My username is most of my real name already. All of my friends and family know this. I even make comments all the time about stuff I found on Reddit/Lemmy/Discord/etc. No one cares. Not a single person has attempted to look me up; at least no one who has admitted it.
I try to be true to myself online. It’s easy to hide behind a username, and eventually you start thinking you’re invincible; that no one will figure out who you are. And you start saying things that might hurt you or ones you love if it ever got out.
I choose to avoid that altogether and just be myself online. Keeping a username that can be tied back to myself keeps me in check and ensures I only say or do things online that people who know me in real life would respect. It helps me to be a better person, even with the anonymity that the Internet may bring.
I used to believe in this (and to a degree still do), but the idea of increasing the attack surface of unreasonable people (who seem to have become increasingly common in the last 10 years) who will do insane things like SWAT you, or doxx your personal details (like home address), or even just follow you around online to harass you has made me have second thoughts about the tradeoffs involved in this approach 🫠
Plus, you gotta be white, male, straight and cis to avoid harassment just for being who you are online. I am none of those things, so no thank you to using a traceable identity online.
This is the way. And same here. I don’t use the mask of pseudo-anonymity to be a jackass. Anyone I know who discovers my online accounts will find I interact online and IRL exactly the same way.
This is the way. And same here. I don’t use the mask of pseudo-anonymity to be a jackass. Anyone I know who discovers my online accounts will find I interact online and IRL exactly the same way.
One can use ‘pseudo-anonimity’ without being a jackass, we all better not forget that.
I mean, the issue with someone being a jackass is not their willingness to (try to) be anonymous, it’s them being a jackass.
Us forgetting that is akin to us allowing those people telling us that we should all let go of any notion of privacy and freedom of speech because ‘think of the children’. Freedom and privacy is the wrong issue, and their suppression is an even wronger solution to what’s the real problem.
Disclaimer: I use a pseudonym (the same one everywhere, even on my personal website), if you want to find any ‘jackass’ content be my guest.
I’m good. Me online and irl is pretty much the same.
Not much. I’ve made it a rule not to say anything on the internet that I’d be ashamed to say IRL. Other posters have recognised me from real life a couple of times and it’s been no big deal.
I was once part of a community for making very crass jokes about sensitive topics, but given that the entrance is plastered with warnings about what you’re going to find inside, I hope people would take it in its proper context.
Not very :3
Not even the tiniest bit, lol. I stand by everything I said here (and wouldn’t mind being corrected, ofc) and my friends and family know me well enough to see I’m actually trying to be cordial to y’all! Oh, and my wife ‘stalks’ me on Lemmy already. 😅
Not. I’m pretty much the same irl and online. Anyone who knows me could probably figure out who I am based on my posts (no need to wait for a doxing!). 🤷
Meh, I don’t say anything online I wouldn’t say to your face, so the folks that know me would just be “Ya, that tracks.”
Might wind up on a few more government lists though.
Oh well. Winter is coming.
I’m in the US right now, wouldn’t be fun to get deanonymized.
Edit: Note to Mods: this is about legal issues and civil rights infringement, so its not really “political”, but I’ve hidden it in a spoiler tag so people don’t have to read it if they don’t want to.
Wall of Text
I’m a non-US-born American, and probably wouldn’t be dissenting online if I were a non-citizen. And even so, I’m using Tor right now.
I already accounted for like the 50% chance that NSA has deanonymized me so I make sure to not make any actual threats. So yea even tho I’m dissenting, I have waterered-down what I really mesnt to say so my words are still supposedly legal (mostly do this so that I win the “court of public opinion” if I do get arrested). Like if I get arrested for a “trump loves to suck dick” comment, I’ll be famous on the news especially considering Mahmoud Khakil is a Muslim Greencard holder that got so much good press and its only because they managed to villianize Palestine, while I’m a Citizen and I fit into the “model minority” stereotype so its much harder to paint a negative picture about me.
