Yeah so a big part of it is the simple and straightforward “I don’t want a potential employer to be able to assess what I’ve said all over the forum”.
The second part was more interesting to me, because there was also this argument that a norm of anonymity has some strong benefits, like people feeling able to truly express how they feel on a topic. I think this connects to the sort of “always be polite” heuristic, where it seems like generally speaking the world could use more straightforward, honest responses, and that anonymity is likely to increase this sort of response and is thus good.
I threw out what I felt to be the common replies to this, that you probably shouldn’t be making a comment if it’s to the point that a potential future employer would downrate your quality based on reading it, that anonymity gives free reign to people being inconsiderate to a trollish level sometimes that is the opposite of productively honest, that connections to real people seem important and that using real names seems like it would foster that. But alas, it was all to no avail, the room was still overwhelmingly pro anonymity in the case of the forum (they conceded that smaller virtual communities could probably drop the anonymity as it becomes somewhat useless as you get to know all the specific people well).
On the meta note, I think this is a situation where I feel like for around maybe 99% of people on the forum there is probably a generally better option they could opt for that would trend towards a healthier community. But I’m also very generally against the idea of lots of things just being up to individual circumstance, so this is a rather unsurprising response given my outside thoughts. What do you think though?
I agree with the tradeoff of [feeling comfortable to post stuff] vs [being closer to others with their name].
For myself, I try to push myself slowly towards being “open”, but I don’t want to override my own comfort zone to strongly (also because I know I have 1000 things to fix and I can’t work on them all at once).
I also wouldn’t want to push others, for similar reasons.
I do endorse what Edo did for me—a small nudge which was no pressure but was enough to get me to think about the question.
Yeah so a big part of it is the simple and straightforward “I don’t want a potential employer to be able to assess what I’ve said all over the forum”.
The second part was more interesting to me, because there was also this argument that a norm of anonymity has some strong benefits, like people feeling able to truly express how they feel on a topic. I think this connects to the sort of “always be polite” heuristic, where it seems like generally speaking the world could use more straightforward, honest responses, and that anonymity is likely to increase this sort of response and is thus good.
I threw out what I felt to be the common replies to this, that you probably shouldn’t be making a comment if it’s to the point that a potential future employer would downrate your quality based on reading it, that anonymity gives free reign to people being inconsiderate to a trollish level sometimes that is the opposite of productively honest, that connections to real people seem important and that using real names seems like it would foster that. But alas, it was all to no avail, the room was still overwhelmingly pro anonymity in the case of the forum (they conceded that smaller virtual communities could probably drop the anonymity as it becomes somewhat useless as you get to know all the specific people well).
On the meta note, I think this is a situation where I feel like for around maybe 99% of people on the forum there is probably a generally better option they could opt for that would trend towards a healthier community. But I’m also very generally against the idea of lots of things just being up to individual circumstance, so this is a rather unsurprising response given my outside thoughts. What do you think though?
Ah
I agree with the tradeoff of [feeling comfortable to post stuff] vs [being closer to others with their name].
For myself, I try to push myself slowly towards being “open”, but I don’t want to override my own comfort zone to strongly (also because I know I have 1000 things to fix and I can’t work on them all at once).
I also wouldn’t want to push others, for similar reasons.
I do endorse what Edo did for me—a small nudge which was no pressure but was enough to get me to think about the question.