Surprisingly Good Evidence That Real Name Policies Fail To Improve Comments

http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/29/surprisingly-good-evidence-that-real-name-policies-fail-to-improve-comments/

by iProject • 14 years ago

115 93 14 years ago

masklinn• 14 years ago

> YouTube has joined a growing list of social media companies who think that forcing users to use their real names will make comment sections less of a trolling wasteland

Do they?

_delirium2• 14 years ago

I agree that that's probably not YouTube's main goal. They rolled out the real-names policy at the same time for video uploads, which I think is probably really what they want to tie to real names.

lysium• 14 years ago

I never thought that real name are required to reduce the amount of trolling, but to ease tracking of individual users. Of course, the latter cannot be stated publicly, so the first is given as a reason.

antidoh• 14 years ago

Yes, exactly. It's not about comments, or civility, of fine dining. It's about selling real people behind real names to real advertisers because real money is at stake.

ThomPete2• 14 years ago

Real names in themselves solves nothing.

It's when what you write gets broadcasted to people you know, it starts to have an effect.

But IMHO nothing beats a strong debate culture with strong pre-emptive moderation, clear rules and an intelligent crowd.

marvin2• 14 years ago

I've seen ridiculously hostile and inappropriate comments posted with full name and photo (using the Facebook comment system).

As a particularly dramatic example, which was so bad it was almost art, we had a debate in a Norwegian newspaper about what to do with the traveling Romani people who put up their tents everywhere. One commenter said: "Why not put Anders Behring Breivik on the case? He cleaned up a camping site in an hour", referring to the Utøya massacre where 69 camping teenagers were killed.

If someone's able to post that with their full name and photo, I don't really think there's any hope of solving the comment problem without old-fashioned moderation.

tomjen32• 14 years ago

Social norms are different in different groups. I have told people that what they wrote could be considered racists and gotten a reply back that they wanted to be clear that they were racists, quite proud of it, and that I was an idiot for not seeing the muslim thread (in a discussion that was not at all related to terror). I have seen the same people belate others for questioning that we should throw all muslims out and arguing that every single muslim was a terrorist ala The Norwegian terrorist.

slurgfest• 14 years ago

I would have initially read that comment as a sardonic remark on the European conception of Romani as needing to be "cleaned up," but I'm not aware of all the cultural issues.

rossjudson4• 14 years ago

Freedom of speech means that they're able to post crap like that. It also means that the poster will deal with the consequences.

the1• 14 years ago

For a couple of years, I used my real full name as an id. That didn't stop me from trolling. But, when people stopped replying to my comments, I stopped trolling. Just my experience.

ahi• 14 years ago

So we really are that dumb? A little depressing knowing people aren't ashamed by their ignorance.

franzus2• 14 years ago

> I think people hide behind anonymity and they feel like they can say whatever they want behind closed doors.

God forbid people could freely say what they think. This obviously has to be prevented or our civilisation might collapse.

I'm strictly pro anonymity. If prude people don't like something they read on the internet they probably shouldn't read it ... or visit the internet at all.

praxulus3• 14 years ago

Some people want to be able to have the same kinds of social interactions they have in the real world, but with the convenience of the internet.

We've gone thousands of years with certain social norms (e.g. not being anonymous most of the time), and so far replicating those social interactions faithfully online has been difficult. There's nothing wrong with free speech unrestrained by social expectations, but there's similarly nothing wrong with wanting to avoid that sometimes. Why should you get the internet all to yourself?

morsch• 14 years ago

Some people on both sides of this argument feel that their way of doing things should be the only way of doing things. This causes even the moderates of each side to resent their opponents, and not without reason: if either side pushes for either technical or legislative means to implement their vision, the step from feasible to all-encompassing is small.

rsheridan6• 14 years ago

We've also gone thousands of years without having everything we said recorded for all time for anyone to hear whenever they want.

franzus2• 14 years ago

Yeah, and the music industry wants us to pay for plastic discs.

