Internet Anonymity: The Double Edged Sword
People love the internet because they perceive themselves as anonymous when surfing and posting content. Tabling the entire discussion on how anonymous you really are on the internet, I wanted to to talk about the double edged sword of anonymity.
It’s great; you can join a forum on photography, get answers to your questions, and help teach others without ever revealing any real information about yourself. For example, I use Yahoo! Answers frequently to get answers to random questions in my life. I love it because I get quick access to large pool of knowledge without any substantial effort on my end. It’s free and all I need is a Yahoo! account, which is free. I can walk away from Yahoo! without any concern, as well.
But there is a downside to being anonymous. It rears its ugly head in areas like commenting and reviews. Several people have written about the need to abolish commenting. The best example of how quickly comments deviate from the original article to derogatory slander against others is YouTube. The site is plagued with spam comments, comments that are space wasting, and finally comments demeaning others. It’s scary if someone used these comments to understand the human condition. The level of anonymity YouTube’s commenting system allows, distances the user from any level of decency. Their comments consist of their inner most personal thoughts that often would never arise in a real social situation.
While commenting is spiraling into a cesspool, it’s review sites that are becoming ever more useless. These sites are challenged with filtering out real reviews against influenced reviews. Additionally, review sites have to devise solutions that bring in a normalized set of review. When I order delivery, I often use GrubHub, but the reviews for every restaurant is horrible. Turns out that the only people that come back to comment on the site are people who had a back experience.
So if you’re running a review site, how do you battle these issues? One solution would be a karma system. So users earn karma points from the community and their activity. The more reviews you write, the more karma points. The more other users value your reviews, the more karma points. There a couple caveats though. Careful monitoring would have to be used to prevent users colluding to drive up their own karma or drive down other user’s karma. Also, if deployed on a per application basis, you have to re-build your karma with every new site. Instead, we need a universal service that allows any application to participate in growing your karma. That way as you move through online applications, people will instantly know how much to value your thoughts.
The karma system provides you both anonymity and respect. You could still keep your online presence distinct from your actual presence, but you can bring the respect you’ve earned through one community over to other communities.
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