I’m prepared for my downvotes. I have often joked that in the not-too-distant-future people will look back upon the early days of the internet like we look upon the 1950s view of smoking. What do you mean kids shouldn’t do it? It’s fine. You know how it is, watch a kids cartoon, look at some memes, two girls 1 cup, email the fam, those two Mexican dudes who had their heads cut off with a chainsaw, research Ghana for a school project, sneak in some porn after the parents go to bed, and cap it off with some chat room conversations about Picard’s superiority to Kirk while some kid across the country goes on about shooting his brains out because mom and dad either doesn’t love him enough or love him too much. Maybe download some credit card spoofers and Diablo hacks for online play if you aren’t quite ready for bed. The early internet, and even the internet now, is a fucking wild concept. Take everything that people think, not just what we know, but what we fucking think about while we are taking a shit, and make it available for anyone look at without guidance or context. We can even watch police shootings in real time and pretend to be detectives during terrorist events, consequences to real people be damned. Should parents know better? Sure. Is the internet an effective babysitter while they grind out a living? You bet. If we restrict this dumpster fire behind age-verification and eliminate anonymity through tagged identification, the effect on privacy and anonymous online activism will be severe. However, CinnamonRingCumGlaze86 will be significantly less able to use their 6th grade reading level to convince people that modern medicine is bad because Pre-Historical Witches didn’t have AIDS bro. #flatearth #zoroastrianismwasasteptoofar #onceagaintherealproblemiscapitalismandwearelookingatthewrongthingbecauseofmanufacturedoutrageandobfuscationcreatedbytheoligarchy #worldofwarcraftclassic I will not be responding to comments.

CinnamonRingCumGlaze86 will be significantly less able to use their 6th grade reading level to convince people that modern medicine is bad because Pre-Historical Witches didn’t have AIDS bro. You don’t need accounts tied to ID to ban such content.

I’m not banning the content, I’m just making sure that when someone tells you something on the internet, you can tell that they are actually a fucking moron.

That doesn’t make any sense. You wouldn’t have access to their ID.

Okay. Imagine if there were no anonymous internet handles. If you just had to use your name and stand by what you said. That is more what I am talking about. Regarding the assessment of idiocy, I suppose I would base it on the quality of their posted content.

Not hard to imagine, people already have to manicure their facebook and other social media accounts because employers look at them. Just because you don’t want something attached to your name, doesn’t mean it’s stupid or bad. There are consequences for unapproved behavior and opinions, even if they’re not wrong or harmful. If you think anonymity is stupid, feel free to set your display name to your real name right here on lemmy.

I know that anonymity is the way it is and don’t think that me changing my display does anything about one way or the other. I definitely shit post, because I can. There is literally no consequence. If I somehow hit the right combination of words and someone commits suicide, I would never know. If I share something that someone looks views at their workplace and then gets fired, I would never know. The entire thing is just people collectively shrugging responsibility for their behavior and that has a net negative effect on society. I’m not going to change my name over to my real name, although that is generic enough that would not be identifying, but I am going to point out that people do shitty things with anonymity and that the world would be better off without it.

Except those who control the narrative will not face consequences for harmful messages they spread. For example, the trump administration spreads a lot of anti-trans messaging. They’ve been going after the funding of schools for what they deem “CRT and radical gender ideology” (thehill.com/…/5113202-trump-schools-executive-ord…). Now imagine they go after online commentators which will be super easy because they’ve got their real names attached to their posts.