Introduction
It seems like a lot of websites today are all about making you use your real name for everything. And this sounds exactly like what you'd expect, but back in my day, many of us avoided that, for a number of reasons. In fact, many still do.
Why Not Use Real Names?
The real name advocates sometimes claim there's no reason not to use your real name all the time. This. of course, is a load of crap, as there are several reasons why you wouldn't want to use your real name for something:
- It's not the/a name you actually go by.
- It's a name that outs you as what some consider "lesser" people.
- You have assholes and motherfuckers (stalkers, exes, etc.) looking for you.
- You want to keep certain aspects of your online life out of your offline life, or other aspects of your online one.
- You just don't want your offline baggage following you online.
On top of all that, you have some who are more than willing to use their real names, but since they don't conform to the real name pushers' "standard", they get accused of using fake names.
What's The Point?
Civility
The real name nozzles usually claim their "authentic identity" policies are put in place to encourage civility by preventing anonymous abuse and trolling. They think that if people see the crap someone posts and can link it to the person who posted it, they'll blackball the crap-posters and keep them from getting jobs and other things.
In reality, some dickwads use "just real enough" names to spew their garbage. And others will say the most vile, awful things and proudly attach their real names to them. A lot of them are probably on Social Security or disability, or their bosses actually agree with the crap they post, so it's unlikely they'll actually be paying (at least financially) for their crap posts.
The Real Reason
If you could read the minds of the real name fuckheads, you'd see the real reason they want everyone using their real names: to give their customers, the advertisers, the sweetest little cherries to top their data sundaes.
Fuck That Shit
Real name policies are just one of the legs of the Shitty Web, and are misguided, racist, and outside of giving advertrash high-value data, utterly pointless.
Note
The above text is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license.