j.r. leonard

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.

I mean, they could just actually read the IS lit on social networks and distributed trust mechanisms and build that system, but they aren’t going to do that either.

So sure, we’ll grind through this iteration and then move on. It’s how this has gone in the past reliably enough it’s a safe bet for how it will play out this time around too

Again, I disagree. I think that we are absolutely headed for an age of universal or near-universal ID verification. And it won’t be for the benefit of keeping LGBQT teens from getting bullied. It will be cause that’s what the government and tech companies want