As a tech-literate person, I'm not 100% against the concept of ID if only because I think people will be more reasonable if they weren't anonymous.

This conflicts with my concerns about government crackdowns and the importance of anonymity when discussing topics that cover people who have a monopoly on violence and a tendency to use it.

So it's not entirely a black/white discussion to me.

Both Google and Facebook have enforced real identity and its not improved the state of peoples comments at all. I don't think anonymity particular changes what many people are willing to say or how they say it, people are just the creature you see and anonymity simple protects them it doesn't change their behaviour all that much.

I think opt-in ID is great. Services like Discord can require ID because they are private services*. Furthermore, I think that in the future, a majority of people will stay on services with some form of verification, because the anonymous internet is noisy and scary.

The underlying internet should remain anonymous. People should remain able to communicate anonymously with consenting parties, send private DMs and create private group chats, and create their own service with their own form of identity verification.

* All big services are unlikely to require ID without laws, because any that does not will get refugees, or if all big services collaborate, a new service will get all refugees.

The problem is this is only true for values of "reasonable" that are "unlikely to be viewed in a negative light by my government, job, or family; either now or at any time in the future". The chilling effect is insane. There was a time in living memory when saying "women should be able to vote" was not a popular thing.

I mean, this is _literally the only thing needed_ for the Trump admin to tie real names to people criticizing $whatever. Does anyone want that? Replace "Trump" with "Biden", "AOC", "Newsom", etc. if they're the ones you disagree with.

> I think people will be more reasonable if they weren't anonymous.

I've seen people post appalling shit on fuckin LinkedIn under their own names.

Strong moderation keeps Internet spaces from devolving into cesspools. People themselves have no shame.

That's what I believe as well. Anons have turned the internet into an unsafe cesspit. It's the opposite of a "town square."