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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 1st, 2023

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  • Genesis, particularly Peter Gabriel-era Genesis, is my favorite band. I’ve played around with using names from their songs as usernames for years, but it’s only when I joined Reddit that I decided I should try to settle on one. I’ve always been fond of this track off their 1972 album Foxtrot. So if you should see some variation of this username online, it’s probably me.


  • Fifteen to 20 years ago many people thought that the anonymity of the internet provided a permission structure for people to act incivilly. But if anything, the rise of social media has disproven that. People post the most incredibly toxic shit on Facebook or Twitter, often under their own names, right now. It’s not the relative anonymity, or lack thereof, that dissuades people from toxic behavior. It’s a collective action problem that rewards whatever the community (however defined) doesn’t rise up to stamp out.

    Require a real ID (which sounds vaguely Orwellian where it doesn’t sound nebulous) and you’ll still get Ben Shapiro and Steven Crowder and your uncle yelling transphobic trash on Twitter and Facebook and elsewhere. Places like Reddit and the fediverse are rapidly becoming outliers.

    And as pointed out in OP, requiring all accounts tied to an identifiable person would be a disaster for people in abusive relationships, or who have a stalker, or other endangered persons. (Thinking back to Google Buzz and the ways it enabled online harassment and abuse before Google mercifully cut it showrt.)

    The current, semi-anonymous, system is possibly the worst system devised, with the possible exception of all the others. No system is going to solve a collective-action problem. We, the collective, have to step up and fix it ourself.

    (My understanding of Web 3.0 is limited to the crypto space, which seems inherently scammy; if there’s more to it than that, and I should be aware of it, I’d love to be educated.)