Things have changed and people who want to force down some old model of social interaction on the internet are dinosaurs who couldn't differentiate a paradigm shift from a potato - just like said music labels with their shiny plastic discs.

mkup• 14 years ago

We've also gone thousands of years without electricity! So should people turn off their computers and phones and throw them out of the window?

Sanddancer• 14 years ago

I come from an abusive family. In the past, moving on from that would mean simply moving to another town. With the internet, abusers are now free to stalk and harass regardless of geography; the old norm of pulling up stakes and heading on is gone. Requiring real names would mean that every jilted ex-lover, every insane sibling, every schoolyard bully can see exactly what you're doing, any time they want. Frankly, I'd rather deal with a few more trolls than deal with that.

nsmartt2• 14 years ago

Yes, and it's been entirely possible to maintain anonymity with a book or a letter to a newspaper for almost as long as writing has been popular among the masses. Maybe longer.

Being required to use your real name on a site where you would reach your readers (the same as a newspaper or mail except the conversation can move in both directions) removes your option of being anonymous.

slowpoke• 14 years ago

>Some people want to be able to have the same kinds of social interactions they have in the real world, but with the convenience of the internet.

And that requires forced real names for everyone... why? The whole point of anonymity is that you can opt-out of it if you want. Just partially, or fully. It's all up to you.

Anonymity is a fundamental right every human should have. You're of course not required to be anonymous at all times, but you should be able to be if and when you chose to. Anonymity is hard to gain when you don't have it to start with. Voluntarily giving it away is easy, though.

prodigal_erik• 14 years ago

"Anonymous most of the time" is the key difference between a village and a city, and cities are wellsprings of progress because this makes them safe havens for eccentrics and heretics of all stripes.

sunir3• 14 years ago

That seems like an strangely authoritarian stance?

The Internet is a free market. There are two billion people on it in 190+ countries and who knows how many non-sovereign entities. It is incredibly diverse and it is designed to let diversity reign. Not everyone has to agree because you can just not hang out with each other.

Why would people who don't like anonymity have to leave the Internet? Can't they build a space that fits their ideals? If you don't like it you don't have to use it; in fact you can compete with your own space that is possibly better.

varjag2• 14 years ago

That's not quite the whole picture. Those 190+ countries were and are doing all they can to get the control of information flow back. If there is one urge both authoritarian and democratic governments share these days, it's deanonymizing the Internet user base. Thus any initiative to authorize people's speech online will have a tremendous backing throughout the world, and it has little to do with social market dynamics.

acabal• 14 years ago

My site, Scribophile, requires that people sign up with a "pen name", which has to sound like a real name. You don't have to use your actual real name, just something that sounds like it could be a real name.

The idea wasn't to prevent trolling or bad comments--I spent enough time banning trolls and cleaning the forums every day to know that it wouldn't have helped anyway--but to add an air of credibility and, dare I say it, professionalism to the environment.

I've found that people interact more intimately when they're talking to "Bob Smith" instead of "cyberwulf555". People can picture themselves talking to a "Bob", but they can't picture a generic alphanumeric handle as well. It makes people more confident in building lasting relationships. In that respect, the policy has been a complete success.

_delirium2• 14 years ago

I haven't found that latter part to be true in communities I've participated in, but it does really depend on the people and topics. In many technical communities, there's a tendency for people who use their real names to go in the opposite direction, and use versions that sound like handles! Initials are a popular way of handle-ifying a name (pg, RMS). You can recover that they refer to real names, but in terms of social norms, few people here address 'pg' as 'Paul'. Another one is to use an 8-char version of your name, akin to a username that might've once been assigned on a Unix system, like someone named Richard Stallman going by 'rstallma'.

(For my part, I use two depending on the situation. This one is the pseudonymous version, and I have another handle that is related to my real name for situations where that seems warranted.)

