ride the coattails of the exploiters. And partly because we don't have field-wide strong tradition of ethics and integrity, unlike some disciplines that are objecting fiercely to plagiarism and shoddy quality. But eventually HN will feel the livelihood impact, and many AI slop poems will be written about not speaking up when some earlier groups got wronged.)
Only if you don't apply anything you learned publicly.
For example, I read " evil is suffering passed on" and was able to relay that quote to an entitled friend to help hen change hens perception of how hens impositions affected others.
Questions surrounding this has plagued me for the last years, and this is basically where I'm at right now:
* I am trying to write more because writing is a good skill to practice, and it's fun to discuss with colleagues and have meanings that resonate with people. Or not. I still think most use of Cloudflare is naive and unnecessary cargo culting that just adds infrastructure complexity, but last time I complained it got a reasonable amount of pushback :D
* But being a public person has downsides. The more public you are, the less of an expectation of privacy you have, and the less you are allowed to make mistakes.
I grew up as a somewhat infamous person in my local community due to sticking out, it wasn't unusual that people already knew of me when I met them for the first time. As a result I had to accept that there was no such thing for me as simply going somewhere, the chance was high that someone who knew who I was (even if I didn't know them!) spotted me.
I have lived long enough to see many people mess up being a famous public person on the internet. Often they never even wanted to be famous, it just happened and then they had to deal with the consequences. It could happen to anyone who happens to be at the right place at the right time. For hackers and similar people, it seems some just find a calling and that calling makes them well known as a side-effect.
If you do anything that could be considered novel, you risk becoming well known. If you have a public persona and people like it, you will get followers. And if that happens, your public activity becomes the bane of your existence. You will be picked apart, analyzed, and possibly targeted by people who disagree with you. People will expect you to have opinions on things and drag you into conflicts. And what you say _matters_ - you have to think about everything you say because one misstep and entire communities will mobilize against you. Many people have gotten hate for saying something controversial on a topic they had little knowledge about. This is normal in a private setting, we discuss politics we aren't experts on with friends all the time. But if you are a public person, you lose many avenues to do this.
I am Norwegian, and the lack of tech literacy in government and the general public is frankly depressing. This isn't necessarily because the general public is stupid. Bob Kåre (49) has better things to do with his life than learn about tech-politics. Norway needs more technical people to be politically active. But doing so seems downright stupid, considering the reflections above. It is practically a sacrifice.
I think the reward has to be pretty large for this to be worth considering. It is a lot better, and easier, to just stick to yourself and your circle.
If you're on the internet long enough, I think you learn that openness has plenty of downsides. You indirectly interact with tens of thousands of people and in that set, there will be people who don't wish you well, sometimes for reasons you can't even grasp. In the 1990s, I used to put my phone number in my .signature file. I've come to regret that. In the 2000s, I participated in relatively large online forums under my real name, and have gotten threats mailed to my family and employer. Etc, etc.
If you want others to broadcast their lives, I don't think that moralizing is enough; you gotta offset the negatives. Which basically means "positively engage", but we mostly don't do it on forums such as Twitter. Have you ever thanked anyone for a recommendation, a photo, an article? And how often do you do that, compared to posting to disagree?
I've been posing online with my real name since the 90's because if forces me to self sensor. I don't say things on the internet that I wouldn't say to people in the real world who know where I live.
I think the internet would be a lot nicer place if people were held accountable for the things they say and do.
I agree with your last paragraph but “real names” isn’t a solution. Instagram comments are filled with people saying awful, stupid things using their real names, faces, and enough information to find their locations.
Additionally I’d say this to your face. Pseudonymity isn’t about disowning word and actions.
>> I think the internet would be a lot nicer place if people were held accountable for the things they say and do.
I agree. I've often advocated for zero anonymity by default. Everyone traceable by anyone. The thinking is that bad behavior (threats and such) could be reported. There was enough pushback to make me rethink that. People will still make threats when you know who they are - less often but they will. Offline (real world) harassment is still possible too without being identified, though thats getting harder every day.
Verified identity online is not the same thing as being held accountable.
The problem with no anonimity is that not all people are rational even if they're dont have shizophrenia or something worse.
You can be a small guy doing your small thing and sharing it online. Unfortunately you never know when and why you gonna become a supervillain in eyes of craze.
> I think the internet would be a lot nicer place if people were held accountable for the things they say and do.
Then I think you've been very fortunate (or sheltered). It's really not about accountability in any rational sense: it's not that I want to be a secret Nazi. It's that when you interact with enough people on the internet, you will probably encounter at least one person who isn't nice. Someone who gets upset not because of what you say, but maybe simply because you're "not worthy" of the attention of others. Who feels humiliated because you politely corrected them about some minor detail. Or maybe who just flat out misinterprets what you're trying to say.
