j.r. leonard

I disagree. Some of my favorite content in Twitter are the parody accounts, like whoever does the fake North Korean news account. I can think of many reasons why parody account creators might wish to remain anonymous.

Granted those are funny. Are they worth having a system where some random LGBTQA teenager with depression issues gets their feed filled by shitposters for weeks or months?

That question implies a phony tradeoff and could just as easily be applied to the entire internet as well. Point is, I’d rather not have Twitter actively judging who is a shit poster and who is a legitimate parody. There are other ways to police abuse

The anonymity tradeoff is not phony, absent any sort of social trust mechanism. Twitter doesn’t have one, so the tradeoff applies here. It can be generally applied to the Internet at large in the meta sense but that’s not particularly relevant to this conversation

There are other ways to police abuse, I agree, and having Twitter itself be the court of judgement is bad, I agree with that too.

But Twitter continuing to not build the system that could be used to police abuse by its own members means the position “no anonymous accounts” is preferable to the status quo. It would rid Twitter of most of its problems and require little else on their part.

You’re snuggling a lot with that “little else.”

Well, it requires them to throw away part of what enabled them to build their network fast using the network effect, so they aren’t going to do it even if they don’t need to continue to allow anonymous accounts to survive. I’ll agree with that, too.