You publish a book, and you get all kinds of unwanted attention.

If Twitter allowed us to mute posts from people who do not post under their own names, 99.9% of the hateful trolls in my stream would disappear. I could still follow pseudonymous accounts by choice, of course.

It's worth keeping in mind, though. Sometimes you think "Gosh, people really don't like what I'm doing. I wonder if I'm off base."

And then you realize that almost without exception, people who use their names do like it. The attacks are coming from @JoeRando01234567 and such.

To be clear, I absolutely want people to be able to post under pseudonyms. Some of my favorite accounts do. So the question is how do you make good faith accounts like that highly visible, while helping users see that 99.9% of the hate is coming from highly questionable sources?

My old friend John Clippinger had some very interesting ideas about distributed trust algorithms that preserve anonymity while leveraging reputational information across platforms. His book Crowd of One is admittedly flawed, but was prophetic in many ways. https://www.amazon.com/Crowd-One-Future-Individual-Identity/dp/B00119XY8O

Based on a number of very thoughtful comments on this thread, it's clear that we don't want to get rid of pseudonymous posting.

Clippinger's ideas from 15+ years ago about secure methods of distributing reputation anonymously across platforms seem to still merit thought.

This is not meant to be a thread against pseudonyms. It just struck me like a ton of bricks today that, as many times a day as I am insulted, attacked, or accused here, I can count on one hand the number of times it has happened from someone using their own real name.

Maybe that's evidence that I'm part of the problem. Maybe I make it unsafe to criticize me.

But I genuinely don't think so.

Anyway, it's interesting to think about what could be done, and crucially which of those solutions are compatible with Twitter's financial interests.