Hate speech / cyber-bullying. Avoiding bad PR

@troybenjegerdes To be honest it's difficult to vote on a proposal where the end result of the proposal doesn't really achieve anything. I guess this is closes related to being a feature since you are proposing ways of publishing ones name and several other things.

The problem with feature proposals is that they need to either be very exact (blueprint style) or have some code to show up for them. Voting on vague proposals on what could be done will not actually get it done. And if it is not a proper documented blueprint of a set of features that everyone can properly vote on, it will have little impact on code that will be written in the future.

Maybe you could document your proposed changes in more details in the wiki, add a link here and then reset the proposal ending time once done to allow more discussion?

Blueprints can be written for example here: http://wiki.diaspora-project.org/wiki/Category:Proposals

This is, yet again, another feature that should be in a fork. You can absolutely expose information on YOUR fork of Diaspora, but it's never going to be included in diaspora/diaspora because of the wide-reaching security implications. In fact, many people choose to share data with Diaspora in order to remain anonymous to search engines...most of the points you made have the exact opposite intentions of many Diaspora users.

Can anyone propose better wording?

What I am asking for is an end-user experience where I can tell my parents 'just search for my name' because if I try to tell them to go to a specific HTTP URL, they will just end up typing into whatever search box pops up first.

Why is this a privacy violation to let the end user choose if they want to make their real name public, or not?

The direct connection to hate speech and bullying is it's pretty damn trivial for a technically-savy bully/hate-speech antagonist to continually create new anonymous accounts.

I find that discussions are move civil and accountable if people use real names that might let me find that person in real life.

Flaburgan: I don't really need to know your real name, but if flaburgan@some_random_pod starts posting about how the holocaust was the greatest thing ever and generally being abusive, how am I to tell if it's you, or if it's someone else?

What I am asking for is an end-user experience where I can tell my parents 'just search for my name' because if I try to tell them to go to a specific HTTP URL, they will just end up typing into whatever search box pops up first.

Of course you can already do this - just put your real name in the 'name' field on your profile, and check the box which says 'Allow for people to search for you within Diaspora', and they should be able to find you by your real name - from within Diaspora, but not from a search engine.

I've just tried searching for your name within Diaspora, and no result came up. This means either you haven't used your real name, you haven't checked the 'make me searchable' box, or you're on another pod from me and the federation of data between pods isn't working.

That's the biggest problem in finding people, that pods do not reliably share information with each other. This is the top priority for the community developers, but it is an enormously complex problem in a large decentralised network, and has not been solved yet.

I can't see why anything needs to change to the profile to achieve what you want: if people want to be found by their real name, they just put their real name into the name field, make themselves searchable, and Bob's your uncle - once the federation problems have been solved. This leaves each user in full control of what happens to their data, and of the level of privacy they want.

All your proposals amount to dangerous privacy leaks, the existence of which in networks such as the ones you name is largely why Diaspora was set up in the first place. I think bringing hate speech into it as a reason for introducing these privacy leaks is a red herring - enabling the leaking of privacy won't help prevent hate speech, and could actually help cyber-bullies as they could find out personal information about people using the privacy leaks.

It sounds as though you want a network which is completely different in outlook and ethos from Diaspora, and privacy is not an important thing to you, perhaps Facebook or another network would suit you better.

I think there are a lot of red herrings in this proposal, it really doesn't belong in a thread on hate-speech/cyber bullying.

1. opt-out (i.e., checked by default) is entirely against the diaspora philosophy of private by default. In facebook, I absolutely expect the privacy policy to frequently change and expose things by default (super annoying), I have to go and carefully find the options and uncheck them. In diaspora, with the default options, my content is private and nothing terrible happens. When I have time or the desire, I can go and find the (hopefully better designed) privacy control and start sharing exactly as much content as I want to.

2. I do not think this would impact hate-speech at all. This kind of policy quite obviously impacts the "casual" user without having any effect on someone truly malicious (who can easily take the time to un-check a box if they care). It's like claiming drm is an effective way to fight piracy, you only ever affect the casual user (why does the dvd I paid for provide a lower quality service (enforced advertisements) than the torrent?), while the "competent" user can easily circumvent any deterrents put in place.