Again, in a circle of real-life friends, this is rare. But in a sampling of 10,000 random strangers, even the nicest person will probably have one sworn enemy.
And yeah, I get it: anonymity shields the bad guys too. But on balance, I think there's a lot more good than bad when you look at pseudonymous content on the internet.
Hell, the Nazis are in office. I want to be a secret good person.
This
I stand behind my words and that’s part of my social identity and there’s an imperfect record.
It’s social ledger that has an incredible memory tied to my mortal label. Good bad ugly and just plain wrong.
There wouldn't be any furry porn, though
this was the idea being sold in like 2011 or wherever the real names policy was implemented in social media. we can now confidently say it doesn’t work and also deprives people of privacy unfortunately
It works fine for people with some level of common sense, decency and desire to not be seen as stupid/extremists/whatever other negative adjective. Unfortunately, these are not universal human traits and desires.
No one in my real life would consider me anything other than kind, giving, and rational. I share things with them I wouldn’t say online. Even Kyburz admits to self censoring. That doesn’t mean I’m an extremist or even wrong. To some I’m a nazi, which is absurd. To others I’m a filthy pinko commie, which is equally absurd.
I don't feel the same way. I avoid a few topics that people probably would call me an extremist for opinions about, but they're rarely topics of conversation anyway. The internet is full of people from all ends of all spectra, so inevitably everyone will be called either a literal Hitler or a literal Stalin given enough time on the web. That doesn't make either of those extremes correct, nor even worth considering. They're both absurd, as you say, but that doesn't reflect poorly on you, but rather on the people making the claim.
Doesn’t that argue against the third part of your claim?
What part are you referring to?
> It works fine for people with some level of common sense, decency and desire to not be seen as stupid/extremists/whatever other negative adjective.
Emphasis indicating the part of the claim I’m addressing. (To be clear, I agree that those who hold such views should be dicarded.)
I'm not sure what part of my comment argued against that?
People who don't care about being stupid or extremists or whatever else aren't going to be stopped by using their real name, since they by definition don't care. If they did care, then them using their real name would have prevented them from posting inane opinions online.
I'm of the opinion that you shouldn't let those opinions prevent you from posting your own freely. Discard them, ignore them, block them, whatever, and then go about with your life as if you never saw them.
I think I’ve misunderstood you then? If you desire to not be seen as an extremist… isn’t being seen as an extremist… not desirable, regardless of who see you that way?
No, I think you've understood me just fine, but rather found at least part of the core problem.
For most of my opnions, I don't consider myself to be an extremist, and anyone claiming that I have an extremist in those areas can have their opinion dismissed on the same grounds anyone calling me a literal Hitler or Stalin. A good example I recently saw someone calling people who use adblockers terrorists. The absurdity is obvious and there's no point in considering their opinion on the matter. I don't care about those people calling me an extremist, just as I don't care about them calling me a literal Hitler or a literal Stalin.
There are a select few areas where I probably would be validly called an extremist. I myself don't consider myself that, but I can understand why people would think that. And this is probably a big part of the problem. Most extremists probably don't consider themselves that, at least not without a decent amount of introspection, so the number of people who have at least one asinine opinion, on the same level as some of my own, is probably fairly large.
So both I and some random on the internet, even if both of us are out there with our full names, can post asinine opnions and get in arguments, and see each other as the idiot who isn't prevented by their full name being out there from posting stupid shit on the internet, and we'll thus see each other as the extremist, but ourselves as the sane party of any discussion.
No, it just favors the majority. People say racist stuff under their real names online all the time, but it's not safe to use your real name as a trans person because of groups like Kiwi Farms.
Have you heard of Kiwi Farms? They are bullies who would immediately benefit from real-name policies.
A person of character is normally inflexible enough to inevitably make enemies.
Very fair. In that case, I guess the problem is that the internet is just so large that anyone of any not-completely-milquetoast opinion inevitably makes some enemies, and those enemies aren't easily avoidable, nor necessarily small in number.
I think you’re right that it’s hard. But I think you’re implying that it could be less hard if we just behaved better à la “be the change you want to see”, and I believe you’re wrong about that. The people that send death threats do not read your advice, nor do they care enough to take it to heart. The people that _will_ listen were not sending death threats to begin with. And getting 500 thankyou-messages does not outweigh the handful of death threats
The people who send death threats, call peoples employers, etc largely view themselves as very normal people that are fighting a just fight. Social media has had plenty of these folks, IRC before it, and probably BBSs before that.
