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INDUSTRY WATCH: A Cult of Anonymity
By David Rubinstein
 June 15, 2004 — There has been somewhat of a tempest in a teapot recently on the Linux-focused news site, slashdot.org. One writer claims he has caught several JBoss employees—even CEO Marc Fleury—in the act of posting anonymous messages on TheServerSide.com and other developer community Web sites.
The writer, whose “handle” of Scubabear, ironically, helps to keep him anonymous, claims JBoss representatives have acted unethically by surreptitiously praising JBoss and knocking its competition on these sites. Scubabear—whose identity might be known to regulars on slashdot but to the rest of us he’s as masked as Batman—writes that new TheServerSide.com features for tracking users by their IP address helped reveal the identities of these JBoss interlopers.
Scubabear writes: “The evidence shows how a corporation can manipulate popular opinion via anonymous personalities, that open source companies can be just as ruthless as closed source when it comes to marketing their wares, and that you should never forget that your cookies and IP address can and will be tracked online.”
Here’s what is so very wrong with the points Scubabear is trying to make. I’m assuming his first point is about trust, with the point being that he wouldn’t trust a company employee to tell him the truth about a company, but he might be more inclined to trust a peer on a developer site to tell the truth. Well, this is one of the acknowledged weaknesses of the Internet—it’s often impossible to really know the source of a given piece of information.
If I were a developer considering using any technology, be it a Java application server, or a requirements tool, or a .NET component suite, I might supplement my own research with some informal inquiries on a developer Web site about the product, but I certainly wouldn’t base my purchasing decisions on those postings—almost all of which are anonymous.
Here’s a scary posting on slashdot, from frenetic3: “It sucks because unlike marketing efforts and vendors’ sales messages, which everyone has learned to always take with a grain of salt, I’m inclined to believe, often instantly and completely, a slashdot posting endorsing product X, because the poster seems unaffiliated and genuine and doesn’t really have anything to gain from endorsing it. In fact, it’s very dangerous, because my trust can be easily manipulated this way; I usually don’t have time to bother to verify the source of a given posting.”
He doesn’t bother to verify the source of a given posting? My question is, why would anyone trust any posting that is unidentified? The sad truth of the Internet is that people can hide behind their anonymity to put forth any version of reality they want, and it’s getting harder for any of us to know what is fact.
I don’t blame JBoss for anonymous postings to developer sites. I have come to expect businesses to do whatever they think they have to do to drive revenues. After all, Fleury has said the company had raised another round of venture funding and planned to use some of the money to step up marketing efforts. Judging by the traction the company has gained over the past couple of years, I’d say its message is resounding with people.
The bigger issue, of course, is how does a consumer learn the truth? Whether it’s a product’s capabilities, or a candidate’s voting record, or a company’s take on the market, how can we really learn what is true? Information can be skewered and skewed to the point where it becomes unreliable. This is not good for anyone. I would like to think that businesses and politicians would voluntarily do their part to ensure the information that is being sent out is accurate and complete. I have come to know better.
Instead, I blame the people who blindly believe. Here’s a slashdot posting from Angst Badger, responding to frenetic3’s line about believing, instantly and completely, slashdot postings:
“I spent a lot of time thinking about this sentence, carefully formulating a well-reasoned, thoughtful response to it. Then I went back over it, polishing it and making it more concise, pruning away every superfluous word that might obscure the essential message I was trying to get across. It came down to one word: Boob.”
The last Scubabear comment, to the effect of “we know where you live,” is intended, I presume, to mean that anonymity is on the way out, that there is no more hiding behind fake IDs and user names. As a journalist, I’m all for openness. We have a right to know where our information is coming from, whether it’s factual and unbiased, or fictional and slanted. We also need to exercise common sense, and throw out or discount information that cannot be verified.
So to all the user-name anonymous posters out there, I say, stand up, or shut up. My name is right here. Who are you?
David Rubinstein is editor of SD Times. |
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