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Real Name Policy
In the past, I supported the COW’s policy to require real names from posters. For one thing, knowing that my friends, virtual and IRL, would see my query, made me phrase my questions much more carefully. Often, by the time I refined my query, I figured out the answer and didn’t have to post anyway.
I used to wish all social media sites would emulate the COW in this regard. I’m still in favor of the COW’s policy, for the COW, because the issues discussed here tend to be technical rather than personal or political.
Not always, though. Occasionally, I have winced when a poster raised a delicate issue with a boss or client; as someone here pointed out, your every post is a Google search away. In those cases, I wish the COW would allow anonymity. This year, a strong nominee for Best Actor probably lost, simply due to an old series of posts that she shouldn’t have written.
I have grandchildren now, who will soon reach social-media age. I will be telling them that a post they write at age 14 might later cost them a fellowship or a job or a college acceptance.
True anonymity may not be possible. With AI, I suspect that people will be able to penetrate posters’ noms de plume. But it’s something to think about.
Especially in the U.S.A., especially now.
Bob C.
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3 Replies
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Hello Bob!
The COW supports anonymity a little bit. We don’t research to find out if someone’s name is actually on their birth certificate and hold them to it. So if someone wants to fly under the radar as another “John Smith”, (of which we have 142!), we’re never gonna know the difference.
What separates Creative COW from other sites is the lack of silly, nonsensical, or even offensive user names, since we lean toward building a community of professionals. And this velvet rope really does seem to prevent a lot of poor behavior. We rarely have folks act obnoxiously, and it could very well come down to a psychological boundary that says “since I have to present myself as a human, I may as well act like a human.”
I do, however, acknowledge that we may also be preventing ourselves from deeper discussions that focus on personal issues.
But on the other hand, we don’t have problems that other sites do have. I know, for example, that if I visit a site like Reddit, I can expect to be dragged through the mud for every misstep and even for completely innocent questions and comments. You just expect people to be unhelpful, rude, and worse than rude, in the land of utter anonymity.
What’s important to remember on the anonymity front is that the COW doesn’t look terribly deeply into user’s identities beyond the fact that they “seem” to have a human name. We have never shared these identities or IP addresses or anything along those lines with outside sources, and we never will. What Google does and what AI does might be another story. But folks who visit the COW are free to do as they wish so long as, like I said, they appear and act like decent human beings.
I do feel very sorry for kids these days who will never see anonymity in their lifetime. I noticed when my granddaughter was born that probably the first thing she saw in this world was a phone in her face taking a picture that would be uploaded to Facebook. I thought: “Thus it begins. A life devoid of any privacy!”
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Hey Bob,
I really like that I can look up long-timers (thinking back to WWUG) outside of the COW and see what they are up to these days.
But I also understand that at a time where the COW, was around before FaceBook, Twitter and the rest, that some people might be afraid of using their real name, incase it falls back on them.
In particularly I found on Twitter, now X, that some “fake” profiles was set up to atagonise and spread discourse, and it is much worse now under Musk’s “X” branding.
(I have joined BlueSky, and is currently winding down my “X” account)You can’t win, but I suspect that Bessie takes a nuanced view on which accounts are behaving to guide-lines, and which accounts, with their IP address just needs to be thrown into a blackhole never to be heard from again.
Atb
Mads -
Thanks Brie and Mads. See, these are the kinds of responses that set the COW apart.
I very much appreciate the COW’s humanity, honesty, and capacity for nuance. It’s not a “Shouting Place,” as so much social media has become.
Bob
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