Non-toxic anonymity in fan communities

[mecurtin]

The non-fandom blogosphere is having Round #34890104789237557 of Why and How There's Bad Behavior on the Internets. As usual, all of the Thinkers stress the importance of (a) Real Names as a check on bad behavior, or at least (b) Consistent Pseuds. "It's the anonymity that brings out the Evil!" they all agree

Comments

[brancher]

I've been both a victim of the /b/ board - and yes, I think they caused real damage in my life - and a part of a thriving anon kinkmeme that originated on a chan board. In both cases, I think the anon environments behaved exactly the way anthropology would suggest human societies behave. I saw the /b/tards act as a classic mob, and I saw the kinkmeme self-govern the same way some small hunter-gatherer groups do - quashing bullies and braggarts, carefully maintaining the common peace

[mecurtin]

Do you think part of the difference was population? That is, /b/ is extremely large, and you imply (maybe?) that the kinkmeme was a small group. It may be that with a very large population implicit social signals ("what we do here") inevitably become very simplistic, reverting to a lowest common denominator of barely-social behavior. Foraging-band level society is *extremely* fine-grained, because everyone (a) knows and (b) lives with everybody else.

[brancher]

I'm not sure that's it, since I have certainly seen smallish anon kinkmemers behave like a pack of bitches. Hm. One thing about /b/ is that they are a mob - that is, they don't attack each other. There are members of /b/ who literally scour the internets to find victims. Among themselves, they are just as self-governing as my tiny kinkmeme.

Although I think you're on to something; I'm thinking about the part of human history when urbanization reached the point when daily contact with strangers became a part of human life. This is what Hammurabi's Code was written for - when self-governance became impossible, and anonymity was part of that.

[eleanorb]

It entirely depends on the anon meme and how self policing it is