Filed under #observations, #messaging and #psychology

When attempting to enforce real name policies in online foras discussions tend to get dumber.

I guess because real name policies work better against smart and nice people than against trolls.

When accounts are short lived or ephemeral discussions seem to get less civilized

I also wonder if, just like how people in nice cars on average seem to behave badly more often, people who have little to fear (powerful, has correct opinion) has a tendency to behave badly online more often. But I don't have data (yet at least).

Filed under #messaging

I think I can remember hearing about wt.social mast fall sometime but I never gave it a try back then.

After seing it mentioned again today I created an account and logged in.

It looks

• kind of promising,
• some ghost town vibes
• feels buggy
• kind of like Wikipedia. This makes we wonder if this project will also get curated to the point where I cannot get myself to contribute anymore. Previously I've given up Wikipedia (sometime after the Russian ex-spy was murdered with polonium) and stackexchange (I haven't enjoyed posting or answering there for years and now I even dread logging in to vote.)

I should probably go back someday to test it again.

Background: I am always looking for an alternative to Google+ (the social network, not the identity feature).

Over the two last years or so I've tested: – writefreely/write.as (kind of works. Really slow sometimes. Lacks a bunch of features, particularly some kind of comments, preferably from the Fediverse I think, but I am still a happy customer.) – mastodon, more specifically mstdn.io (it is more like Twitter, a nicer Twitter but still built on the same paint-yourself-into-a-corner ideas as Twitter.) – pixelfed (Instagram clone with a focus on creating good software instead of focusing on making Mark Zuckerberg happy.) – MeWe (kind of similar, but far from as nice) – Minds (my impression last time: polished, some interesting features, but between neo-nazism, plain old racism, lunatics and lunatic racists it almost set a new standard for both dumbness and unpleasantness. Unfortunately it is hard to beat certain chan sites at their home turf though.) – Hubzilla (seems really promising but despite experimenting with my own hub, trying to join a number of others etc I haven't been able to connect to a single human being that was online and posted in English. FWIW Norwegian, Danish or Swedish would have been OK too. Still it is one of the most promising ones in my opinion.) – Matrix (Also on my list of promising messaging solutions I want to try on a day when I get some uninterrupted time. I really want to like it.)