we don’t need or benefit from pseudonym culture
the most insightful / "smartest" posts I’ve read on social media have been by professors/academics/authors using the Friends Only setting; behind that is either that same demographic posting publicly, OR experts commenting in groups mostly composed of other experts in that same field. behind that are people in facebook groups selecting for some quality or another that makes people more thoughtful than usual, such as a group calling out posts that are questionable and don’t have citations.
on the other end, the dumbest posts are consistently by bots / fake accounts.
quick coinage: realnymity. forgive me for how unaesthetic and crude this is, but nymity just feels wrong and I lose clarity; people instantly know what I mean - without needing the term defined - if I contrast realnymity with anonymity.
another coinage: fakenymity, because "fakenymous accounts" is much more concise than "pseudonymous and anonymous accounts".
and this needs to be burned into your brain: I’m not at all unfamiliar with operating under pseudonymity. when I quit reddit in 2017, I had something like 100,000 comment karma across all of my accounts; my MittRomneysCampaign account alone had 65,000. I’ve participated in the deepest layers of internet weird. I was one of the founding moderators of /r/tumblrinaction which later became /r/kotakuinaction. I’ve used the website enough to see the worst of it and the best of it; in fact I’ve *been on* the front page of /r/bestof a few times.
and I don’t think we really gain a whole lot from fakenymity. it’s really not that good, yet certain people go to absurd lengths to protect it. I’ve had a post taken down for "doxxing" MYSELF because I linked my own facebook post; I was not allowed to "post private information" even if that was my own information.
(if you think this verdict make sense, go and meet normal people. if you’ve already done that, go outside for longer. if you think that’s presumptuous of me, good.)
the dichotomy isn't "public posts under your real name" vs "public posts under a pseudonym" because, remember, I've been in both the pseudonym world and the real name world and the best posts I've seen are from people with their real names to a non-public network. there are actually four factors here, not two:
1. realnymous posts under a public network, like this post
2. realnymous posts under a closed network, like facebook friends only posts
3. fakenymous posts under a public network, like 4chan or twitter or reddit or tumblr
4. fakenymous posts under a closed network, like discord servers
let's be real: the biggest appeal of pseudonymity and anonymity is that you can comfortably talk shit about people you'd never say to someone's face, you can have the confidence of someone much more confident than you actually are, you can post absolute bullshit with no fear that being wrong will affect your reputation. you're able to have a sense of superiority you'd never have standing face to face, meatbag to meatbag, with neither of you knowing quite how to stand or use your arms or look at each other as you start a paragraph with "No.".
in a more victim-centered lens, you could say that you're relieved of your social anxiety and you're given a safe space to be who you "really are". you can comfortably talk about how you get off to extremely specific fetishes. you can reveal your insecurities without fear that your IRL friends will know.
but, how true is that, really? if you have social anxiety because you just stole a car, isn't that just the correct thing to feel? and if we can admit that *some* social anxiety is justified, then we're just debating about *which social anxieties* are justified rather than whether it can be at all. likewise with extremely specific fetishes. likewise with these deep insecurities.
and this is almost never brought up, but I think it's an extremely important factor in the debate:
people seem to think about realnymity as a question of what people stand to lose. NO ONE — and I mean OVER THOUSANDS OF POSTS ON THE ISSUE I'VE NEVER HEARD ANOTHER PERSON MAKE THIS ARGUMENT — no one makes the argument terms of what people GAIN.
think, for a second, about what happens when you make a really good post under a pseudonym that lots of people praise. there is a very natural and I think very correct tendency to want to take credit for it, because it's *your work*, even though most people don't usually think about posts as work. a pseudonym account has to contend with this odd problem where they want to produce high quality work and find themselves increasingly unable to say they did that work. it is psychologically difficult to do work you're proud of in secret, especially if you're seeing thousands of people praise you for how it's benefited them. the question of "why am I even using this fake name?" becomes increasingly salient.
I've found that ALMOST EVERYONE who started writing under a pseudonym eventually comes to a conflict between using their real name and their pseudonym; their pseudonym is what people know the work to be, so dropping the pseudonym is work in the short term, but they also know that pseudonymity is extremely unlikely to last — after enough notoriety, the circulation of your real name is next to inevitable, and I mean "mencius moldbug real name" google inevitable. who actually bothers calling curtis yarvin "mencius moldbug" anymore? it's increasingly farcical to do; likewise with scott siskind, likewise with chris ballas. I challenge you to name a person who is pseudonymous and famous and able to keep it a secret. the most famous pseudonymous person in present day is banksy, and even he was more or less found out, and that's partially because it's a lot harder to ID street artists than writers for a number of reasons. in other words, one asks the question: "if I achieve any level of the kind of success I'm aiming for from pseudonymous work, I will eventually be known as my real name, so...why waste the effort?"
there is therefore a reduced incentive to making really good posts under a pseudonym. it has a sense of pointlessness and inevitability. really good writers or posters or whatever you want to call them will eventually just transition to their real name as they accept the inevitability of it.
and this is assuming we're paying attention to the *best of* what pseudonymity has to offer. the worst is clear: lots of false information and bullshit is going to be circulated and people can lie as much as they want without repercussion.
even people who make the "misinformation on facebook" argument neglect to mention that much of the misinformation about e.g. vaccines came from *pages*, not real name accounts, which for a while was a workaround for people who want to be pseudonymous on facebook; many of the people extremely preoccupied with pseudonymity, such as the Strengthwave series of accounts, eventually just moved to twitter and instagram. there is more misinformation on facebook because there are more people; fb has about 2 billion daily active users compared to twitter's 238 million. but in terms of *how easy it is to misinform*, it's not even a question — twitter and instagram are much, much worse.
all of this is to say: I really don't see much downside to just making people use their real name on social media and instead letting them set the level of privacy/visibility they prefer. it's quite doable to make a fakebook account, and I have two of them, but it takes some work. by contrast it's *way too easy* to make a fake account on twitter; I can do it in seconds. likewise with instagram. likewise with, really, every social media website except facebook. I've never read a proponent of this who has been able to back it up with examples. people who talk about how much great content they're seeing on twitter forget that I can track their liked posts and have done so. over every social media platform I've used — and I've explored pretty much all of them to some level of iceberg depth — the "good posts" are just mid, and I've probably followed the same accounts you have. the best writers/posters use their real names, or eventually will once recognized enough. I've never seen someone who fiercely defends pseudonymity who has also extensively participated in real name networks and pseudonym networks; it's inevitably a person with a virginal sense of real-name accountability or who is primarily involved in pseudonym networks.
I don't, in other words, see the upsides of pseudonymity on social networks ever outweighing the downsides. pseudonyms are largely something you can dispense with, with little consequence.
