A few weeks ago a friend forwarded me this TED speech given by Christopher Poole, better known as Moot of 4Chan fame. To save a Google for those of you less familiar with such things, 4Chan is an anonymous web of forums. Do NOT go there if you are at work. As with most things annonymous, the majority of it is entirely inappropriate, disgusting and fairly deplorable. Poole does point out that several “good” deeds were pulled off by this annonymous mob that could not have been accomplished if people were assigning their own identity, including the “Annonymous” protest of Scientologists pulling the video of Tom Cruise off the web. The primary value of 4Chan though, is the Rick Roll and various oddities (not exactly an irreplaceable benefit to society).
The most interesting thing to me though is that at the very end of the session Poole talks about the fact that he gets emails from people thanking him for “giving him this place where they can come home after work and be themselves”. I can appreciate this point, I think it is also the fuel that runs SecondLife and (to perhaps a slightly lesser degree) most of the MMOs. To me though, MMOs are a good place for anonymity, message boards are not. The difference is that the first is recreation and the second is information. Information is to valuable a commodity to allow people to spread it anonymously. For an example take the 4Chan stunt where they rigged the voting in the Time 100 Poll to make the top 21 spell “Marble Cake Also The Game.” While this stunt was cute, it robbed us of the opportunity to see what Time readers actually felt were the top 100 most influential people in 2009. Even though this stunt is not a particularly big deal, it does show that information can’t be trusted in the hands of the anonymous.
I’m not calling for the law to eliminate anonymity, I would never agree to that. I am, however, saying that we need to separate the value of data from people who were willing to put their name by their opinion (or provide some way of having accountability for their actions) from the data of people who won’t. I point this out because it will be one of many filters that will help to purify and personalize the internet.
