Has use of handles on the internet changed over past few years? (Warning: possibly incoherent rant)

[sniffnoy]

Perhaps 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

Comments

[grenadier32.livejournal.com]

There are a few things at work here, but let's see if I can sum up my thoughts on this.

For one thing, you seem to be assuming (or at least basing a number of thoughts on) a 1:1 correspondence between people and handles. I've seen plenty of counterexamples to this, perhaps most notably people who do things like deliberately using a different handle for different sites to obfuscate the fact that they're the same person (and, perhaps more importantly, disassociate Facebook identity from, say, forum identity). I myself have gone through a few different recurring handles over the years, namely "grenadier", "skeith" and finally "mithaler".

Facebook does technically have a "handle" field--the friendly URL/new user ID thing works that way, in my understanding. The thing is, people don't use it that way, because it's assumed that you know people on Facebook IRL and you would thus use their real names instead (indeed, the site's entire UI is based on this principle). Another consideration is that many people expect potential employers to discover their Facebook profiles, which discourages openly displaying unprofessional handles like "grenadier32" or, I dunno, "xXkittenXx123". I myself actually changed my Twitter username from grenadier32 to mithaler because I explicitly wanted to be able to show my Twitter account to employers, which is useful in the field I'm in.

To address your central question--of whether there's been some sort of trend towards real names over handles--I suspect that there are a few things at work here: 1) Prevalence of sites like Facebook; 2) People around us wanting to display real identities to contacts instead of Internet identities that might be perceived as immature (this is perhaps a consequence of being old enough to be exposed to the professional world); 3) People wanting to disassociate themselves with perceived youthful indiscretions.

[sniffnoy.livejournal.com]

For one thing, you seem to be assuming (or at least basing a number of thoughts on) a 1:1 correspondence between people and handles. I've seen plenty of counterexamples to this, perhaps most notably people who do things like deliberately using a different handle for different sites to obfuscate the fact that they're the same person (and, perhaps more importantly, disassociate Facebook identity from, say, forum identity).

The assumption I had in mind was a weaker one - that use of multiple handles was usually due to... crumbs, leftovers, things not so easily changed. So you change your handle at one point, but you can't easily change, say, your AIM name, so- you know how it goes. You leave a line in your profile listing that old name. Then later you stop using it entirely and don't bother to list it in newer profiles but people like me will search it out and trace it down anyway. :) I've seen a number of people on fora with lines in their signature stating "I'm also known as ___" or "I'm known as ___ on ___ board". Certainly there are people who deliberately keep identities on different fora separate but of course I have no idea how I might detect such a thing. :) Fundamentally it comes down to statistics I don't have, really. (But I have to wonder why someone would not want to be recognized as the same person in different corners of the internet in the first place. I just don't see the point of it. Maybe as a precaution against people piecing random bits of dropped information to solve problem A... people do do that, after all. But such a cost...)

Facebook does technically have a "handle" field--the friendly URL/new user ID thing works that way, in my understanding. The thing is, people don't use it that way, because it's assumed that you know people on Facebook IRL and you would thus use their real names instead (indeed, the site's entire UI is based on this principle).

Agreed, which is why I want a separate one. :) I myself have username "thehaltman" rather than "sniffnoy", though I only bothered to get one listed so I could use FB chat through Pidgin. Which could start me on a whole nother ramble (I realize my post was properly a ramble rather than a rant, but that didn't fit), but not now.

Another consideration is that many people expect potential employers to discover their Facebook profiles, which discourages openly displaying unprofessional handles like "grenadier32" or, I dunno, "xXkittenXx123".

Indeed - as I said, it's Facebook, not the internet. :) It's good at being unhelpful to internet stalkers like me. What annoys me is that people now often don't even have contact info listed for just their friends to see! (What are they worried about, spam phone calls? Haven't they ever heard of the Do Not Call List? It works, you know. But I guess phone numbers would be a different subject. But that's all I have to say on that one.)

2) People around us wanting to display real identities to contacts instead of Internet identities that might be perceived as immature (this is perhaps a consequence of being old enough to be exposed to the professional world)

Yes, this may be the key thing I failed to account for. I was assuming that most people want problem A to be hard, but problem B to be easy for their RL friends. But when the people you are adding on FB are shading closer to "arbitrary people" than to "friends", you might want problem B to be hard even for people who know you IRL. I hadn't considered that. I for one solve the latter problem by keeping it towards the latter end of the scale, and of course being generally open and an easy target so that the first measure isn't necessary in the first place. :)

(Of course, really it's not "random people" that are a problem, but people who know you but aren't friends. Thus for instance, on LJ, if there's something I don't want totally public, but isn't really something private, I'll often just friends-lock it rather than do something more restrictive, even though my friends list includes people I don't know IRL. George R. R. Martin sure as hell doesn't care about some random person making occasional jokes about some tests he had to grade! I do retain the more restrictive lists but it's a rare occasion that those get pulled out.)

[sniffnoy.livejournal.com]

I'd just like to point out that I had to spend quite a bit of time editing this to fit within the limits. :) (Why 4300 characters, I wonder?) Yeah, I could have just split it up, but I didn't want to. :)