SeanDav• 14 years ago

I joined your site a short while ago and was quite surprised at your "pen name" policy, but surprised in a positive way. I also think that anything that helps take away some of the anonymity of interacting on online forums will lead to an overall increase in posting quality and less flaming/trolling.

darklajid• 14 years ago

May I ask what the (estimated if needed) average age of your registered users is?

nickzoic• 14 years ago

Which is interesting, because Google/Facebook also seem to be requiring a "Pen name", really ... until they start checking IDs for a serious proportion of users, and not just the ones which seem odd to them.

nsmartt2• 14 years ago

It's a terms of service violation. Are you really arguing that it's acceptable to enforce a real name policy because you can just lie about your name?

kmfrk• 14 years ago

People write a lot of vitriol on Facebook and in Facebook comments. I guess you can be hopeful, but experience shows that it doesn't exactly stop the stupidity entirely.

quacker• 14 years ago

From a linked article: According to a study by the KCC, malicious comments accounted for 13.9 percent of all messages posted on Internet threads in 2007 but decreased only 0.9 percentage points in 2008, a year after the regulation went into force.[1]

And from a glance at the CMU paper: Our findings suggest that the enhanced identification process shows significant effects on reducing uninhibited behaviors at the aggregate level, but there is no significant impact regarding a particular user’s behavioral shift.[2]

These actually indicate an improvement in general, and in fact the first reason listed in for scrapping the real-name registration was that it increased "cyber hacking" rather than the ineffectiveness of using real names.[1] I haven't read through the paper, but I'm interested in the contexts where changes occur. For example, if HN and reddit and YouTube all switched to real-name logins, which site would have the most improvement? Are sites that discuss primarily controversial topics more likely to resist improvements in comment quality after a switch to real-name login? (These are rhetorical.)

1: http://english.chosun.com/site/data/html_dir/2011/12/30/2011...

2: http://www.computer.org/csdl/proceedings/hicss/2012/4525/00/...

ThomPete2• 14 years ago

The best way to improve comments is to charge for your service. well.com have probably some of the most amazing discussions I have ever been part of. Sadly the website is slowly waning. But there are great great discussions in there and all of them well behaved even when it gets heated.

You own your words

paulsutter• 14 years ago

Most Koreans have the surnames Kim, Park, or Lee. I once tried searching for the names of Korean friends on a Korean social network. Every name I tried had a huge number of matches, and I was unable to find anyone by name.

Of course I do agree that moderation is important anywhere. Forcing users to identify themselves may have an adverse selection bias. People with anything to lose may comment much less, and the trolls may be proud of their provocative opinions.

john_flintstone• 14 years ago

I once tried searching for my friend John Smith on Facebook, and there he was, right at the top. Good thing westerners have such distinctive names.

bokonist• 14 years ago

In Korea ~50% of the population has one of the three most popular surnames (Park, Lee or Kim). There are only about 250 surnames in use ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_name ). In the U.S. a bit less than 3% of the population has one of the three most popular surnames (Smith, Johnson or Williams) and there are over ten thousand names in common use ( http://www.census.gov/genealogy/www/data/1990surnames/dist.a... ). So yes, your sarcasm aside, American names are an order of magnitude more distinctive.

varjag2• 14 years ago

Any realistic method of signing off with your real name make you very traceable via the identity provider.

yaix• 14 years ago

Real name means:

(a) lawyers will make more money suing people for ever bad word they write

(b) you will have problems all your life for some puberty-influenced shit you wrote when 16

This real name wave is the worst thing happening to web culture since aol was invented.

cbr• 14 years ago

You will probably have (b) even without real names. Pseudonymity is hard enough that as we get better at interpreting this data I suspect most will be connected back to offline identities. Relying on the identity separation we have now to persist is asking for trouble.

mechanical_fish• 14 years ago

For social purposes you usually don't need the kind of anonymity that would fool a government agency, or a private investigator, or even the Googlebot. You need plausible deniability and relative obscurity.

When someone goes looking for the most embarrassing thing you ever wrote, they often find it. But we treat them the way we'd treat someone who hired a private detective: If they don't have a good reason, we conclude that they're creepy and rude.

flogic• 14 years ago

Also it tends to shut up exactly the disadvantaged people we want to here from. Personally, I use my real name, but I'm a white heterosexual male. Change any of those and I might not feel so comfortable giving random strangers the means to find me. My fiancee for instance avoids using her real name like the plague of death.

mynameishere• 14 years ago

I use a fake name specifically because I'm a white heterosexual male. You don't seem to understand which views are verboten and punishable in this modern age.

