My Identity Crisis: Why can’t I be more than one thing on the web?

http://blog.windsoc.co/2011/06/07/my-identity-crisis-why-cant-i-be-more-than-one-thing-on-the-web/

by wolfrom • 15 years ago

59 34 15 years ago

blog.windsoc.co

wibblenut• 15 years ago

I'm looking forward to decentralised microblogging, since then we can publish multiple feeds (RSS would seem ideal) from the same identity (domain), e.g. $ dig andy.tel naptr|grep rss - there'd also be a record to delegate a "hub" for my followers to subscribe to.

Fooman• 15 years ago

You worry about annoying your followers by talking about the wrong topic. Sounds like preaching to the choir.

Flip the coin.

You can be more interesting by providing information or point of view that isn't expected. Embrace your broadness and don't siphon yourself off into well defined silos.

cobralibre2• 15 years ago

It's not unreasonable to want our communications media to facilitate siloed interaction.

I look at it this way: If somebody I know avoids talking to me about that things that bore me -- say, pro football or New York Times bestsellers -- I wouldn't see that as a lack of boldness or a species of dishonesty; I would see that as a form of consideration for my time.

ecaradec• 15 years ago

As a user I've unfollowed twitter accounts that were developers but as there was sport literally flood my timeline with comments. It's a question of volume thought. I don't care about the occasionnal comments on things that doesn't interess me.

wccrawford2• 15 years ago

Wait, is he really trying to suggest that in real life, he talks to everyone the same way? That as a CEO he talks to clients the same way he talks to his drinking buddies? (Assuming he has them.)

Why would the internet be any different? If you want to mass communicate, you're going to have to sort your people into categories and communicate with them according to that.

Because that's what it comes down to. Mass communication.

StavrosK• 15 years ago

Because Twitter is the real-life equivalent of getting everyone you know in a room and shouting things at all of them.

cobralibre2• 15 years ago

No, he's saying the opposite. He's pointing out that most online communications channels haven't solved the problem of filtering your output to specific audiences as you deem appropriate. For any single service, you're generally either communicating one-to-one or one-to-everybody, with no options inbetween.

This is a problem that is more easily managed in "real life" by the obvious limitations of presence.

wccrawford2• 15 years ago

And easily managed on the web by having multiple twitter accounts or email lists.

I really don't see the issue, and I think that's why nobody has done anything about it.

lusis2• 15 years ago

I think I've found a healthy balance. I don't use twitter for generally personal stuff (except for the occasional twitter commiserating with other parents) and I don't use Facebook for any technical stuff.

My blog is mostly technical and the only place I'm even linked to the company I work for is LinkedIn.

I don't HIDE that fact that the two "personas" are connected but I try to keep a separation in place. My family and most of my friends don't care about the technical stuff and most of the people in the various OSS communities could give two shits about my kids pooping in the potty.

Shit, I've even got two about.me profiles.

enjalot• 15 years ago

I also use Facebook for personal and Twitter for work/code. I try to spill over a little of each so that my friends can see my work and my peers can see I'm a human. My blog has a mix of technical and personal, but lately it's mostly technical.

I think the author has a point, but I think it should be up to the user to be able to "subscribe" to different identities rather than having to choose which one you will post under. I think stuff like tags and categories will help with this. Until then, I'll just keep making noise, I think if it's signal to someone, it's worth it.

Jun8• 15 years ago

This solves the problem only up to a point: How to group and filter among the hundreds of FB friends, some are family, some are colleagues, some are close friends, etc. FB has a mechanism to do lists, post filtering, etc, but I find it to be clunky so don't use it. The result is like you have all you acquaintances in one room, shout what you want to say, and people who are not interested will tune it out. Not ideal. But I can't think of a better alternative.

joebadmo3• 15 years ago

I think the answer in a post-FB/Twitter decentralized/distributed social network world is to have transient, easily spun-up and spun-down social networks that you could think of as places.

So, for work friends, I'd make (or join) a social network called WorkBuddies, and I'd have a different one for each context. But you'd take your identity with you, and you'd own your own canonical social graph independent of the people in each network.

lusis2• 15 years ago

Well in my case I have a rule. I don't friend anyone on facebook I've never met personally of that I'm currently working with. Everyone is pretty understanding about it.

mdoerneman• 15 years ago

I am currently working on shaping my identity on the web and I feel exactly the same way. I think I'm going to use Facebook for personal use (family & friends) and twitter/blog for technical. If I happen to make a friend on the technical side, I can request them as a friend on Facebook and open them up to the rest of my life.

jacobr• 15 years ago

Being bi-lingual adds even another dimension.

fgumo2• 15 years ago

I have similar problems, but they are worse. Add to the mix suffered by the author working and having friends in a couple of countries/languages and you get my scenario.

I tried with one twitter account per language and doing groups in facebook, but it was too time consuming. Now I mix both languages with care and some won't like it, but I can't go further.

DanielKehoe• 15 years ago

So what's the problem? Bits are in short supply so we can't have multiple websites or social network accounts? I've got two Twitter accounts, one for technical tweets for my peers who are Rails developers, another for personal tweets that mostly just amuse me, and if I got into knitting tea cosies I'd probably start a separate Twitter account for that. Same with Facebook: an account for my old high school friends and their political rants; and another for my professional network, where I feel political attitudes or religious viewpoints are as out-of-place as any other workplace.

