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.
My father lived through the Uruguay dictatorship in the 1970s and avoids all social media whenever possible.
I was an infant at the beginning of democracy, so I haven't taken that much care.
Now, it seems he'll be vindicated once again, I do plan on visiting the USA and I'm hoping my social media won't be an obstacle (fortunately I don't think I have anything, but who knows, maybe I liked a meme or something).
> I will often find a blog post on Hacker News that really resonates. And when I go to check the rest of the site there’s three other posts. And I think: I wish you’d write more!
I really miss that period in the 90's and early 2000's when:
- people were doing interesting things online and tending to those spaces regularly,
- Google actually worked and it was easy to find those things,
- Myspace/Facebook wasn't a thing
I'd love to have the general mood and vibe of the 90's back, which I think contributed greatly to the early Internet and the ability and desire to be public within it.
But even in the 90's, spam was a problem, and it's grown amd morphed into different things over time. Banner ad popups, link farms, SEO optimization, etc.
Age verification laws are going to fully destroy the Internet for anything other than approved business uses, such as selling stuff. Soon, any "public" left will be spammers-spammers in the modern form of influencers either directly trying to sell you something or sponsored in order to support/create a market. Some may argue we've mostly reached that point.
It's over. The forward thinkers need to think beyond the Internet. Until then it's closed groups and chats.
Forums need to make a comeback. Kids these days not only don't know what they are, but have trouble understanding them when explained. I somehow feel like forums could catch on again if there were a shiny enough platform.
To that end, can anyone recommend any decent forum engines? Discourse's UI rubs me the wrong way, and it would be nice to avoid PHP/MySQL as dependencies in general.
As someone who is sometimes on slow/spotty internet, Discourse's loading dots/circles rub me the wrong way. Like what are they *doing* for all this time while I wait for a page of relatively simple-looking HTML to load? I kept seeing these familiar coloured dots on seemingly disparate sites and it took me a while to realise they were all running Discourse.
I've spent (way too much) a lot of time on forums built using xenoforo, though I'm not sure of what's the stack underneath and what was built-in and what had been added by the operators.
Acting in public is hyperlocal - your behaviour affects those around you and gives those affected right of reply, if they have the courage to take it.
Publishing your actions on the Internet is a little different. If people were affected by the action, they are affected (likely unknowingly) by the publication too - and the audience that you grant right of reply has at best an ideological horse in the race, not true skin in the game. And not much courage is required to engage with an opposing position.
So "living publicly" on the internet leaves a permanent door open to ideological conflict, mob behaviour, and creates a disconnect between action and reaction - in both time and space.
Kinda alien for a monkey brain to wrap banana powered neurons around.
Everytime I intentionally interact with Meta's apps/data factories, I feel a bit like in the movie Matrix when Neo is disconnected from the Matrix, wakes up from his pod and sees the other pods. And have to admit I saw that movie when I was to young for it and that scene really did a number on me.
I don't mind being public but I mind if I'm in a way a slave to an entity that uses that to farm my identity and distorts my perception of reality.
If they farm your identity, they do so whether you post online or not. The only way to not contribute is to practice no identity. In that case your biomass still serves as a battery somehow (the movie fails to explain the physics here.)
As I heard it explained, the original manuscript had the humans kept alive because the Matrix was actually running on the humans' brains as the computing substrate. This both made much more sense than humans as a power source, was more horrific, and a better story.
Apparently this was deemed to hard for the unwashed masses to understand, and we were left with this battery analogy instead.
Huh interesting. It makes also much more sense then to have some humans have the ability to change things in the Matrix, considering it was basically running on their brains.
The big question in that case though is why? Why would the AIs keep a simulation of the old world?
To answer your Q tho, this was in one of the sequels I believe, basically the first iterations of the matrix were like "Eden" but humans couldn't adapt to it so they redesigned and iterated it into what you see in the movie. The idea being that if humans weren't busy they'd realize they were enslaved so they had to make a system to keep humans occupied and stimulated enough to be useful.
