For a time my profile had a link to my personal website. I felt comfortable sharing this with y'all. Incidentally, during that time it would be trivial to find out who I am, in the real world. It's probably still really easy to find out who I am.
I have shared that I go to a boarding school in the Northeast, that my girlfriend is on Hubski (calling her out by username), and have shared videos and pictures of my accomplishments with y'all that put a face to the name. I put a "follow me on Hubski" button on my personal site.
Conversely, I chose a username on Hubski I barely use anywhere else, my Facebook profile is relatively limited as displayed to the public, and at some point in the past month I got rid of the link to my personal site to limit my exposure. I found myself willing to connect my name to my username when I felt that the community was smaller, but found my willingness to do so diminish as the community grew. I know many around the 'ski have connected their names/pennames to their usernames (thenewgreen, _refugee_), and I'm on the fence about doing it again. There are also people whose usernames are simply their first names (mike, steve), but I think I'm the only one on Facebook with my first name.
I stand behind the opinions I post here, the content I post here, and I already have a resume-style website where I connect my accomplishments to very concrete pictures of my face and my actual name. So I'd like to hear your thoughts.
Have you associated your name with your user? Would you consider doing so or continuing to do so in the future, even as our community grows? What do you suggest?
In my opinion, the spectrum of identity as it relates to the Internet is one of the most vexing and fascinating subjects confronting us without us really internalizing it.
Sherry Turkle wrote a couple books about it; Jaron Lanier wrote a couple essays. The big problem is that throughout history, the anonymous don't mix with the pseudonymous don't mix with the noteworthy. On the Internet, anonymous people can tweet at Kanye West all day. Combine that with Reddit, where you can go from anonymous to pseudonymous under the exact same conditions; there's no benefit to everyone knowing your handle but the more you participate, the more likely it is to happen. Unfortunately none of us really know how to act and it hurts a lot of people.
I'm a weird corner case: my pseudonym became an identity worth defending because I put a lot of me in it. That made it easy to attack, unfortunately. I've always written as if my real world identity would eventually be discovered and I try to be enough myself that I have nothing to be ashamed of. Anything I've said, I'd be comfortable saying in real life. That's not the way a lot of the Internet works, however, and when you have different groups of people operating under different ground rules, someone is going to get caught in the collision.
One of the things I like best about Hubski is that it functions on pseudonymity rather than anonymity. We have to know each other somewhat in order to have the conversations we have, and the site dynamics lend themselves to pseudonymous relationships. This is a place that encourages disclosure more than Reddit, 4chan, anywhere like that. It also makes the disagreements cut deeper.
I'm pretty good at locking down my identity and I've been doxed successfully at least three times. The stakes are much higher than they've ever been before; I no longer moderate a default because I wasn't 100% certain that my identity wouldn't be threatened. I also know that as a male I have an infinitely easier time on the Internet. Greater Creep Theory is fuckin' rough on the fair sex.
I think it's a choice we all have to make as carefully and in as well-considered a fashion as we can: how much of "you" can you risk? Not just here; Hubski is searchable so anything you're saying here, you're saying everywhere. That's the double-edged sword of Hubski - it encourages real social connections on an Internet designed to burn humanity to the ground.