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sniffnoyPerhaps not. On the internet itself, nothing much looks different. (Except, I suppose, on Facebook, which I will get to; I don't really consider Facebook part of "the internet". I think you know what sort of places I'm referring to when I just speak of "the internet".) People are known by their handles; some might reveal their RL name, but they'll still almost certainly be called by their handle. In the special case that they're well-known IRL, the two will be used synonymously. But here's something that's been bugging me for a while: I don't know the handles of really any of the people around me here at Michigan.
That wasn't true back at Chicago and it *certainly* wasn't true back in high school. OK, maybe I didn't know many handles, but to some extent they were unavoidable, right? I mean, look at the tags we used in Smash. I was (am) "NOY". Aaron was "BAS". Grant was "VOLK". Etc. Sure, some people just their usual name or variants thereof ("WONG", "MIKE"), but if you had a consistent handle, good chance you used a short form of it, right?
So let's consider two, uh, function problems: A. Given an internet handle, find the corresponding RL name. B. Given an RL name, find the corresponding handle. Problem A doesn't appear to have changed much. Admittedly, problem A is rarely something I've had reason to work on instances of; if I encounter someone on the internet, I don't *care* about their RL name except in rare cases. If they mention it, OK; if they don't, why would I bother to try to find it out? Maybe a quick Google search would reveal it, but there's not much point. I freely admit to "internet stalking" (which despite commonly being considered "creepy", does not in any way resemble, y'know, actual stalking) but this direction of the problem is not one I've had reason to work on. (I, of course, am in a sense immune to this, by being too easy a target.)
EDIT next day: Minor correction next paragraph.
(Funny tangential story. One case where I did do that direction. After some comments by the user SarahC on LessWrong, I figured "Hey, I could probably identify this person". I could indeed do so... because after all I already knew her first name, last initial, a bit of other information, and as it turned out we had 6 friends in common on Facebook. So after the initial "Yay, I solved a problem!" came a quick "Wait, that 'problem' was entirely trivial." Further tangent: I like finding quadrilaterals on Facebook, where by "quadrilaterals" I mean "induced 4-cycles", and where by "induced 4-cycles" I really mean "induced 4-cycles consisting of people I somewhat know". After identifying this person I quickly realized that she formed part of a *pentagon* including me, which I thought was great. Which means there are several people on Facebook that (despite knowing to some extent) I must not add, or it will break the inducedness of the 5-cycle...)
Anyway. What I'm concerned with is the reverse problem - determining handles of people I know IRL. Which really, you would think, shouldn't be a problem, because I mean, these are people I know IRL. Like I said - I don't recall having to do this back at Chicago. (Exceptional case: Nadja mentions she has an LJ, but refuses to state its name. Naturally I took that as a challenge, and it wasn't too hard either.) So I guess I must have mostly done this back in high school then? My memory's a bit fuzzy. I mean in any case, I don't do anything advanced, just a few basic techniques - 1. Search on a name or handle, then search on any you can connect it to, etc. People with multiple handles often list them alongside each other unless they have a specific reason for keeping them segregated. 2. Check handles you find against commonly used sites. 3. On "social network" type things such as LJ or Twitter, find people they know and crawl the friends graph.
Uh. Where was I. Right. Anyway, my point was, the combination of these two - "I know the person IRL so I ought to know their handle" and "Finding someone's handle when you have access to their basic information isn't hard" - usually sufficed. Lately it's seemed like it hasn't. But I definitely suspect I might just be imagining this difference. One thing that is true is that now there are more sites that require (Facebook, Quora) or encourage (MathOverflow) you to use your RL name. (OK, they can't really require it, and I know Quora has gotten into trouble with removing people with "fake-sounding" names. Perhaps we could instead say that they "demand" it?) In particular both in high school and at Chicago I remember that instant of "Oh hey you use LJ? Oh my... so many...". I know LJ isn't so popular these days, but you'd think I might stumble across something like that. So far, nothing.
You know what's been surprisingly useless? Facebook. Goddamn people won't list contact info even to their friends. Or if they do it's all based on their RL name, not helpful at all. Though I'm really now that if I actually seriously want to do this I haven't taken full advantage of what's there! Was looking through this just before I started writing this, there may be some usable bits. But I had to look through so much to find them! It's not the usual case, that's for certain. And some of these look more like the sort of things I expect of old email addresses rather than in-use handles... man, Facebook should really just have a "handle" field. That would be helpful. Hopefully people would use that.
Really, though, isn't it strange that people's Smash tags here tend to be based on their RL name? I'm NOY, and Kyle was ROFA, and Evan used all sorts of crazy names, cluttering up the list, but seems most people here use a variant on their RL name. Which makes me wonder - has there been a trend in general, recently, of it becoming more common to use a variant of your RL name as your handle? I don't mean "using your initials as a handle and nobody can tell what they mean", I mean where it's obvious that the one encodes the other... well, OK, I suppose that's a fuzzy distinction. In any case, perhaps it's not a large chunk, but I definitely feel like I've noticed this as a pattern, that this is significantly more than it used to be. And that meanwhile on the flip side of that it's become more common to totally insulate RL identity from internet identity, to the point that I can't even solve the goddamn easy direction of the problem! Or, you know, perhaps I've just recently been picking targets that are too hard, or that aren't significantly on the internet in the first place.