The internet is a very different place nowadays. There are private companies using your data for profit and manipulating you. Governments prosecuting you based on what you post and bad actors trying to hack/scam you. Even if you stay anonymous. And yet I think there are plenty of people being public online, just perhaps not as much sharing the kinds of things the author mentions.
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.
> 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.
This is why it's not reasonable (for the vast, vast majority of people) to attempt this, and why we have to be realistic about our threat profiles.
Sure, anyone who knows what they're doing and is dedicated enough can find out information about me - that doesn't mean I'm going to advertise my name and location so that everyone can find that information about me with ease.
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 resonate with the "honeypot for nerds" sentiment mentioned by others here.
There is a distinct difference between "being public" as a performance (influencer style) and "working with the garage door open." The author seems to be advocating for the latter.
I've found that publishing raw notes, half-baked projects, or niche interests acts as a high-quality filter. It might not get mass engagement, but the few people who do reach out are almost always high-signal connections. The fear of surveillance is valid, but the cost of total obscurity is missing out on that serendipity.
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.
But how would they be held accountable? Who gets to decide right vs wrong? How do you ensure the accountability mechanism isn’t used against you?
Today, people online are “held accountable” via harassment, threats, SWATting, and such directed towards their friends/family/employer, by internet lunatics who exist across the political spectrum. If you’re popular enough, it doesn’t matter if you’re a leftist, rightist, or literally Mr. Rogers; you’ll get haters who go out of their way to hurt you using whatever PII and vulnerability you expose. Or if you’re not popular, but unlucky and post something mildly controversial from either the mainstream left or right; or if you’re very unlucky. Or if you’re publicly a woman, you’ll face sexual harassment and potentially stalking.
And some of these haters and sex pests have nothing to lose, so holding them accountable doesn’t solve the issue.
I do think a solution involves holding people accountable, but carefully. Perhaps to start, people form overlapping social groups, so a system where a group can only punish people within that group (e.g. banning them from posting), but can’t outside (e.g. harassing them or people close to them, especially in-person, or threatening their job).
Unfortunately that does not really work for people who live in countries governed by oppressive regimes, or people who are in any way different (immigrant, LGBT, etc), and in fact, even posting with the best of intentions will have people wanting you dead. Ask me how I know.
Pseudonymity allows people to freely express ideas with others without fear of it seeping into all aspects of their lives. How else would individuals share and get feedback on things like health issues, relationships, employment, etc. without the threat of repercussion? The internet is so powerful as a tool for connection because of this layer of pseudonymity and striving for a 'nicer' internet is being content with a shallow version of the interconnected human experience.
>> 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.
This fact comes up with Bitcoin a lot. I and everybody else doesn't know who a random hash is but all the activity involving that address is highly traceable. So all you need is an oracle (like a cryptoexchange) that can convert a hash into a person to enforce any penalties against a person.
Same could be true of the internet. You notice illegal activity from a specific IP; that source is responsible for that activity (they did it!). In general that IP is going to be some intermediary (like an ISP) who was relying a packet from a different IP so it'll be on them to provide the next person who is accountable and do you do this chain until you get to an end subscriber. Everybody is anonymous by default but can be traced back to an actual person.
> 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.
Nowadays people can just SWAT you anonymously and cheaply. Or pressure your employer to fire you without identifying themselves to you.
the problem often in conflict is that the incentives aren't symmetrical. if you and somebody exactly like you are put in a ring with a knife each, you'd both have the same things to lose. but often times in real life, and much more so online, one of you has a lot less to lose.
in a conflict in the street, if he gives you a brain injury, you might lose your job, mortgage, family, etc. it's just his next stay in prison, he has nothing more than his freedom to lose for the 5th time. if you give him a brain injury, you might lose your job, your mortgage, family, etc. he'll spend some time in hospital and then he'll be back on the street doing the same thing in a year.
online, it's worse, because now you can be matched with the bum with the least to lose within a 50 miles radius.