Gormo• 14 years ago

Your real name is 'flogic'?

I kid, but this is one of the best discussions sites on the web, and few, if any, use their real names here. Clearly discussion quality is much more significantly determined by other factors: site demographics, culture, subject matter, even the UX of posting in and viewing discussion threads probably all matter more than whether people use real names or pseudonyms.

Using pseudonyms has been traditional online for a very, very long time, and it's possible that some of the unique aspects of the internet as a social medium might not exist were this not the case.

Much of this discussion revolves around anonymity, but it's important to note that people who consistently use the same pseudonyms in the same communities are not anonymous within those communities. But by using pseudonyms, they're able to de-link participation in one community from their participation in other communites - including their offline relationships - and posit a context-specific persona.

The old "on the internet no one knows you're a dog" cartoon comes to mind, and not just because of your comments about being a "white heterosexual male", and that being in other categories might expose you to certain risks; you're also able to start with a blank slate in a new community, or start over in an old one, and have your identity there be shaped entirely by the value of your participation. You don't get this anywhere else in life.

I'd be surprised if most of the people posting cogent and insightful comments here on HN aren't also posting the occasional image macro on Reddit, or posting God-knows-what to 4chan, or participating in forums, IRC channels, etc. under names that keep their identities on these disparate sites quite separate, and adhering to the cultural norms of each within its own boundaries.

yuhong• 14 years ago

Personally I am not for real name policies, but I do believe that these problems should be fixed properly if possible, which is why I consider employee gagging the worst part of the Google+ nymwars.

rrbrambley2• 14 years ago

It is true that requiring real names reduces the amount of unwanted noise and can thus result in a higher quality discussion, but some people are just a lot more worried than others about their reputation with their peers. Lack of anonymity will cause you to second guess yourself a lot more before clicking the reply button.

jcfrei• 14 years ago

my thoughts exactly. one of the best properties of online discussions is the relative anonymity towards other members. Randi Zuckerbergs statement "I think anonymity on the Internet has to go away" is bullshit, and blatantly ignores the importance an anonymous web has for the efficient distribution of information (esp. if you're living in a country which censors the internet). although real names might increase comment quality, this is at the loss of a much broader range of topics and participants within the discussion. curation of web comments has to happen via a community driven approach like flagging and downvoting.

rossjudson4• 14 years ago

I think you blatantly overstate the importance of the anonymous web for everyday use. Yes, there are some corner cases where anonymity is an important part of the political process. These are exceedingly rare. Anonymity is used, in virtually all cases, to disconnect speech from consequences. In other words, to be a chickenshit, 'cause you're worried someone you work with might see your hate-filled rant against the blacks.

djt• 14 years ago

The irony is that Techcrunch started using Facebook Comments to decrease the amount of trolls.

http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/06/techcrunch-facebook-comment...

rocky1138• 14 years ago

Isn't there a culture difference between Korea and America/Canada/England/France/Russia? Perhaps there are more variables at stake here than just whether or not it's a person's real name.

It's neat that this didn't work in Korea, but that doesn't mean it won't work elsewhere.

rrbrambley2• 14 years ago

Yeah, what this study doesn't acknowledge (or at least via TechCrunch's perspective) is that the culture (and more broadly, the country) in which the website visitors live (in the offline world) would probably contribute to how they present themselves to an online community. I would imagine that people might go as far as to speak in a way that they think will reflect on themselves positively in the physical "real" world, if they care about their reputation in their physical community. However, if you live in a rural community, you might not care as much, because your reputation online does not necessarily transfer to the real world and affect relationships with people you see on a daily basis.

mindslight• 14 years ago

You know what would actually improve comments? A browser extension that posted Markov chain generated trolling, recognized such comments from other instances, and then removed the auto-generated comments and their replies. Most "trolling" is just unintrospective but earnest people arguing at other morons. Trap them in a honeypot.

mokus• 14 years ago

Serious question - how do you stop the trolls from running that extension too?

