As with most other aspects of “design for discourse”, I came up with a very different decision concerning names. Does “Chatham House rule” ring a bell?
My notion was that a participant would be free to link his identity to most anything s/he wanted, but that within the system the participant’s identity would be obfuscated. My main reason for going this route was to avoid the whole “popularity is credibility” thing. An argument would stand (or fall) on its merits, not according to who uttered it.
That seems like the inverse of the Chatham House rule… The Chatham House rule is that everybody knows who everybody is during the meeting, but you can’t publicize or reveal who any participants were after the fact, even though all the discussion is fair game.
… ok. But since this sort of system stands as an open, public record, how else to implement “can’t publicize or reveal who any participants were after the fact”.
Those discussions are real-time IRL. This, of course, is not. So …
It surely does have an analog. What’s the end product? What’s there to be read at the end of the process? If you mean to say that matters not at all, I can’t agree with that.
True identities are hidden or obfuscated. Even if you insist I not refer to Chatham, I will continue to do so.
I’m not “insisting” on anything. I’m just pointing out it doesn’t really seem like a good metaphor for what you’re trying to convey, which is anonymity with non-verifiable naming. (Or maybe with verifiable naming? I wasn’t quite clear on that point.) I also mentioned that other forums and communities do similar things, and that you might want to use them as examples instead.
How is that different from trying to find a good Twitter handle? A forum is usually too small and I may arrive too late to it to get my personal username the same way I got it when I signed up for GitHub, Twitter or Discourse. And so I am very happy when Discourse is reserving this username for me so I can be reasonably sure when I as a user encounter a new Discourse forum I can get my preferred username.
Oh, and you are right: A clear privacy policy on the “Discourse Hub” would help - but I’d still argue on keeping the globally unique username feature on by default.
For the same reason that I HATE the idea that there is someone posting as ‘ultimape’ on a penis enlargement forum and have tried to get the account changed.
Its the difference between a site-centric and user-entric mindset. In a user centric world, identity is important. Identity feeds into reputation, and reputation is everything in an online only ecosystem:
“According to a 2010 study by Microsoft and Cross-Tab Market Research, 70 percent of companies have rejected candidates based on the candidate’s online reputation, but only 7 percent of Americans believe it affects their job search.” http://www.pcworld.idg.com.au/article/373007/how_clean_up_your_online_reputation/ (via wikipedia)
Gravatar facilitates this by making it easy to enforce profile picture consistency as a way to hint at the fact that it may be the same user. The Discourse Hub will enforce username uniqueness (optionally) across the discourse ecosystem.
I think it might be best to start a new thread about the Discourse Hub. Some of my objections and views in this thread are no longer as strong as they were, and others may have changed their stance too. It’s still something I’m personally not keen on, but in light of what the Discourse team are offering, the time and money they have put into the software, and that they come across as genuine, decent people who I trust won’t do the dirty on us all, it is something I am personally willing to compromise on.
I will quickly respond to this tho:
That’s exactly one of the reasons why I wouldn’t want the same username across all forums, or indeed for it to become the norm.
If I were to join a forum where anonymity was important, I wouldn’t want to use my real name or commonly associated username. Yours is one example, others are forums about health concerns, financial worries, relationship problems, those relating to work, neighbours, sex, religion etc - things that generally people like to keep separate.
Currently people don’t assume the person is the same on a forum unless a few things tot up - usually the avatar plus the username along with the similarity of the topic of the forums. (So for example I might use the same username on all the dog related forums I am on, but a different one for all the car forums I am on).
I have different usernames for different forum topics - probably about 20, and 10 that I use most frequently. I think that’s generally the case for others too - indeed it is something I have noticed on my forums, where people use a different username on each (apart from two that are closely related).
Also, don’t forget that even if that Penis Enlargement forum was running Discourse… it probably wouldn’t have the Hub activated anyway (for the reasons I state above) - so would not be a help to you at all.
Yeah, sorry to dredge up an old post. I didn’t think about it until a few minutes after I submitted.
I think we both agree that identity management is important. Hearing your perspective helps. Anonymity is a very valid use case. Maybe a partial answer to this with the Discourse Hub is to do something like how Gravatar allows for different pictures based on what email address is registered.
I don’t think any of this would prevent you from creating a multitude of different discourse hub accounts anymore than Reddit’s central authentication prevents you from creating throw-away accounts for each individual sub-reddit.
I do believe, that the general trend is away from the more complicated “20 different usernames” way of doing things. I’d bet that most people with that many usernames are doing it for vanity reasons - which is something that Discourse seems to avoid (aka, no ‘signatures’ feature).
Part of my view is I’m coming from an IT support world where 90% of the people I interact with can’t remember their own password, much less manage the complexity of dealing with 20 different email addresses/accounts etc. My own mom tries to do exactly what you describe and I was constantly figuring out her mess of user accounts until I told her it had to stop and set her up with LastPass.
In the end, no one can be “me” on facebook, or google, so using that to sign in to a site should, at least optionally, let me keep this consistent.
Maybe the real answer is for Discourse to implement a tripcodes (NSFW site) plugin for users that want to use more anonymous style forums?
In the end this boils down to a philosophical argument on what way is best. It seems that Discourse is going in the direction that makes conversations easier to have - and a purely anonymous system can make that convoluted.
This at least would be something that the Discourse Hub thing would be able to indicate. Right now I have no way of proving I am not the same Ultimape on those forums except for people to trust me.