Same: I decided c. 2000 that it was better to be the real me everywhere and to live with the benefits but also the restrictions. I am probably a kinder, more constructive person for it.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> I think the internet would be a lot nicer place if people were held accountable for the things they say and do.
Agreed. Equal rights for all people regardless of race wouldn't have happened if individuals starting the first discussions were held accountable for their words.
A recent thing is also that you cannot predict what will be controversial tomorrow. This that are basic common sense today might be controversial tomorrow.
Dumb example: gender. As early as twenty years ago it wasn’t controversial to say that women don’t have a penis. Today it is (i know I’m getting downvoted just for making this example).
So yeah, being public is a dangerous game with huge margins for losing.
It's a good example. People have been fired, reprimanded, blacklisted from their field, harassed and stalked for publicly objecting to the gender identity viewpoint. It somewhat reminds me of the tactics scientologists used to suppress dissent. I'm glad that era is starting to come to an end now.
It's really not coming to an end. People still look silly for talking about things like "the gender identity viewpoint" as if it's just a matter of opinion.
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 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 try to apply a rule that if I do something, and don’t write about it—or otherwise generate external-facing evidence of it—it didn’t happen. I have built so many things in the dark, little experiments or software projects or essays that never saw the light of day. I want to put more things out. If it doesn’t merit an entire blog post, then at least a tweet.
I think this might be the crux of a lot of the disagreement that seems to be present with article (which I feel as well admittedly). So much of my life is stuff that isn't around things I've built or written; sometimes I'm just existing without producing, nowadays with my wife, but in the past maybe with a friend, roommate, or just relaxing alone. I'm not the type of person to be greatly concerned with my legacy or whether lots of people remember me after I'm gone as much as whether the people who do happen to remember me from the interactions I had with them have good memories. I don't see any purpose in documenting this sort of thing, and most of the time it would actively worsen the experience to do so. I don't know if this isn't something that would apply to the author's life or if they're just talking about something else specifically and don't intend to imply that it should literally be every moment, but by their own rule, if they spend any time like this, it didn't happen, so I guess it would be hard to tell the difference.
Officials in my country of origin might lock me out of using banking and government services if I post something wrong on the internet even if I permanently reside abroad, and while I still have relatives there I cannot risk that happening. Oh and if they do and I come back they might also slap me with a 10-20-year sentence for good measure. So nope, can't afford to be any more public than I am (I'm under no illusion that connecting my nickname to my real name isn't a piece of cake, but at least it's one layer of indirection).
I imagine that many people are in very similar boats, and more and more countries steer that way as of late.
Come to Switzerland. The worst country in that regard. Cameras everywhere (lamps etc.). Nobody follows the law. They just make up reasons to ruin your life and everyone has to suffer. There is no privacy, at least in CH.
I have noticed that a few years ago, at least in Zürich, small unobtrusive black enclosures have appeared everywhere on traffic signal/lamp posts along the roads. I can only assume that they contain cameras. But nobody else I've talked to has even noticed them.
Flock ALPR mass surveillance is at least controversial in the US, yet I haven't heard any controversy over the apparent(?) roll-out of ALPR mass surveillance in Switzerland.
I have not spent the effort to dig into what exactly those things are, who owns them, and what their claimed purpose is, but given their recent installation, density, clear view of the roads, and strategic locations (intersections, roadway exits, etc.) an ALPR mass surveillance network is, to me, the most plausible explanation.
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.
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.
> This is one of the best things about writing online: your future friends will seek you out.
Do I live in the same reality as the author? is that really a thing as in "it happens regularly enough to be mentioned as if it was"?
Apart from this I'm so-so about this, like I believe a lot of people from my generation I'm fond of the idea of the internet as it was in the 90s, like a decentralized cyberspace of free spirit thinkers, which slowly diluted itself as decades past and might have been at its peaks during the blog bubble and RSS feeds era (meeh it's arguable). But it seems like that spirit is long gone and we've been compartmentalized, our spaces enclosed like the British Luddites were before us. I'm all for the permacomputing self-hosting ring websites but it seems like a thing mostly done by the cool kids, the Artists, the few that tend to do it for the performative angle more than from their own tropism or the one from the culture (as it was done when it was natural to do so).