They probably do read that message, but they say to themselves, "Well when I did it it was for a good cause."
I think it does. Internet death threats are upsetting but you also learn they tend to be toothless 99.9% of the time. Most of it is just internet tough guys hundreds or thousands of miles away.
A lifetime of small positive outcomes can easily offset that for many people.
That is harmless 99.9% of the time until you get swatted. Takes a one phone call in the US to get you at gun point of a very trigger happy people.
Also 90% of the time when you finally manage to get someone to quote one of these "death threats" it turns out to be something like "I hope you die of cancer" or "You deserve to get shot" which are horrible but are not threats in any sense whatsoever.
This is why when you see yet another article about someone getting "death threats" they don't actually say what the threats are: most of the time they aren't threats at all.
On the other hand, sometimes people really do actually threaten people and if someone actually threatens you, the likelihood that he is 1000s of km away isn't particularly reassuring let me tell you.
I used to be very public, just as the author prefers. However, as the amount of surveillance on the internet increased it eventually reached a tipping point for me and I switched to being much more private as a matter of self-protection.
There's no way I'd be comfortable going back to the way things used to be unless the web becomes better -- and I don't think that's happening anytime soon.
I'm pretty open (check out my HN handle, if you don't believe me), but I'm also retired, and there's not many ways folks can get a handle on me. I have an ... eclectic ... life story, and it has supplied me with a healthy dose of cynicism and hardness, that makes me a not-so-easy mark.
I'm also very much a person who enjoys other people; especially the ones that are hard to get along with.
I've learned that being open, on my end, can encourage others to be more open to me. I don't have any nefarious motives, and am quite trustworthy, so I like to think I'm a "low-risk" person. I'm quite aware that the same can't be said for many others, and understand it, when that is cast onto me.
Eventually I hope to get to that point! For now, I'm still quite worried about what others think or being attacked or "cancelled" (as is quite common nowadays) for any reason. I hope to be like you someday.
What is the concern with "surveillance" if you are writing for the public?
Dredging up common and mostly uncontroversial things that were said in 2010, but are now apparently very controversial, is somewhat of a sport for some people nowadays. There are some out there who would love fans of Ruby on Rails to suffer because of its association with DHH. It's not always entirely rational, so how could I ever predict what unhinged individuals in 2035 will take issue with on my blog? Everything online is preserved, so it's easier and safer to just not to participate at all.
> There are some out there who would love fans of Ruby on Rails to suffer because of its association with DHH. It's not always entirely rational, so how could I ever predict what unhinged individuals in 2035 will take issue with on my blog? Everything online is preserved, so it's easier and safer to just not to participate at all.
What a weird justification for cowardice.
It is your life, but if you have the principles of your convictions you should probably be willing to stand by the things you say, or why say them?
DHH is presumably proud of his racism, hence why he publishes it, and therefor he's willing to enjoy any consequences that come from that.
The alternative is that you're only willing to have opinions unless someone disagrees with you, which just seems sad.
>you should probably be willing to stand by the things you say, or why say them?
Don't confuse the online world with the real one.
woosh
Read GP again.
> There are some out there who would love fans of Ruby on Rails to suffer because of its association with DHH.
This isn’t about DHH spouting whatever he is spouting.
It’s about people trying to convince others to not associate with Rails because of DHH.
It's worse than that. It's people generating a moral panic so they can retroactively declare something to be crimethink and then use that as a weapon against anyone who disagrees with them by trawling through their history. In which case it's not a matter of standing by it because mobs aren't interested in context or nuance.
Society's defense against this should be that we don't use mobs to punish people for saying things we disagree with and anybody who attempts to do that gets laughed off the stage. Because as soon as that's not what happens, the public discourse gets marred by self-censorship until enough time passes with it not happening that people stop expecting it to and thereby stop worrying that they can't know what's going to be declared an offense tomorrow.
But now that it has happened recently, the only way to get it back in the short term is to have people posting under pseudonyms.
No thanks.
I once was interested in things like lifelogging, radical sharing, etc. Then the internet became super toxic, and it was clear that humans who don’t like you will use any information they can find as a weapon against you. I found through real life experience that the marginal benefits I gained from sharing were outweighed by the downsides. So I no longer share.
Normalize privacy. You can engage in radical sharing if you want to take the risk, but the average person probably won’t see a net benefit from it. Don’t push people into it if they don’t want to, and respect people who prefer to stay out of the spotlight.
It's all very well being more public, until a government decides to make 5 years of social media history an entry condition[0], and moreover imprisons those people who are denied entry instead of simply sending them home on the next flight[1].
