Online Communication And The Merits Of Anonymous Discussion Platforms

Anonymity-oriented apps and websites are often criticized for facilitating negative behavior. While this criticism is valid, I believe that anonymous discussion platforms enable us to connect in ways that are no less important than the ways in which Facebook and other identity-oriented services enable us to come together.

Online Communication

When it comes to online interactions, we communicate using audio, visual, and written content (thanks Gary Vaynerchuk). I find it interesting that we’ve managed to comfortably divorce audio and visual content from our individual identities, yet have not been able to do the same with written content.

What I mean is that we often treat reactions to our Facebook and Reddit posts differently from how we treat reactions to our content on Instagram or Snapchat.

With written content, we instinctively frame our engagement in terms of the individual behind the content rather than the content itself. And I think this is the reason behind much of the undesirable behavior we find on platforms where we use words to express our ideas.

Written Content Platforms

Written content platforms tend to map our offline relationships online. And in personal contexts, this works very well. Services like Facebook enable us to connect with individuals worldwide in ways that simply weren’t possible before.

However, civility often breaks down when strangers with conflicting viewpoints interact.

While such issues are less apparent on more professional platforms like Medium and LinkedIn, at this point we’re all too familiar with the hateful comments and intellectual self-segregation that occurs within certain parts of Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, 4chan, and many other online communities.

Twitter, Reddit, and 4chan

In many ways, these services showcase both the best and worst of what anonymous online discussion has to offer.

On one hand, they enable users to engage with anyone about anything. But on the other hand, features like upvotes, likes, karma, tripcodes, followers, and subscriber counts encourage users to form cliques and group mentalities that make it all too easy for users to talk at each other instead of listening to each other’s ideas.

And this is a shame because anonymous discussion platforms are, in my opinion, the best medium for us to discuss and exchange ideas we might not come across in our day-to-day lives.

A Change In Perspective

I think that treating our Reddit posts the same way we treat Instagram photos would go a long way in solving the issues with anonymous and pseudonymous discourse.

To that end, I tried making a website that incorporates some of these ideas. Hashtags is a chat site where, instead of individual users, individual messages have IDs.

A few days ago, I posted the site to Hacker News and had some interesting feedback. Some users found the concept fun and interesting, while others were confused about the IDs being tied to their messages instead of themselves. There was some great discussion, but also some spam.

Going forward, I’m interested to see how other communities react to the idea of separating the message from the messenger.

To use the site, you can append any hashtag or discussion topic to the base URL (https://hashtags.chat/YourTagHere) and share the link with anyone who’d be interested in discussing your chosen tag. Otherwise you can visit the default channel at https://hashtags.chat, which might be a little chaotic.

Oh and there’s no need to sign up — you can just start typing.