I'm not sure we could really go back to that era flavored internet culture without burning the centralized juggernauts to the ground.
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.
The post made me think of a different compromise: more public artifacts when we choose, without surrendering our lives to centralized platforms. Like mentioned in the comments, today’s internet is permanent, searchable, and easily weaponized through harassment, surveillance, or data exploitation, so the personal cost of being ‘public’ can be unpredictable and high.
So why don’t we build a system where our identity and activity data live with us by default, on a small server in our home, instead of scattered across company clouds? Everything we do online could be logged locally under our control, and shared only when we explicitly allow it. If a company wants to use our data (for ads, analytics, or training models), it should be a clear opt-in, scoped to a specific purpose, and priced transparently. If it’s valuable, we should get paid for it and that creates incentive structures.
This also matches how I want to use AI personally. I want my own local model that can learn from my data privately, say something like training or updating nightly while I sleep; so I get the benefits of personalization without handing over the raw contents of my life to someone else’s servers. In a world like that, being “more public” becomes a choice you can make safely, not a gamble you’re forced into.
~ organized thoughts with GPT5.2 and used Apple proofread
As interesting as such a world is to the author, the post fails to appreciate that the beneficiaries of such a world won't be us, but AI companies that hoover this data, pollute it with "alignment", and sell it back to us.
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 usually don’t like it when people use unnecessary big words. But sometimes a word comes by that explains exactly the idea. One of my favorites is Schadenfreude ( it’s funny and real at the same time). When I noticed the author used Solipsism, I definitely judged him for a moment, but after I read the explanation, it was a beautiful description of his stance :)
Solipsism is a philosophical position asserting that only one's own mind is certain to exist.
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.
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!
I think an answer is maybe to have multiple identities on the web. Like I've got real name stuff on Facebook and Linkedin and some anonymous accounts too. You keep the real name stuff safe for work and your mum seeing.
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.
> 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?
That doesn't sound impossible. Perhaps LLMs can already do this.
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.)
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.
We have systematically dismantled by popular consensus the safety of liberalism and belief in a marketplace of ideas.
There is no advantage to being "more public" when it's all to common to get hit by marauding bands of idealists and trolls of all atripes. Nobody rewards you for having nuanced opinions on things like immigration publicly, nor trans rights, nor even something as banal as programming language choice.
We've now lived through a full pendulum cycle where public writing that was insufficiently woke was punished via internet lynch mobs and state pressure, and now we are seeing the exact same thing with insufficiently reactionary ideas invoking...internet lynch mobs and state pressure.
So, no, I don't think I will be more public, and I'll be unsurprised--if sad--when other rational actors do similarly.
There's no reason to be public, because people have made it clear that they'd rather support a system that attacks that than protects it.
Public is that which happens once, in real time,and most importantly derives it's content from spontainious colaberations of humans.Speaking and acting to the moment.
Everything else, the all of all, is a spin off from this.
Clearly phrased to take advantage of the "controversial opinion" for clicks. "I wish people would publish more" is what they mean, but that's not interesting. Can one even "be public"?
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.
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...
My father lived through the Uruguay dictatorship in the 1970s and avoids all social media whenever possible.
I was an infant at the beginning of democracy, so I haven't taken that much care.
Now, it seems he'll be vindicated once again, I do plan on visiting the USA and I'm hoping my social media won't be an obstacle (fortunately I don't think I have anything, but who knows, maybe I liked a meme or something).
[flagged]
Brown sympathizers
> I will often find a blog post on Hacker News that really resonates. And when I go to check the rest of the site there’s three other posts. And I think: I wish you’d write more!
I really miss that period in the 90's and early 2000's when:
- people were doing interesting things online and tending to those spaces regularly,
- Google actually worked and it was easy to find those things,
- Myspace/Facebook wasn't a thing
I'd love to have the general mood and vibe of the 90's back, which I think contributed greatly to the early Internet and the ability and desire to be public within it.