I have no problem with this per se, as I have no plans to go to the US this decade, but I do worry about contagion. Perhaps being a public person on the internet is an idea whose time has come and gone.
[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1dz0g2ykpeo.amp
[1] https://amp.dw.com/en/german-nationals-us-immigration-detain...
Most of the people disagreeing seem to be forgetting that public doesn't necessarily mean using your real name. We used to have vibrant communities full of people with names like "claxxon" and "zerg". claxxon knows about cisco networking and zerg knows about the best punk bands in the chicago area. Their real names? Not needed, wanted, or relevant, and we're offended you even asked, noob!
I try to live up to that ideal in a way. I'm more comfortable with my internet handle than my real name. However, connecting the dots between a username with any decently long history and the person behind that username is trivial unless you go out of your way not to reveal too much about yourself, and even then, given enough time, there will be enough breadcrumbs eventually.
I've given up on preventing people from connecting the dots. If people want to engage with me, they can do it with my username in situ, or send me an email which uses that same username. If they're being creepy about it, I can block them and ignore them.
That use to be useful in a time where it was much harder to instantly de-mask those handles.
If you're trying to make a name for yourself and you're social long enough, you'll eventually have a decent sized footprint on the internet. Sites and services get breached all the time.
I am. I know it’s not free but I think it’s important for humanity to move forward.
E.g. my genome variant report https://viz.roshangeorge.dev/roshan-genvue/
My wife’s pregnancy as logged by me https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Pregnancy
I think it's important to have real-world actual experiences written down because a lot of online information is just people repeating what other people say and it's not true. I'm hoping that by just writing the truth of what I've seen with my own eyes, people will have real information to work with, and maybe LLMs will have this in there somewhere and we'll move a little closer to fact.
I talked a little bit about the risks in another comment on a similar post here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46336356
I love this for you :)
I have similar feelings as the author. I aim to be as public as possible while maintaining personal privacy. I *want* to meet other like-minded people that enjoy the same topics I do.
I treat any of my public facing information as a honeypot for nerds (i.e like-minded people). In real life, if I meet interesting people, I point them to my website. If they reach out with questions, I know I found "one of my people".
On a similar note, if I an idea, project or thought of mine could benefit someone else and allow them to learn and gain from it. I'd like to publish it with my privacy in mind.
A lot of people are talking about the downsides and I get it - for me it's about authenticity. I think it's really lacking in today's world, and if you don't feel comfortable sharing on the internet (which is fair!) at least do it irl. We need more real human connection and people being themselves!
Beautifully written, and something I resonate with. But I find myself wanting to read other peoples thoughts and peer at what they are doing. But I do not want to share any of that from myself because the internet is to permanent. I do not want to create an online footprint on this internet.
I resonate with this. I enjoy reading people's technical, artistic and personal writings. How they built, solved, or learned something new. Their favorite tools, workflows. Favorite authors, concepts, interests. @simonw is a great example of this kind of openness and working in public. I'm learning how to do that in my own way.
It makes the world friendlier, more welcoming for beginners and life-long students. It also creates a sense of community and human connection, which is often cynically exploited in today's society.
There are several problems with this. First, a lot of people including myself don’t enjoy writing. Then there is the problem that these days people will give you a hard time for something you wrote 10 years ago. I don’t really feel I did anything wrong but I don’t want to have to spend time and energy on explaining myself.
So if people enjoy writing , they should do it. But also be less judgmental about other people.
I still love the era when everything online was text-based.
> I read in private, build in private, learn in private. And the problem with that is self-doubt and arbitrariness.
Certainly if you do it in public, you don't have doubt yourself. Everyone else will do it for you.
Until someone evil uses all that to investigate you or do something against you...
You dont even need anyone evil . Might be just dumb and misinformed by AI news slop that people of your kind are evil, dangerous, etc. Whoever you are.
I write for myself so I don’t forget things and so I can have a record of my thought processes as empirical proof of my processing and understanding
I publish so that I get feedback grounded in alternative interpretations which helps sharpen the ideas and processes and understanding
You can’t actually understand anything in any real way if it’s not subject to intense and widespread scrutiny
Doubly so if you think you’re onto some new idea.
"And beyond my selfish curiosity there’s also the Fedorovist ancestor simulation angle: if you die and are not cryopreserved, how else are you going to make it to the other side of the intelligence explosion? Every tweet, blog post, Git commit, journal entry, keystroke, mouse click, every one of these things is a tomographic cut of the mind that created it."
