Are you who you say you are?

Hi Amy,

I agree with you that the comments section on newspaper Web sites are among the worst offenders in this regard.

The problem is, most of the tools these sites have at their disposal to ward off abusive users are ineffectual. IP address bans don't work, because many people have dynamic IPs. E-mail confirmations don't work, because throwaway e-mail addresses are common. And reporting the commenters to ISPs almost always falls on deaf ears.

About a year and a half ago, I created a Web-based service called Truyoo (www.truyoo.com) that I had hoped would be welcomed with open arms by newspaper companies and other Web sites that public user content.

Truyoo offers a dead-simple way to curb abusive comments: It charges users a small, one-time fee (and when I say small, I mean less than $2) to verify their identities. If they behave themselves, that's all they ever have to pay. If they misbehave, their account gets disabled. Sure, they could always sign up for another account, but the fees will quickly add up.

Unfortunately, I haven't found a single site that will touch it, because it involves charging the user a fee. Everyone's so afraid at turning off potential commenters, and thus potential page views, that they neglect to factor in the substantial costs of comment moderation, and the many eyeballs they're losing by allowing offensive content to permeate their sites.

Granted, a service like Truyoo wouldn't necessarily be effective at preventing something like the elaborate, long-term "April Rose" ruse ... but it would go a long way toward cleaning up the comments sections of newspapers and blogs, where the bulk of the abuse comes from a small percentage of persistently abusive users.

Thank you!

In the same vein, but of a rather more off-the-wall variety is the news story out of Italy,

http://ftalphaville.ft.com/blog/2009/06/12/56978/quantitative-stealing/

that seems too hot for any US journalist to handle:

http://www.asianews.it/index.php?l=en&art=15505&size=A

Its been going the rounds on European blogs and financial broker bulletin boards, YouTube and Japanese TV:

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x9k0lg_bonds_webcam

but here at home....deadening...silence....about a sum of money in Federal Reserve Notes that could send the world as we know it helter skelter over the precipice, and the only ones on the ball are... the Vatican's Pontificio Istituto Missioni Estere? Wierd...? Or seriously disturbing...?

You decide.

I think my blog transparency (starting about 7 years ago) began with the belief that anything I had to say wasn't so interesting that it would need to be anonymous. Having already had multiple letters published in the Chicago Tribune, I knew that if people want to find you to talk to you they will. (It helps to have a bizarre last name...all the von Hubens on earth know each other. I throw my very common maiden name around a lot, too, and I suppose I could have chosen to hide behind that in all my internet writing but it never occurred to me.) I tend to blog everything and so far no one has shown up to steal my adorable tschotchkes, menace my family or kill me in my sleep.

I also find this to be an incentive to honesty. Honesty with prudence. There are few things I won’t say and if I’m not saying it, it probably shouldn’t be said. That goes for observations on my home life as well as anything I may wish to say about my part-time job as a church secretary. Knowing that my remarks are “traceable” is a last line of defense against any temptation to divulge anything that should not be published in a public forum. (I never mention the exact location of my employment, but any third grader with a little Google experience could put the clues together...)

On the other hand, I do not assume that everything I read on the internet is true. In the same way that I reserve some skepticism about all other media.

The use of a pseudonym has LONG been an honorable practice, even if some have no respect for such writers. Most of the Founding Fathers used a pseudonym, and even many in the early Church used veiled language to avoid detection of their identities.

Moreover, unless you are a well-known celebrity, it adds NOTHING to the weight or legitimacy of a comment if it is written under a real name rather than a pseudonym. When I first started commenting on Open Book, I used my real (first) name, but then four or five others were using that same name. But even had I added my last name, I am still a total nobody in a nation of 300 million nobodies. My real full name adds nothing to the authority or lack thereof of my comments.

And if I were to use my real full name, then I would have to add all sorts of disclaimers to my postings saying that my comments, thoughts, opinions, etc. do not necessarily reflect the views of my employer, my parish, my teachers, the organizations I belong to, etc.

Comments stand or fall on their own. Truth stands or falls on its own, regardless of who is speaking it.

The only time the use of a pseudonym is wrong is when it is an act of identity theft, when it is used to defraud people into thinking that you are someone you are not.

Forgot to say that a lot of people living totally faked lives never do ask for money. Either there's a psychological thing going on, and they just want respect or sympathy; or they really do want to con people, but the reward is purely that of "winning" a game or forwarding ideological goals. I think both kinds of people crave intimacy but are afraid to try for it as themselves.

Isn't the 1930's the time when dinosaurs roamed? :)

I've been thinking about the Munchausen folks I've met. A lot of times, it does seem to run in tandem with a certain kind of brilliance -- quick thinking, dazzling, not necessarily very deep. The "not necessarily" part is where the insecurity comes in. Sometimes they are very aggressive about trying to prove they are smarter and cooler than anyone else. There was one guy who would switch back and forth between languages at you -- basic phrases, but he had learned to speak them very quickly. I think this was why you ran into them so much in the early days of the Internet going wide.

Anyway, they tend to want to make it all about them, all the time. They think nobody will like them unless they are the coolest person you have ever met. Even a relatively harmless case will take over your mailing list with tales of all their amusing adventures they're always having. Often, they really are good storytellers; sometimes they manage to switch to just writing regular fiction stories.

Patrick O'Brien probably wasn't a Munchausen person per se, but he ended up "reinventing himself" by lying about pretty much every facet of his life and making up extremely convincing stories of his past. The fact that he was also one of the world's great writers didn't seem to stop him from wanting to impress people even more.