Well, I don't know. Hopefully most of that was at least coherent. So are the patterns I'm spotting real or spurious?
-Harry
That wasn't true back at Chicago and it *certainly* wasn't true back in high school. OK, maybe I didn't know many handles, but to some extent they were unavoidable, right? I mean, look at the tags we used in Smash. I was (am) "NOY". Aaron was "BAS". Grant was "VOLK". Etc. Sure, some people just their usual name or variants thereof ("WONG", "MIKE"), but if you had a consistent handle, good chance you used a short form of it, right?
So let's consider two, uh, function problems: A. Given an internet handle, find the corresponding RL name. B. Given an RL name, find the corresponding handle. Problem A doesn't appear to have changed much. Admittedly, problem A is rarely something I've had reason to work on instances of; if I encounter someone on the internet, I don't *care* about their RL name except in rare cases. If they mention it, OK; if they don't, why would I bother to try to find it out? Maybe a quick Google search would reveal it, but there's not much point. I freely admit to "internet stalking" (which despite commonly being considered "creepy", does not in any way resemble, y'know, actual stalking) but this direction of the problem is not one I've had reason to work on. (I, of course, am in a sense immune to this, by being too easy a target.)
EDIT next day: Minor correction next paragraph.
(Funny tangential story. One case where I did do that direction. After some comments by the user SarahC on LessWrong, I figured "Hey, I could probably identify this person". I could indeed do so... because after all I already knew her first name, last initial, a bit of other information, and as it turned out we had 6 friends in common on Facebook. So after the initial "Yay, I solved a problem!" came a quick "Wait, that 'problem' was entirely trivial." Further tangent: I like finding quadrilaterals on Facebook, where by "quadrilaterals" I mean "induced 4-cycles", and where by "induced 4-cycles" I really mean "induced 4-cycles consisting of people I somewhat know". After identifying this person I quickly realized that she formed part of a *pentagon* including me, which I thought was great. Which means there are several people on Facebook that (despite knowing to some extent) I must not add, or it will break the inducedness of the 5-cycle...)
Anyway. What I'm concerned with is the reverse problem - determining handles of people I know IRL. Which really, you would think, shouldn't be a problem, because I mean, these are people I know IRL. Like I said - I don't recall having to do this back at Chicago. (Exceptional case: Nadja mentions she has an LJ, but refuses to state its name. Naturally I took that as a challenge, and it wasn't too hard either.) So I guess I must have mostly done this back in high school then? My memory's a bit fuzzy. I mean in any case, I don't do anything advanced, just a few basic techniques - 1. Search on a name or handle, then search on any you can connect it to, etc. People with multiple handles often list them alongside each other unless they have a specific reason for keeping them segregated. 2. Check handles you find against commonly used sites. 3. On "social network" type things such as LJ or Twitter, find people they know and crawl the friends graph.
Uh. Where was I. Right. Anyway, my point was, the combination of these two - "I know the person IRL so I ought to know their handle" and "Finding someone's handle when you have access to their basic information isn't hard" - usually sufficed. Lately it's seemed like it hasn't. But I definitely suspect I might just be imagining this difference. One thing that is true is that now there are more sites that require (Facebook, Quora) or encourage (MathOverflow) you to use your RL name. (OK, they can't really require it, and I know Quora has gotten into trouble with removing people with "fake-sounding" names. Perhaps we could instead say that they "demand" it?) In particular both in high school and at Chicago I remember that instant of "Oh hey you use LJ? Oh my... so many...". I know LJ isn't so popular these days, but you'd think I might stumble across something like that. So far, nothing.
You know what's been surprisingly useless? Facebook. Goddamn people won't list contact info even to their friends. Or if they do it's all based on their RL name, not helpful at all. Though I'm really now that if I actually seriously want to do this I haven't taken full advantage of what's there! Was looking through this just before I started writing this, there may be some usable bits. But I had to look through so much to find them! It's not the usual case, that's for certain. And some of these look more like the sort of things I expect of old email addresses rather than in-use handles... man, Facebook should really just have a "handle" field. That would be helpful. Hopefully people would use that.
Really, though, isn't it strange that people's Smash tags here tend to be based on their RL name? I'm NOY, and Kyle was ROFA, and Evan used all sorts of crazy names, cluttering up the list, but seems most people here use a variant on their RL name. Which makes me wonder - has there been a trend in general, recently, of it becoming more common to use a variant of your RL name as your handle? I don't mean "using your initials as a handle and nobody can tell what they mean", I mean where it's obvious that the one encodes the other... well, OK, I suppose that's a fuzzy distinction. In any case, perhaps it's not a large chunk, but I definitely feel like I've noticed this as a pattern, that this is significantly more than it used to be. And that meanwhile on the flip side of that it's become more common to totally insulate RL identity from internet identity, to the point that I can't even solve the goddamn easy direction of the problem! Or, you know, perhaps I've just recently been picking targets that are too hard, or that aren't significantly on the internet in the first place.
Well, I don't know. Hopefully most of that was at least coherent. So are the patterns I'm spotting real or spurious?
-Harry