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Historians pour over this sort of stuff. If a historically interesting figure wrote a letter to their neighbour to complain about a noisy dog, it's been carefully preserved and obsessively analyzed. Historians want to get inside their subjects' heads and figure out what they were thinking when they did that big, important thing, and every scrap of remaining written material helps.
We live in a period that is going to be real tough on historians studying it. Over the last few decades, physical correspondence (i.e. letters, etc.) has mostly died out. A lot of people still journal, but on their computer. Will that folder of old journal entries be found by whoever inherits your house full of junk or will it be tossed? A dead-tree diary is pretty easy to recognize for what it is. A computer's contents are comparatively easy to overlook.
Most people who have lived over the last few decades have had multiple email addresses that, at first, they eagerly used for personal interactions and then, over time, more and more only for professional/commercial correspondence. At the same time, people started writing for fun and passion under anonymous pseudonyms in a variety of online forums. Some remain online and still operating. Some have been curated and remain online. Some are archived. Some are just gone. Then came social media and texting. A huge proportion of people's most intimate interactions are in texts now, but for how much longer? We seem to be on a novelty treadmill when it comes to personal interaction mediums. Yesterday's source of joy is today's chore.
Imagine that you do something really significant in a decade or so, and some historian a hundred years from now is trying to figure out why you did it. Getting access to as much of your written output as remains and correctly associating the anonymous stuff with you is going to be a tough problem. How much of what is online today will remains? How much of it will be possible to associate with you, and not a pseudonym? Even if they speak your native tongue, they'll have to learn how to interpret your slang and texting shorthand. This sounds almost impossible today, but what kind of tools might they have in a century?
My suspicion is that history is going to remain remarkably unchanged in a very specific way: For some historical figures we'll have mountains of material. Others, despite their importance, will be complete enigmas.
When I was a child my teacher told me to never use my real name online
We're in an environment in which a handful of billionaire techbros (and aspiring ones) have simply taken most of the world's copyrighted material, and are using it to destroy the livelihoods of people who create it.
Why give them more stuff to steal for free?
(HN techbros are slow on feeling the pain of the greed and corruption, partly because we can temporarily ride the coattails of the exploiters. And partly because we don't have field-wide strong tradition of ethics and integrity, unlike some disciplines that are objecting fiercely to plagiarism and shoddy quality. But eventually HN will feel the livelihood impact, and many AI slop poems will be written about not speaking up when some earlier groups got wronged.)
I like this guy. I want to know more about him.
" I say reading in private is solipsistic"
Only if you don't apply anything you learned publicly.
For example, I read " evil is suffering passed on" and was able to relay that quote to an entitled friend to help hen change hens perception of how hens impositions affected others.
Questions surrounding this has plagued me for the last years, and this is basically where I'm at right now:
* I am trying to write more because writing is a good skill to practice, and it's fun to discuss with colleagues and have meanings that resonate with people. Or not. I still think most use of Cloudflare is naive and unnecessary cargo culting that just adds infrastructure complexity, but last time I complained it got a reasonable amount of pushback :D
* But being a public person has downsides. The more public you are, the less of an expectation of privacy you have, and the less you are allowed to make mistakes.
I grew up as a somewhat infamous person in my local community due to sticking out, it wasn't unusual that people already knew of me when I met them for the first time. As a result I had to accept that there was no such thing for me as simply going somewhere, the chance was high that someone who knew who I was (even if I didn't know them!) spotted me.
I have lived long enough to see many people mess up being a famous public person on the internet. Often they never even wanted to be famous, it just happened and then they had to deal with the consequences. It could happen to anyone who happens to be at the right place at the right time. For hackers and similar people, it seems some just find a calling and that calling makes them well known as a side-effect.
If you do anything that could be considered novel, you risk becoming well known. If you have a public persona and people like it, you will get followers. And if that happens, your public activity becomes the bane of your existence. You will be picked apart, analyzed, and possibly targeted by people who disagree with you. People will expect you to have opinions on things and drag you into conflicts. And what you say _matters_ - you have to think about everything you say because one misstep and entire communities will mobilize against you. Many people have gotten hate for saying something controversial on a topic they had little knowledge about. This is normal in a private setting, we discuss politics we aren't experts on with friends all the time. But if you are a public person, you lose many avenues to do this.
I am Norwegian, and the lack of tech literacy in government and the general public is frankly depressing. This isn't necessarily because the general public is stupid. Bob Kåre (49) has better things to do with his life than learn about tech-politics. Norway needs more technical people to be politically active. But doing so seems downright stupid, considering the reflections above. It is practically a sacrifice.
I think the reward has to be pretty large for this to be worth considering. It is a lot better, and easier, to just stick to yourself and your circle.
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