But even in the 90's, spam was a problem, and it's grown amd morphed into different things over time. Banner ad popups, link farms, SEO optimization, etc.
Age verification laws are going to fully destroy the Internet for anything other than approved business uses, such as selling stuff. Soon, any "public" left will be spammers-spammers in the modern form of influencers either directly trying to sell you something or sponsored in order to support/create a market. Some may argue we've mostly reached that point.
It's over. The forward thinkers need to think beyond the Internet. Until then it's closed groups and chats.
Forums need to make a comeback. Kids these days not only don't know what they are, but have trouble understanding them when explained. I somehow feel like forums could catch on again if there were a shiny enough platform.
To that end, can anyone recommend any decent forum engines? Discourse's UI rubs me the wrong way, and it would be nice to avoid PHP/MySQL as dependencies in general.
As someone who is sometimes on slow/spotty internet, Discourse's loading dots/circles rub me the wrong way. Like what are they *doing* for all this time while I wait for a page of relatively simple-looking HTML to load? I kept seeing these familiar coloured dots on seemingly disparate sites and it took me a while to realise they were all running Discourse.
> can anyone recommend any decent forum engines
I've spent (way too much) a lot of time on forums built using xenoforo, though I'm not sure of what's the stack underneath and what was built-in and what had been added by the operators.
Discord feels like this generation's forums (and Reddit).
what's wrong with PHP/MySQL? I am not into web tech, so genuine curiosity.
Acting in public is hyperlocal - your behaviour affects those around you and gives those affected right of reply, if they have the courage to take it.
Publishing your actions on the Internet is a little different. If people were affected by the action, they are affected (likely unknowingly) by the publication too - and the audience that you grant right of reply has at best an ideological horse in the race, not true skin in the game. And not much courage is required to engage with an opposing position.
So "living publicly" on the internet leaves a permanent door open to ideological conflict, mob behaviour, and creates a disconnect between action and reaction - in both time and space.
Kinda alien for a monkey brain to wrap banana powered neurons around.
Everytime I intentionally interact with Meta's apps/data factories, I feel a bit like in the movie Matrix when Neo is disconnected from the Matrix, wakes up from his pod and sees the other pods. And have to admit I saw that movie when I was to young for it and that scene really did a number on me.
I don't mind being public but I mind if I'm in a way a slave to an entity that uses that to farm my identity and distorts my perception of reality.
If they farm your identity, they do so whether you post online or not. The only way to not contribute is to practice no identity. In that case your biomass still serves as a battery somehow (the movie fails to explain the physics here.)
As I heard it explained, the original manuscript had the humans kept alive because the Matrix was actually running on the humans' brains as the computing substrate. This both made much more sense than humans as a power source, was more horrific, and a better story.
Apparently this was deemed to hard for the unwashed masses to understand, and we were left with this battery analogy instead.
Huh interesting. It makes also much more sense then to have some humans have the ability to change things in the Matrix, considering it was basically running on their brains.
The big question in that case though is why? Why would the AIs keep a simulation of the old world?
Matrix lore is quite cool, if you haven't seen the Animatrix check it out. The Second Renaissance is great world building!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sU8RunvBRZ8 (first part)
To answer your Q tho, this was in one of the sequels I believe, basically the first iterations of the matrix were like "Eden" but humans couldn't adapt to it so they redesigned and iterated it into what you see in the movie. The idea being that if humans weren't busy they'd realize they were enslaved so they had to make a system to keep humans occupied and stimulated enough to be useful.
The internet is a very different place nowadays. There are private companies using your data for profit and manipulating you. Governments prosecuting you based on what you post and bad actors trying to hack/scam you. Even if you stay anonymous. And yet I think there are plenty of people being public online, just perhaps not as much sharing the kinds of things the author mentions.
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.
> 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.