Sami_Lehtinen• 14 years ago

I think real names do make difference. It makes you effectively self censor, because every comment is a statement with your name with it. Do you often troll you boss or clients / customers?

rossjudson4• 14 years ago

This is where Slashdot's "anonymous coward" really starts to shine. Sure, you can post anonymously, but ac can get filtered out very quickly. Anonymous should mean anonymous, not pseudonym-anonymous.

Produce• 14 years ago

So the Google ecosystem was a bad idea after all. I knew it. First they lure you in with a slick web mail client and a couple of gigabytes of storage. Then they buy up a bunch of companies, including YouTube. Then they link your Google and YouTube accounts together. And now your Google identity is suddenly your YouTube identity which is linked to your real name. I didn't ask or sign up for the vast majority of this!

jkn2• 14 years ago

I don't really use YouTube so I can't say, but is there anything preventing you from keeping separate accounts on Gmail and YouTube, something that makes it less convenient than if these websites were run independently of one another?

pi18n• 14 years ago

It seems that Google will log you in across all of their services if you log into one. So to use separate names, you would have to be logging in and out whenever you switch services.

stcredzero• 14 years ago

> In 2007, South Korea temporarily mandated that all websites with over 100,000 viewers require real names, but scraped [sic] it after it was found to be ineffective...

In other news, TC editors still found to be ineffective.

dhughes• 14 years ago

Damn, I'm going to have to change my username to rocketboy2354.

milesskorpen3• 14 years ago

They buried it, but: "Further analysis by Carnegie Mellon’s Daegon Cho and Alessandro Acquisti, found that ... the policy reduced swearing and “anti-normative” behavior at the aggregate level by as much as 30% ..."

Seems pretty compelling (and positive) to me.

WiseWeasel• 14 years ago

But at what cost?

/dramatic

freshhawk3• 14 years ago

Oh well, if there's less swearing in youtube comments then it's clearly worth it.

Plus, with more real names then we have less of that uppity anti-establishment talk. That stuff is so annoying when it drowns out my stream of pictures of cats and plates of food.

And history clearly shows us that the only times important works were published pseudonymously those works were attacking their betters and upsetting the status quo. Like these hooligans: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pseudonyms_used_in_the_...

sunir3• 14 years ago

I do not feel worried that we will miss out on the next revolution because its manifesto can no longer be written in a YouTube comment.

As long as free expression is legal and there is a free market, there will be an outlet for free, anonymous expression. It just doesn't have to be every single one.

I do think it is reasonable to wonder if real names on YouTube is too restrictive. Yet in the same vein it is ludicrous to confuse the issue with the extreme worry that the US constitution could not be debated in YouTube videos--possibly arguing if LMFAO's Party Rock Anthem should be our bro-national bro-anthem.

tomjen32• 14 years ago

It sounds extreemly draconian to me.

"anti-normative behaviour" is just an extreemly faux-elitist word for what business calls out of the box thinking.

It can be good or it can be bad, but a simple reduction to the mean (which is what it implies) is nearly by definition bad. Societies that are chaotic and disorderly may seem worse of than societies that march in lock-step and where everybody wears the same uniform and everybody is the same, but the latter society is guaranteed never to advance, no matter how far ahead its present state is.

invisible2• 14 years ago

I don't get what you are trying to imply... You do not walk up to people in public and criticize their gender, sexuality, appearance, intelligence, and more just because you do not agree with their opinion. "Anti-normative" is pretty vague but I'm assuming it is covering that subset of things that may not be cursing but are still negative. It seems that you are making the term fit some assumed oppression on society when it's just trying to make people not be dicks.

scott_s• 14 years ago

In the context of social interactions, "anti-normative behavior" is academic speak for being a dick.

vacri3• 14 years ago

There is no way in hell that I would swap swearing for discussion of edge case politics, ethics, or philosophy.