Like the headline looks like: “Anti-CCP ethnic Chinese, American Citizen, whom the CCP tried to prevent the birth of under the One Child Policy, arrested for criticizing dictatorships and excersicing freedom of speech”. Yea legally I can get very fucked, but I’ll make a great news article. I’m okay with dying if it mean I got a wikipedia page for it lol.
I guess I could get very fucked if they actually start to prosecute online comments, but then again there’s like millions of anti-trump comments they have no room to fit everyone in concentrstion camps, unless they pull off a “Tiananmen”.
If Americans really let this trump version of Tiananmen happen, then I probably wouldn’t have enjoyed what comes afterwards anyways so I might be better off just dying.
With my family/peers - not at all.
With psychopaths in power and their supporters/goons - mildly to very.
I’ve already been completely screwed before Lemmy. At this point, all that could happen is me getting unscrewed.
that can be arranged 😘
Nah, screw it.
Worst is that everyone knows I say fuck a lot.
Swear words are actually handled by a separate ancillary language center in the brain…
You’re not being crude, you’re just using your whole fucking brain
Fuckin giga brain
Giga brain and giga body…
Engaging that part of your brain increases pain tolerance and strength.
All anyone needs to be a fucking hulk is to lose their fucking filter.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7204505/
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11586181/
Now, what’s crazy is your brain doesn’t know what a swear word is innately, so saying “fricking” with the same meaning and being used habitually as a standin gives the same effects. Any word/phrase with enough emotional effect gets filtered there, could be anything
Tldr:
You can train a child to yell “That’s my purse” and get stronger and tougher like Bobby Hill
Interesting, but according to the first of those links, fake swear words don’t work as well? There’s a psychiatric illness called Tourette’s syndrome where the person can only use swear words, so that does sound to me like the brain processes them differently.
You’re not born knowing the difference between “fuck” and “birthday”…
You learn those words, you learn that one is “special” and comes with intense emotional connections , then it goes to the special language center
If I told you to pretend “apricot” meant “asshole”, it might work a little
If I raised you from birth with the correct usage of the English language except those two words were reversed in every instance …
You’d get stronger and tougher by yelling apricot, and calling someone an asshole would be silly, but not insulting.
But while Tourettes can involve that language center, it doesn’t have to. It’s a square/rectangle thing. Like how some people only make a syllable or two. And others scream whole ass sentences to the point others think an actual conversation is happening.
I did almost mention that, but it’s one of those things that are often oversimplified and needs a lot of asterisks
Quick edit:
“You could train a child to _____” is/was kind of a joke in psychology because it’s about what you could actually do. But under no circumstances would it be ethical to do.
Psychology is a very young field, and the first couple decades…
Ethics wasn’t really a big concern.
I didn’t mean I could take a 9 year and convince them “that’s my purse” was a swear word, it was a tongue in cheek joke that an infant raised in an unethical experiment would believe it.
We can’t actually do a lot of studies we want, so it’s kind of a gallows humor thing.
But it would be possible.
If I told you to pretend “apricot” meant “asshole”, it might work a little
Maybe the first of those experiments could have persisted for a while with a plan like that, but otherwise it’s an untested hypothesis that I don’t have particular reason to believe. Part of the conditioning around swear words comes from how you’ve seen other people react to them. If you put the test subject in a big group that was prompted to respond to “apricot” as if the person had said “asshole” and conditioned the person like that for a long while, that might work better than the subject just pretending. But it might be hard to do for long enough.
Man, if you’d have read one more sent you wouldn’t have needed to type a paragraph…
If I raised you from birth with the correct usage of the English language except those two words were reversed in every instance …
Not in the slightest. Even my wank material is relatively tame.
honestly I act the same in real life so not much
Which one? If all of them, I’m very screwed.
If it’s only one of them, I might still be fine. I often have more than one account in each “domain” to maintain some semblance of compartmentalism. If I can’t do that, I usually don’t post much, if at all.
Meh. I like the privacy but it wouldn’t be that bad. I try not to be an asshole, and NSFW stuff, I figure it’s private more because nobody wants to see that, than to protect me personally, I am not embarrassed to be human.
ETA question this reminded me of the Father John Misty song “The Ideal Husband”.