This is why it's not reasonable (for the vast, vast majority of people) to attempt this, and why we have to be realistic about our threat profiles.
Sure, anyone who knows what they're doing and is dedicated enough can find out information about me - that doesn't mean I'm going to advertise my name and location so that everyone can find that information about me with ease.
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 resonate with the "honeypot for nerds" sentiment mentioned by others here. There is a distinct difference between "being public" as a performance (influencer style) and "working with the garage door open." The author seems to be advocating for the latter.
I've found that publishing raw notes, half-baked projects, or niche interests acts as a high-quality filter. It might not get mass engagement, but the few people who do reach out are almost always high-signal connections. The fear of surveillance is valid, but the cost of total obscurity is missing out on that serendipity.
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.
But how would they be held accountable? Who gets to decide right vs wrong? How do you ensure the accountability mechanism isn’t used against you?
Today, people online are “held accountable” via harassment, threats, SWATting, and such directed towards their friends/family/employer, by internet lunatics who exist across the political spectrum. If you’re popular enough, it doesn’t matter if you’re a leftist, rightist, or literally Mr. Rogers; you’ll get haters who go out of their way to hurt you using whatever PII and vulnerability you expose. Or if you’re not popular, but unlucky and post something mildly controversial from either the mainstream left or right; or if you’re very unlucky. Or if you’re publicly a woman, you’ll face sexual harassment and potentially stalking.
And some of these haters and sex pests have nothing to lose, so holding them accountable doesn’t solve the issue.
I do think a solution involves holding people accountable, but carefully. Perhaps to start, people form overlapping social groups, so a system where a group can only punish people within that group (e.g. banning them from posting), but can’t outside (e.g. harassing them or people close to them, especially in-person, or threatening their job).
Unfortunately that does not really work for people who live in countries governed by oppressive regimes, or people who are in any way different (immigrant, LGBT, etc), and in fact, even posting with the best of intentions will have people wanting you dead. Ask me how I know.
This just makes the internet a place only for the overtly shameless, which is certainly different, but you'd need to convince me it'd be better.
Pseudonymity allows people to freely express ideas with others without fear of it seeping into all aspects of their lives. How else would individuals share and get feedback on things like health issues, relationships, employment, etc. without the threat of repercussion? The internet is so powerful as a tool for connection because of this layer of pseudonymity and striving for a 'nicer' internet is being content with a shallow version of the interconnected human experience.
>> 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.
Traceability and Anonymity aren't antonyms.
This fact comes up with Bitcoin a lot. I and everybody else doesn't know who a random hash is but all the activity involving that address is highly traceable. So all you need is an oracle (like a cryptoexchange) that can convert a hash into a person to enforce any penalties against a person.
Same could be true of the internet. You notice illegal activity from a specific IP; that source is responsible for that activity (they did it!). In general that IP is going to be some intermediary (like an ISP) who was relying a packet from a different IP so it'll be on them to provide the next person who is accountable and do you do this chain until you get to an end subscriber. Everybody is anonymous by default but can be traced back to an actual person.
> 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.
Nowadays people can just SWAT you anonymously and cheaply. Or pressure your employer to fire you without identifying themselves to you.
the problem often in conflict is that the incentives aren't symmetrical. if you and somebody exactly like you are put in a ring with a knife each, you'd both have the same things to lose. but often times in real life, and much more so online, one of you has a lot less to lose.
in a conflict in the street, if he gives you a brain injury, you might lose your job, mortgage, family, etc. it's just his next stay in prison, he has nothing more than his freedom to lose for the 5th time. if you give him a brain injury, you might lose your job, your mortgage, family, etc. he'll spend some time in hospital and then he'll be back on the street doing the same thing in a year.
online, it's worse, because now you can be matched with the bum with the least to lose within a 50 miles radius.
Same: I decided c. 2000 that it was better to be the real me everywhere and to live with the benefits but also the restrictions. I am probably a kinder, more constructive person for it.
Probably also doing an undeserved benefit to all the others with the moniker.
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.