The biggest problem with running multiple accounts is a UI issue. Many services (such as Facebook) assume you will have only identity and make it difficult to switch between accounts because they save some state (setting a cookie). But one can use separate browsers or install a browser extension that makes it easy to switch sessions. And many third-party apps (such as Hootsuite) recognize users are likely to have multiple accounts. Heck, the latest version of the Twitter native client allows multiple accounts and even Google is making it easier to set up and switch among multiple accounts.

We just need more developers recognizing that we have multifaceted personalities and accommodating multiple personas for our presence online. No harm in that.

arunbahl• 15 years ago

It's definitely a UI issue, in that right now the burden of management of multiple identities falls to users, and yes, developers don't usually include facilities to help. It's a pain, and like Wolfrom I sometimes choose to not say anything at all.

But beyond that, I think it's also a problem of expectations mismatch: on an app level social media is about siloing information by person (or possibly by company), but the user expectation is often that they've siloed information by subject matter.

It's a burden most acutely felt by so-called renaissance men and women (which I'd wager are an over-represented group here in the HN community). There's discrimination towards people that talk about/do seemingly unrelated things, that I think Wolfrom is alluding to. People tend to confuse specialization with expertise, e.g. that a software developer that also does visual design and has an interest in making music, for example, isn't as much of an "expert" as someone focused exclusively on code. Unfortunately not separating your content can have an impact on your credibility.

andywood2• 15 years ago

I struggle constantly with this problem. As I see it, the main practical problem is that services have a 1-to-1 mapping from identity to account. This is compounded by the fact that the services often depend on one another - e.g. when I need a unique email address to sign up for some service, then for every account I need on that service, I also have to go create yet another gmail account.

I wish I could have just one identity, that is me-facing, but many accounts, that are audience-facing. I wish I could log into YouTube as Andy Wood, and manage all my accounts (3D graphics demos, domino toppling, paragliding, etc).

In fact, WordPress.com works just like this, and I love it. Google, YouTube, and Twitter, by contrast, seem borderline resistant to this type of usage - meaning they all force me to keep creating new email accounts in addition to the multiple service accounts, even when I really don't want another email account.

fgumo2• 15 years ago

One relatively easy solution for your email accounts problem: buy a domain, set up Google Apps, create a user and make that email address catch-all.

Now you can have as many email addresses as you want without needing to create them one by one. And if you work it a little more you can even answer as any of them and apply filters.

scottkrager• 15 years ago

I use twitter for work/startup stuff and facebook for friends/non-work

ptarjan• 15 years ago

You can use Facebook lists to only post things to a set of people you want to. Or Facebook groups if you don't even want to be friends with them but want a group communication channel.

http://www.facebook.com/help/?page=768

jonathanwallace• 15 years ago

Seems like this is an area ripe for a startup. All of these comments commiserating and not one can point to an application or service that helps solve this problem?

eftpotrm• 15 years ago

Oh, it's not that tricky....

I only have one Facebook profile but I certainly know others with more than one. I do, on the other hand, have two Flickr photostreams for very different categories of work.

OK, the websites only cache one login via their cocokies, but that's a solvable problem. I use Firefox for one profile and Chrome for the other, works well enough for me...

ellyagg• 15 years ago

Or multiple incognito windows...

juiceandjuice• 15 years ago

I feel the exact same way. For a long time now, I've set up facebook friends in groups, and I use twitter but only with best friends, never coworkers, roommates, former friends, etc... Twitter is my outlet.

I was working on a site like twitter but with much more anonymous features and hierarchal posting interactions, and security features, largely motivated by both the iranian election and arab spring, but I got sidetracked and bored of the project pretty quickly, ultimately realizing that there's not really an elegant all-encompassing solution to the situation.

hm2k• 15 years ago

I joined the internet in a time when everyone had a "handle" or nickname.

I built up quite a reputation under this nick, but perhaps not enough in the right direction.

Now I find myself going back to the drawing board and building a reputation in my own name.

This also inevitably leads to the dual identity as I struggle to leave the alias behind...

andywood2• 15 years ago

I relate to this very strongly, and it's the #1 thing stopping me from publicizing my work more. I see a lot of comments saying things like "I don't see the problem; I use X for work and Y for personal life." That isn't the problem.

The problem is having lots of different, separate audiences, each across several different sites. I'm a composer wanting to grow an audience for my music, a professional software developer wanting to develop my day-job career, a 3D engine developer wanting to write up my realtime rendering research and correspond with other graphics programmers, an indie game developer wanting to cultivate a following for my game, a paraglider wanting to communicate constantly with other paragliders about weather and flying opportunities, and finally a regular guy wanting to keep up with friends and family about more ordinary things.

Each of those subjects has a separate audience that hardly overlaps with the others. The worst part is that most of those things could use a Twitter account for daily updates and engagement, a blog for more detailed write-ups, and a YouTube channel for video or music. The music probably wants a SoundCloud account. Some of those things want separate email accounts. Some want dedicated web sites.

Having a properly rounded web presence seems like a nightmare of account management. I imagine keeping a spreadsheet with a huge matrix of login info. It's possible to do it - it just seems daunting and hard to manage effectively.

My Identity Crisis: Why can’t I be more than one thing on the web?

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