Asymmetric Anonymity (aka Don't follow the Le Web Leaders)

I've been reflecting over the last two days about a very interesting thing I noticed while watching LeWeb live on Ustream - ie the difference between the IM style text stream that went out with the video, and the Twitterstreams coming out at the same time - the Tale of 2 Le Webs.

The difference was this - one was sharp, irreverent, funny, cruel, anarchic and a hoot to watch. The other was on Twitter.

One had a go at the piousness, pomposity, posturing , product pimping and peccadilloes of the presenters and promoters, argued the rights and wrongs of the arguments, pimped and flamed various speakers, and was the olde altnet at its best (and worst). The other was respectful, simpering, careful what it said and, well, mostly lame. Thousand, and thousands of bytes of blanc tweetmange.

Both approaches are pub/sub systems architecturally - so the difference in experience, I think, was anonymity.

Now its not just me that's noticed this - Ewan Spence, writing for the BBC on the subject, noted this:

This transparency is often seen as one of the strengths of the internet and Web 2.0, but can sometimes hold back the free exchange of ideas (especially if you know your parents, employers or significant others read your comments or blog).

Gabe MacIntyre is looking to address that with his anonymous Twitter project. By allowing people to post messages to Twitter without being identified as the author, he hopes to answer the question of what it means to Twitter, and to hopefully see how these social tools are used when the results are not tied to a digital identity.

"When people can post anonymously, interesting things start to happen," said Mr MacIntyre.

"This isn't for myself, it's an outlet for anyone to let off steam. Twitter is more interesting than blogs, it boils everything down to short, concise, ideas," he said. "This project is for the love of people."

If the Ustream IM is anything to go by, you get far more honesty - but also more pimping and "marketeering" over time - it was noticeable by the end of Day 2 that the speaker PRs (or fanbois?) and "marketeers" had arrived in force. Bold coloured typefaces "barking" agenda, attempts to get people to follow links etc began to abound - along with people getting p*ssed off with this and flaming them.

In other words, these anonymous systems work very well if you can establish ground rules, but rapidly fill up with social cheats if they don't. In that way they remind me of old Web 1.0 chat systems, where the arms race evolved to allowed you to block certain people (hence Asymmetric Anonymity) as well as vote karma and get people thrown off (they came back, but hey)

But overall I think you need this anonymity option in any social media system. I don't know why the Twitterstream was by comparison so tame - fear of the presence of A-Listers, unwillingness to upset the (popular / powerful ) speakers and organisers, unwillingness to admit that $2000 was a lot to pay? I don't know - but it definitely skewed to the powerful and popular and reduced contrariness and

What I do know now is that only having systems that ensure users are authenticated, identified and persistent reduces the willingness to dissent from The Leadership's View, to vent things noticeably going wrong and - frankly - to entertain - which cannot of itself be a good thing.

In fact, I have a hypothesis - those social nets that insist on high levels of identification and match that with high persistence and trackability will over time become lame, banal and - deserted.

So, lets hear it for anarchy, the altnet and Asymmetric Anonymity.

By the way, if you missed the Ustream IM, it was like this but even funnier.....