@moovlin When I say "bad idea of the day", I usually mean "counterintuitive, unpopular, or perverse idea of the day". Many of them are good for *something*, if only a laugh.

@enkiv2 Meh, those are the best kinds of ideas! Earlier I made a toot about an idea of making a website that converts every frame of a video into a page in a PDF. I think you and I are on the same page when it comes to counterintuitive ideas.

@StreetWanderer
Yup.

I'd like to see the kind of anonymity-driven weirdness that 4chan has in a context where most users are not already assholes. Options I've come up with are super-temporary accounts and instances where all toots are redirected to a single 'anon' account.

@enkiv2 I was thinking maybe toots that disappear after 24h but that's not manageable in the federated space.

@StreetWanderer I was thinking about it as an over-the-top symbolic rejection of all this "how do I prevent my name from being used on other instances" / "how do I migrate my followers" stuff.

@enkiv2 Ho I see! I understood it more as a rejection of the need to create a "brand of self".
Still I'd be interested as to what people would do if we tell them
"There's​ 200 accounts in the instance, you get assigned a random username/password/picture. If you stop posting for 24h, everything you did is deleted"

@StreetWanderer Well, that too. I think it's all shades of the same thing.

People try to unify their identity across platforms because their identity is their brand, and then they try to keep in character & consistent between platforms, which gives them nowhere to safely experiment with who they could become rather than who they are right now.

@StreetWanderer I really like the random username/password/picture. I was thinking along the lines of people trying to create new identities, but if you produce 200 usernames, passwords, and pictures, with a bio to go with each, people could essentially RP as whoever they're assigned. RPing as a different kind of user than you actually are is potentially really interesting.

@enkiv2 I've kept thinking about this idea and the more I think about it the more I believe that it should exists.

@erinT
Anonymity allows people to challenge norms enforced by shunning. A lot of norms are really important, while many are arbitrary.

Somebody who violates an important norm just because they can't be punished is, basically, a bad person who is hiding their bad behavior out of self-interest. While a large, long-lived community needs to be stable & thus needs to keep bad behavior in check even if it means allowing people who behave well for the wrong reasons, temporary ones don't.

@erinT
Basically, if you invite some small number of people you trust to be anonymous together for a short period, & you ban all of them from participating in the future if any really bad behavior occurs, you get the positive norm-challenging of anonymity without the negative norm-challenging.

@erinT
That said, there are subtle but important differences between real anonymity, group-pseudonymity, and temporary individual pseudonymity.

Temporary individual pseudonymity is probably the most interesting, since people get to try out new identities without worrying about long-term sustainability of those identities. (Think costume party or LARP)