Topic: Anonymize Usernames for Unbiased Discussions on Bitcointalk! - An Idea - page 2. (Read 529 times)

Thanks a lot for the feedback and your opinions everyone! I can't reply to every individual post so just posting a general reply here and some quoted posts below:

Tech:

This isn't a feature request to the forum but something users would willingly do on their client side! That is, with a mentality that "I don't want to be biased with my opinions despite the account being a newbie, a trusted member, or my friend" so let me just freely express what I think and the principles I stand for without any history of the accounts influencing my opinions.



I get that! But my solution is more like the stuff you'd willingly do on the client side than having the forum actually to implement the changes. It will dissolve the point of trusts/merits & other forum features if it ever happens haha!

 
Great point yahoo! As I mentioned in the post, if at all I had to ship it out, I would ensure no data of the post's original author is leaked to the client while you are posting/quoting a reply.

True but to move towards a more decentralized approach we definitely need a layer to protect our identities so the commenter's opinions are not influenced by the person behind the account but by content posted by the account. Ad Hominem attack for instance: It's problematic because it avoids engaging with the actual argument and diverts the discussion to irrelevant personal attributes.


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sorry, but i don't see how this is good if it's just a script and is not implemented directly on the forum. if only you are seeing the randomized users, what's the point?


or they could just disable the script and see who posted, since it's an end user implementation.

This is a nice idea, and I love the concept behind it by offering users the ability to stay anonymous while trying to share opinions on some forum discussion. But however, I think I'm yet to fully understand (i.e step by step) how the intended anonymousity works, because ever since I made a  glance through other people's comments, a few questions have been running in my head and I will love to ask O.P specifically. And they are;

1. Is the anonymous feature customized just a particular post, or can it be used for just a particular thread? or does it affect the entire forum comments just immediately the script has been activated?

E.g. Can a user's post in Politics & Society be anonymous while his other post on Gambling board be normal at the same time? Or does one needs to activate and deactivate this feature before his/her post on other boards be visible as normal?

2. Can post used by this anonymous feature be eligible for signature campaign weekly post count?

I will be glad if you can answer these few questions of mine.

He can change the display name, username of a user or he can change more to "Anonymous" which I believe only a display name. Ratimov, remember him?

Many deleted threads were restored by admins and I remember that author of those restored threads is not Ratimov but something like Rxxxxxx.

Exactly, admin can change someone's name to "Anonymous" as far as I understand that all the posts of that member are shown under that name - but he can change the user's name only in a certain topic - as is the case here / How username turned into "Anonymous" in 2022?

Because whenever the name is hidden, the possibility of deceiving new users immediately will be the highest, so it is most appropriate for me to take other steps to keep myself hidden. I do not consider everyone on this forum to be trustworthy. Those who have a bad reputation will basically hide and will be more likely to commit corruption again. So to keep yourself alert, it is necessary to present all the issues that are currently there.

i didnt think you ever could post as a guest or anonymous account, i thought those accounts here were regular accounts and manually changed by theymos for whatever reason at some point. not sure though.

I'm sorry, but I think this is a terrible idea. This generously opens the door for trolls to bury us even more.
They appear here cyclically and use all possible methods to involve other members in endless and toxic discussions, this would also enable them to spam with new accounts. And what would be the purpose of the ignore option at all in that case?

What about post histories, even if you change your visible username to something else in order to make a post, the post is still going to show up in your post history. So once people are able to get an inkling of who it is based on writing style, signature, personal text, etc, they would check your post history to confirm that it is you who made the post. I think it is better to stick with this:

As they should be. If someone has been consistently posting accurate content for 5+ years on the forum, I'll be interested to read their comments in a thread to gain more insight. This does not mean I just skim past other comments without paying attention, but theirs, quite rightly will stand out. When you relate it to a negative aspect, if a user is consistently a troll to me, I'll be right to have preconceived notions about them and wouldn't want to constantly read through their bs without knowing and wonder what this anonymous user is getting at.

For the most part,  a neutral doesn't need to view the forum anonymously, everyone was once anonymous to them, through time and actions they built biases and notions, which are not inherently bad.
While someone who isn't or was never a neutral will not be interested in this.

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I however think this can be useful in reputation topics where users judge newbies harshly sometimes and indemnify members they are familiar with. This may also be a cool experiment to know if some users subconsciously merit certain members they are familiar with and if they'll still merit those same contents if they had no idea who was the author.

I understand the idea behind the script.
But, I'm only being used by those who really don't get into these types of complicated discussions.

Furthermore, in general, the fact that some members create new users just to enter into debates is already widely criticized. Having this type of tool would not have much of an impact, as those who criticize it would not use it.

The username is our forum identity. This is a global community, hiding your identity is not a very positive thing in general.

It's an acceptable idea in political or general discussion boards but the username is very important in technical, economic and marketplace discussions. I remember something similar happened as one of the previous April Fools.

I think the point was more geared towards people writing an unbiased opinion. Basically for those afraid to have their own opinion, but as someone said earlier that's why people create alts and post.

In theory the idea is ok, but not as useful as the OP might have hoped.

I didn't check that thread, but I will guess using my memory, the Detective Conan is NotATether, the bald guy is ABCbits, the one who wear Metawin signature is iv4n. After I read the personal message, I made mistake, the last one should be holydarkness.

The idea is good, but it will not work like it should be.

And if you have randomize everything, you will lose your reputation you built.

This is a bad thing for someone who make money in this forum, except they don't want to participate in campaign, not have any service and don't care about everything.

This is kind of an interesting idea, but you're right about having to change (or obscure) all of the other details that'd make it possible to figure out who was posting.  But even with a script like this, I'd imagine most members who wanted to make a post they thought would be controversial/reputation-damaging/whatever would do what they've always done and create a new account. 

There are probably other applications for something like this, and props to OP for creating the script. 

Ah, icopress....the days of being able to post as an anonymous guest are long gone.  Not sure when Theymos did away with that, but I think it was before my time here.

I noticed this when I read the OP, the total merit and activity make it pretty obvious who this anonymous account might be. I think it’s worth considering if there’s a script that could hide those details.

Actually, I like the idea OP presented because, personally, I’ve observed this could indeed be the case. Bias is always present, especially if you know the user either from this forum or if both of you are part of a group or community outside the forum.

At the end of the day, I think it is not completely anonymous everywhere except for the thread you choose to remain anonymous. This means another user can choose to go through your profile like you have said or enter through your merit histories to see the real profile information.

I also have a few things to inquire about, imagine if the other users choose to view the console and see the script they may choose to delete the script so that the real username can be seen.  In other, for this to be implemented, it has to be a feature in the forum and it has to be Theymos himself who would add it.

People will be able to discern who is who based on avatars, merit count, merit history, signature, rank, and probably other things. The point is a random username won't do much if people can still find out who is who IMO. You would need to randomize everything.

So based on the sample screenshot the quoted message with username does not change so you can still see the original usernames. How about making that anonimize too?


I guess that's given, the anonymized usernames are for discussion purposes as for the OP, peeking the user profile page is different story.

What would happen with all the posts from Satoshi and other important members from history of bitcointalk forum?
I am not saying anynimizing usernames can't have use case in this forum, but it's more complicated since bitcointalk is also used for historic references.