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.
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.
nowadays wanting public healthcare and advocating for the rule of law can get you branded a terrorist in certain third world countries.
> I think the internet would be a lot nicer place if people were held accountable for the things they say and do.
What does this mean? What sort of accountability do you have in mind?
> 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.
Wish my spelling was better :<
> I think the internet would be a lot nicer place if people were held accountable for the things they say and do.
Agreed. Equal rights for all people regardless of race wouldn't have happened if individuals starting the first discussions were held accountable for their words.
There wouldn't be any furry porn, though
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.
A recent thing is also that you cannot predict what will be controversial tomorrow. This that are basic common sense today might be controversial tomorrow.
Dumb example: gender. As early as twenty years ago it wasn’t controversial to say that women don’t have a penis. Today it is (i know I’m getting downvoted just for making this example).
So yeah, being public is a dangerous game with huge margins for losing.
It's a good example. People have been fired, reprimanded, blacklisted from their field, harassed and stalked for publicly objecting to the gender identity viewpoint. It somewhat reminds me of the tactics scientologists used to suppress dissent. I'm glad that era is starting to come to an end now.
It's really not coming to an end. People still look silly for talking about things like "the gender identity viewpoint" as if it's just a matter of opinion.
It is in the UK. Perhaps it's different in other parts of the world.
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 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 try to apply a rule that if I do something, and don’t write about it—or otherwise generate external-facing evidence of it—it didn’t happen. I have built so many things in the dark, little experiments or software projects or essays that never saw the light of day. I want to put more things out. If it doesn’t merit an entire blog post, then at least a tweet.
I think this might be the crux of a lot of the disagreement that seems to be present with article (which I feel as well admittedly). So much of my life is stuff that isn't around things I've built or written; sometimes I'm just existing without producing, nowadays with my wife, but in the past maybe with a friend, roommate, or just relaxing alone. I'm not the type of person to be greatly concerned with my legacy or whether lots of people remember me after I'm gone as much as whether the people who do happen to remember me from the interactions I had with them have good memories. I don't see any purpose in documenting this sort of thing, and most of the time it would actively worsen the experience to do so. I don't know if this isn't something that would apply to the author's life or if they're just talking about something else specifically and don't intend to imply that it should literally be every moment, but by their own rule, if they spend any time like this, it didn't happen, so I guess it would be hard to tell the difference.
Officials in my country of origin might lock me out of using banking and government services if I post something wrong on the internet even if I permanently reside abroad, and while I still have relatives there I cannot risk that happening. Oh and if they do and I come back they might also slap me with a 10-20-year sentence for good measure. So nope, can't afford to be any more public than I am (I'm under no illusion that connecting my nickname to my real name isn't a piece of cake, but at least it's one layer of indirection).
I imagine that many people are in very similar boats, and more and more countries steer that way as of late.
Come to Switzerland. The worst country in that regard. Cameras everywhere (lamps etc.). Nobody follows the law. They just make up reasons to ruin your life and everyone has to suffer. There is no privacy, at least in CH.
I live in Switzerland too and can't relate at all.
I have noticed that a few years ago, at least in Zürich, small unobtrusive black enclosures have appeared everywhere on traffic signal/lamp posts along the roads. I can only assume that they contain cameras. But nobody else I've talked to has even noticed them.
Flock ALPR mass surveillance is at least controversial in the US, yet I haven't heard any controversy over the apparent(?) roll-out of ALPR mass surveillance in Switzerland.
I have not spent the effort to dig into what exactly those things are, who owns them, and what their claimed purpose is, but given their recent installation, density, clear view of the roads, and strategic locations (intersections, roadway exits, etc.) an ALPR mass surveillance network is, to me, the most plausible explanation.
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.
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>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.
> This is one of the best things about writing online: your future friends will seek you out.
Do I live in the same reality as the author? is that really a thing as in "it happens regularly enough to be mentioned as if it was"?
