I think you’re living in 2010, man. Public discourse in the digital town square is completely destroyed in 2026.
I attribute it mostly to bots, whether from corporate, state, or NGO activity. It’s almost impossible to tell what the organic consensus is on anything. Lies spread faster than ever, and it’s confusing the public enough that this is a very real crisis.
It’s nice that you suspect that botnets could be handled in some other hypothetical way. But in a technical sense, there’s not really a way to do that without enumerating real identity in some way.
There are a dozen ways to handle your “corrupt town” scenario without anonymity that are concrete and not at all hypothetical.
It’s plenty easy to silence you when you’re anonymous and speaking out. Just look at what Twitter and Facebook did. And look at what Reddit does every single day.
Anonymity will always exist in corners of the internet. But it does not belong in the mainstream, easily accessible parts that most people use.
I attribute it mostly to bots, whether from corporate, state, or NGO activity. It’s almost impossible to tell what the organic consensus is on anything. Lies spread faster than ever, and it’s confusing the public enough that this is a very real crisis.
It’s nice that you suspect that botnets could be handled in some other hypothetical way. But in a technical sense, there’s not really a way to do that without enumerating real identity in some way.
There are a dozen ways to handle your “corrupt town” scenario without anonymity that are concrete and not at all hypothetical.
It’s plenty easy to silence you when you’re anonymous and speaking out. Just look at what Twitter and Facebook did. And look at what Reddit does every single day.
Anonymity will always exist in corners of the internet. But it does not belong in the mainstream, easily accessible parts that most people use.