Mar 14
moot and Mark Zuckerberg, shockingly, don’t exactly see eye to eye on the subject of online identity. 4Chan’s founder (known as Christopher Poole to his dentist) called the Facebook founder out over comments about anonymity at South by Southwest over the weekend.
Zuckerberg has been preaching the importance of a “single identity” in recent years, with comments like, “Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.” Essentially Zuck’s point is that you should be the same person online amongst your friends as you are online amongst your coworkers. Naturally, Facebook wants to play a major role in bringing this uniformity to the forefront.
Of all people, the guy who started 4Chan–you know, that message board full of practical jokers hatching hijinks under assumed names–is taking Zuckerberg to task on this stance, arguing that the push toward single identities will be something of an end of innocence for the Web as we know it.
Being anonymous on the Web is like being the new kid in a neighborhood, Poole told a crowd at SXSW. It gives you a chance to experiment and try out new things. There are just too many consequences when you announce who you are ahead of time. “The cost of failure is really high when you’re contributing as yourself,” he told the crowd.
Interestingly, moot seems to be splitting the difference with a new project called Canv.as, which uses Facebook Connect to identify users to administrators. For front-facing activities, however, users will still be able to post anonymously. “[Y]ou know that we know,” he said of the site identification policy.
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