Apart from this I'm so-so about this, like I believe a lot of people from my generation I'm fond of the idea of the internet as it was in the 90s, like a decentralized cyberspace of free spirit thinkers, which slowly diluted itself as decades past and might have been at its peaks during the blog bubble and RSS feeds era (meeh it's arguable). But it seems like that spirit is long gone and we've been compartmentalized, our spaces enclosed like the British Luddites were before us. I'm all for the permacomputing self-hosting ring websites but it seems like a thing mostly done by the cool kids, the Artists, the few that tend to do it for the performative angle more than from their own tropism or the one from the culture (as it was done when it was natural to do so).
I'm not sure we could really go back to that era flavored internet culture without burning the centralized juggernauts to the ground.
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.
The post made me think of a different compromise: more public artifacts when we choose, without surrendering our lives to centralized platforms. Like mentioned in the comments, today’s internet is permanent, searchable, and easily weaponized through harassment, surveillance, or data exploitation, so the personal cost of being ‘public’ can be unpredictable and high. So why don’t we build a system where our identity and activity data live with us by default, on a small server in our home, instead of scattered across company clouds? Everything we do online could be logged locally under our control, and shared only when we explicitly allow it. If a company wants to use our data (for ads, analytics, or training models), it should be a clear opt-in, scoped to a specific purpose, and priced transparently. If it’s valuable, we should get paid for it and that creates incentive structures. This also matches how I want to use AI personally. I want my own local model that can learn from my data privately, say something like training or updating nightly while I sleep; so I get the benefits of personalization without handing over the raw contents of my life to someone else’s servers. In a world like that, being “more public” becomes a choice you can make safely, not a gamble you’re forced into.
~ organized thoughts with GPT5.2 and used Apple proofread
As interesting as such a world is to the author, the post fails to appreciate that the beneficiaries of such a world won't be us, but AI companies that hoover this data, pollute it with "alignment", and sell it back to us.
As well as nefarious government actors.
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.
Never have so many people with so little to say, said it so loudly.
I usually don’t like it when people use unnecessary big words. But sometimes a word comes by that explains exactly the idea. One of my favorites is Schadenfreude ( it’s funny and real at the same time). When I noticed the author used Solipsism, I definitely judged him for a moment, but after I read the explanation, it was a beautiful description of his stance :)
Solipsism is a philosophical position asserting that only one's own mind is certain to exist.
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.
No thanks.
I wish people kept to themselves more.
I still love the era when everything online was text-based.
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!
I think an answer is maybe to have multiple identities on the web. Like I've got real name stuff on Facebook and Linkedin and some anonymous accounts too. You keep the real name stuff safe for work and your mum seeing.
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 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.
"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.
> 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?
That doesn't sound impossible. Perhaps LLMs can already do this.
Reading is as much engagement as writing if not more.
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 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.
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.
We have systematically dismantled by popular consensus the safety of liberalism and belief in a marketplace of ideas.
There is no advantage to being "more public" when it's all to common to get hit by marauding bands of idealists and trolls of all atripes. Nobody rewards you for having nuanced opinions on things like immigration publicly, nor trans rights, nor even something as banal as programming language choice.
We've now lived through a full pendulum cycle where public writing that was insufficiently woke was punished via internet lynch mobs and state pressure, and now we are seeing the exact same thing with insufficiently reactionary ideas invoking...internet lynch mobs and state pressure.
So, no, I don't think I will be more public, and I'll be unsurprised--if sad--when other rational actors do similarly.
There's no reason to be public, because people have made it clear that they'd rather support a system that attacks that than protects it.
Public is that which happens once, in real time,and most importantly derives it's content from spontainious colaberations of humans.Speaking and acting to the moment. Everything else, the all of all, is a spin off from this.
When I was a child my teacher told me to never use my real name online
I like this guy. I want to know more about him.
Clearly phrased to take advantage of the "controversial opinion" for clicks. "I wish people would publish more" is what they mean, but that's not interesting. Can one even "be public"?
A very self centred viewpoint
" 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.
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.
Post brought to us by the NSA
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