[Foundation-l] Ring of Gyges

Tue Nov 30 23:53:37 UTC 2010

On Tue, Nov 30, 2010 at 3:32 PM, Ryan Lomonaco <wiki.ral315 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 30, 2010 at 6:26 PM, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> For added self-referentiality, you can't read this article unless you
>> identify yourself to the NYT.
>>
>
> I was able to read the article without registering - it's worth noting that
> the NY Times has a rather interesting version of a paywall, where only a
> handful of people who visit the article are required to register or log in.
> So it leads to confusion when you send a link to 100 people, and, say, 15
> people can't read it.

(list-unrelated)

It's really just a porous IDwall - It's only a paywall in the sense
that I get targeted ads aimed at my identity there (sometimes
amusingly - the full-page-header Livescribe pen ads, when I had worked
there and was given a free pre-prod version of the advertised product
to field test as I left the company...).

Google, as far as I can tell, does no worse or better on that point.
I use Gmail and other related services and am ok with that info being
floated around for ad targeting.  NYTimes can have it, too.  It's well
worth it for the access, IMHO.

(list-related)

Responding to Mike Peel's comment about applicability to Wikipedia; we
have two variations on the anonymity theme.

One, true IP anons often feel little connection to our core goals of
building an encyclopedia and supporting a constructive community to
accomplish that.  Not so much that I advocate shutting off anon
editing at all, but it's an observation that's easy to make.

Two, nearly all WP users use pseudonymity rather than real names, and
for most people not having their real name attached anywhere gives
them a sense of anonymous empowerment similar to the truly anonymous
trolls seen elsewhere.  We see a lot of behavioral problems that are,
to anyone who studies interpersonal communications online, extremely
common.  People don't inherently humanize other pseudonyms; they don't
feel that they'll necessarily be held accountable in the same way they
would in real life for behavior, etc.  Coupled with the inherent
degraded emotional communications in text-based communications, we
have a lot of the same behavior even with persistent pseudonyms.  And
you can see a lot of that, where a pseudonym account gets sufficiently
bad community karma on WP and they go and sockpuppet off and create
another one, not caring about the underlying issue their behavior
raised.  That sort of thing is not unheard of in the real world, but
it's generally felt to be the domain of scam artists and private
investigators and the like; at the very least, socially dubious.

-- 
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com