Even when throwing around 'devil's advocate' stuff, people get scared when there are potential ramifications for what they said. Often it doesn't come out.

JumpCrisscross2• 14 years ago

For "surprisingly good evidence" the TechCrunch article blatantly ignores the findings of the Carnegie Mellon study linked to [1].

TL;DR the study found "that the proportion of negative postings has decreased on the pseudonym-based forum after the law; whereas, the law was not influential on the website in which real names were being revealed regardless of the law." It gives little insight into what happens when a site switches from being pseudyonym-based to real named.

The Real Name Verification Law of 2007 required website owners verify the identities of users but did "not force websites to reveal [their] real names". Thus, it resulted in pseudonym-based forums that can now link to a real identity if needed and sites which always used real names but can now verify them.

On the pseudonym-based forum, after switching from unlinked pseudonyms, i.e. anonymity, to linkable pseudonyms "the proportion of bad postings clearly decreased...in both short-term and long-term compared to the control group, and they are statistically significant". The switch was "not salient" on the real name board that always used real names. Plus one TechCrunch.

The study readily states that the "proportions of bad postings [on the real name forum] are smaller than those [on the pseudonym-based forum]" across the board. This suggests a real name board will contain less vulgarity.

If one is worried about switching from unlinked to linked pseudonyms, note that the "composition of user groups did not change over the period regardless of the law".

We should also qualify articulating these findings to the United States given that "South Korea’s household broadband penetration reached 95%, which was the highest rate among those of all 57 surveyed countries" and that their political culture tends to be a mark more boisterous than we have here.

[1] http://www.computer.org/csdl/proceedings/hicss/2012/4525/00/...

ChuckMcM• 14 years ago

I too was surprised that they would link to a study which kinda skewers their argument.

The point about how people eventually stop caring about cameras though is well taken. I can certainly believe that people will eventually get accustomed to the fact that their identity is out there and revert to their 'normal' behavior.

JumpCrisscross2• 14 years ago

Until we have evidence that belief is an article of faith. The study showed a significant persistent effect six months after the law.

rossjudson4• 14 years ago

You're making the silly mistake of believing the the TC author actually read the paper he linked to. Sigh. I guess that's another article for why real names don't matter. The TC author didn't care about his name being attached to this article, and it's crap that's wrong.

ThePherocity• 14 years ago

And on top of that, this is a single market, culturally linked, with only five family names making up the majority of the populace (54%). Real names policy probably isn't as much of a deterrent for John Smith. Just sayin'.

grandalf• 14 years ago

One thing I don't understand is if "real name" means that I have to use my real name or that my username must consist of a made up first name and made up last name...

DanBC2• 14 years ago

> “People behave a lot better when they have their real names down.

I've read plenty of mailing lists where real names are used and people behave appallingly. See also fidonet; Usenet; some wikis; some web forums.

And do they actually want a real name, or just something that sounds like a real name?

"Ivor Trotts" only makes YouTube videos about bowels?

ck2• 14 years ago

Can you imagine in the USA if individuals were allowed to donate millions completely anonymously to political campaigns but not allowed to post a comment online without a real name by law?

dredmorbius• 14 years ago

Pseudonyms and anonymity are also an established part of many cultures -- for good reason.

- Alma Whitten, Director of Privacy, Product and Engineering, Google

http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/2011/02/freedom-to-be...

Tsagadai• 14 years ago

Note the date for the KCC's move to scrap it (the date is today for those who didn't read the source). The real names policy has been used by the government and corporations to stifle serious discussions and criticisms in South Korea. Korea has a really strong and trivially abusable libel law, the [Cyber defamation law](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyber_defamation_law). Basically, right now in Korea, I cannot criticise the accuracy or validity of a news article online without giving the journalist a strong case for suing me for damaging their career of ineptitude. The law is completely ambiguous and even allows political figures to sue opponents for criticising their policies.

That, and as a coder the way the law was worded made it very difficult to actually comply with securely. Politicians are the last people you want to have writing a data retention policy for you.

Surprisingly Good Evidence That Real Name Policies Fail To Improve Comments

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