Who you are in "real life" very much affects who you are, and what you are capable of, and how you are impacted by what you experience on-line. Anonymity works in very limited circumstances. It quickly becomes pathological over the long-term.
Sure, social norms need to adapt to the circumstances and the context, but the fundamentals of kindness, respect, integrity, and the need for communities to police themselves on some level, don't really go away.
These are long-term work projects where folks are either employed or are volunteering and donating considerable amounts of time and energy. If you want that to be successful, in the long term and for increasingly many people, you need a mechanism to deal with people behaving badly, or people not understanding one another. It's ridiculous to think this is all necessary when all you want to do is write some code, but it's also ridiculous to think you should have to worry about harassment, bullying, or worse when all you want to do is write some code.
when I was in middle school (2004-ish?), I collaborated on a video game development project with four other dudes I met online, two of whom I became close friends with. we all knew the project leader was Australian because he told us as much, because he insisted we spell "armour" with a "u", and because of the times of day he was online. it was easy to infer that the rest of us were North American, but it wasn't until months and months of IMing back and forth that I came to learn that one of the other guys, the one whom I was closest with, was black. it just never came up in conversation, until he was explaining some personal anecdote to me in private and it was contextually appropriate. why would it? we were five dorky middle/high schoolers who enjoyed video games and learning to create them together, and we only knew each other by our handles, and, later, our given names. why would we talk about what color of skin we had? nothing could be less relevant to a bunch of kids who were eagerly doing collaborative creative work together, across the globe, through the magic of the Internet.
this is not to say that one shouldn't be open with who they are in real life, when projecting themselves on the Internet, but, rather, to show that, just a couple short decades ago, it was far less popular to do this than it is now. Internet users were usernames, avatars, and forum sigs, and perhaps a personal webpage (which was highly unlikely to reveal much about one's real-life identity, either). that's all you had to go on at the base level, and then, from there, it was one's actions that influenced others' opinions of them, as opposed to anything having to do with one's real-life physical or demographic characteristics.
it was so cool, man, let me tell you. it felt like being on the brink of a glorious cyber-libertarian future, where all manner of real-life bigotry could be nonexistent, because it was useless, because nobody knew anything about anyone else, because we were interacting with cyber-avatars of each other first and foremost, only getting to know the real meatspace people behind the cyber-avatar after becoming friends with them, through shared purpose and/or interest. especially after learning that this dude I was interacting with, teaching, learning from, making stuff with, for months, online, was black, it was just so exciting, because one got the feeling that perhaps this Internet thing could truly be a force of good in the world—if everyone became used to interacting with these raceless sexless ideology-less cyber-avatars on this Internet thing, then perhaps, gradually, real-world bigotry would be phased out, as it would largely be useless in this new realm of cyberspace.
but then Facebook, Twitter, etc. came to be, the iPhone was released, and normies became connected to the Internet 24/7. then, as if that wasn't bad enough, the modern idea of identity politics cropped up mysteriously right around the time the #Occupy was gaining steam. then in 2013—a decade ago now—Donglegate happened, and it became clear to me that the cyber-libertarian dream of an utterly meritocratic, bigotry-free Internet, full of all kinds of weird and cool people coming together to share interests and make weird and cool stuff together and share said weird and cool stuff with the rest of the world, was most certainly long since dead.
> It sounds like arrogance, group-think, and a lack of empathy for outsiders was pretty much at the heart of your cyber-libertarian dream utopia.
that sure is one way to characterize being a lonely teen who discovered a feeling of belonging in an emergently developing meta-culture set in an incredibly diverse environment of digital creativity, inspiration, and hope for the future, that anyone could feel like they belonged in if only they lurked for awhile to acclimate to the social norms of whichever communities seemed interesting to explore—only to watch it all turn into a shit garbage nonstop 24/7 orgy of pot-stirring clickbait, endless screeching about identity politics, opportunistic social posturing and grifting, and just general daily misery, all funneled right into the palm of your hand, ready for you to scroll through and get agitated about whatever the fuck latest nonsense thing is going on elsewhere in the world—and then when you're done with that, swipe your thumb a few more times, and easily access a dozen more endless feeds containing the same digital excrement, just with different seasonings.
"normies" got thrown into being online 24/7 way too fast, before anyone could acclimate to the cultural norms that had already been established there, such that said cultural norms were immediately supplanted by a deluge of what was essentially mass immigration from a foreign, incompatible culture. and it wasn't even their fault, really, it was the corporations who were overly eager to usher in the New Age of Everyone Being Online At All Times, So As To Market More Things To More People.
> It was just comfortable _for you_ because in that utopia, you had power.
were you there for the Old Times? or do you genuinely know no other Internet than today's grotesque hellscape? because that's kind of what it sounds like.
if I had any "power", it was the power to create, share, and consume creative content in a way mankind had never thought possible before—contrast this with today's Internet, in which 99.9% of users only engage in consumption, and not just any consumption, but consumption of the highest-bandwidth, lowest-effort, most-brain-cell-killing kind. if you call this "power", then you can hardly claim I was alone in having it, or that some identity/demographic property permitted me access to it—desktop computers were cheap and popular, and pretty much every household had one. anyone with the requisite curiosity and either patience to lurk or humility to be told to lurk could find something to enjoy, no matter what their interests were.
there were no endless social feeds to scroll through just to intentionally read things that make you angry for political reasons because they were engineered to do exactly that, no highly centralized websites where everyone could yell at each other online—it was all smaller communities, like this one, with their own value systems, social norms, and so forth. it was good times.
> But let's not kid ourselves that it was somehow free from all the failings of normal human society.
this is why I asked if you were there at the time, because this sounds like the perspective of someone who either was not, or has since forgotten how much things have changed in such a short period of time—the Internet and the Real World used to be different things, not long ago at all, and everyone used to understand that. you used to have to sit down at a computer in order to interact with the Internet, and it was like jacking into the Matrix—when you logged off, you were back in the real world. that doesn't happen anymore, because even if you log off, everyone around you hasn't—if not physically then at least mentally.
Peak Desktop Internet was twentyish years ago man, and the Web was only mainstreamish for, what, tenish years before that? if that?
a lot has changed in the past 20 years, culturally, with the rise of the smartphone, and it's useful to reflect upon that—I don't know why you're insisting on being a dick about it. I have to assume you grew up in the smartphone era, and that's all you've ever known.
Who you are in "real life" very much affects who you are, and what you are capable of, and how you are impacted by what you experience on-line. Anonymity works in very limited circumstances. It quickly becomes pathological over the long-term.
Sure, social norms need to adapt to the circumstances and the context, but the fundamentals of kindness, respect, integrity, and the need for communities to police themselves on some level, don't really go away.
These are long-term work projects where folks are either employed or are volunteering and donating considerable amounts of time and energy. If you want that to be successful, in the long term and for increasingly many people, you need a mechanism to deal with people behaving badly, or people not understanding one another. It's ridiculous to think this is all necessary when all you want to do is write some code, but it's also ridiculous to think you should have to worry about harassment, bullying, or worse when all you want to do is write some code.