Most people here value their anonymity, which makes me wonder if some posters would get in trouble if some people had their real life identity revealed.
I know some posters value their privacy for the sake of being private. They don’t have anything to hide or worry about, they just want to feel they have a space on the internet where they don’t have to put on a filter or act.
But other people share surprisingly personal info. How much would their peers care what they were saying? Would it affect their relationships with family, friends, or work?
And on the flip side, if you had a relative or co worker sharing a lot of stuff about you online, and one day you found out they post on xyz message board, how would you react?
I know someone who posted to a board somewhere, saying that a popular singer “wasn’t very good.”
Somehow, his identity got out.
He had to disconnect his phone after six hours of non-stop death threats. You can imagine what his email in-box looked like. His case went to the FBI.
It all blew over, of course, after a few weeks. But this is what most of us are worried might happen if our names got out. We aren’t really ashamed of our opinions; we just don’t want to be targeted by the really evil people who are out there.
SOME people do know my real name by now, since I told the SDMB when I was going to appear on Jeopardy!
I don’t think most people care. Certainly nobody has tried to contact me personally.
In any event, while I’ve surely made a fool of myself here from time to time, I don’t think I’ve ever said anything offensive enough or stupid enough to have major repercussions in my life.
Personally, I have nothing to hide; if you’re familiar with my posts, you should know a great deal about me. But I don’t reveal my partner’s name; it’s his choice, and I respect it.
Few people on these boards like me or the positions I take on issues. Worse yet, years back someone in my household posted things under my user name that were extremely inflammatory and pissed off a lot of people. I had to endure a lot of scorn and hate email because of it.
Oh well. Too bad, so sad.
My names is Peter King Beitz and I live in West Allis, Wisconsin.
Worst-case scenario: my leanings toward agnosticism, and my pot use, get out. That would cost me about half of my Facebook friends, and my mother would die of shame.
TBH, I’m surprised it hasn’t happened yet. Anybody who knows me on FB, if they take up reading the Dope, will probably put two and two together at some point due to the similarity between my last name and my Dope username.
I might be a little embarrassed if the “wrong” people learned who I am, but it would only be embarrassing, not crisis inducing. On those occasions where I mention something “inappropriate” that I might have done, it’s happened far too long ago to cause me serious problems. (Being retired also helps! )
Sometimes I wonder if I should change my username, because it’s close to my real name.
I’d say quite a few people on the board know my real name. I’d be more worried if someone from “real life” found me here on this board. Especially one of my family members.
No huge concern. On most social forums, I keep things a little anonymous simply because I want to avoid any of those out-there scenarios like random people contacting other friends or spamming my work email, etc. I’m not overly worried about it, though, and there are some public fora where I’m pretty open with my identity.
There are two issues here. One is that we post here on the Dope the real names, email addresses, phone numbers and street addresses of everyone. Eh. Who cares. What are the other dopers going to do with that information? Call me up and ask if my refrigerator is running?
The other is that you contact all our friends and family and acquaintances and bosses and coworkers and tell them “Did you know that Darryl Shannon posts on the Straight Dope website under the username Lemur866? Check it out!”
Except why would my mom or my wife care? What, she’s going to comb through years and years of posts in the hope of finding something embarrassing? I guess if I constantly was bragging about the affairs I had, and the office supplies I stole from work, or the time I kicked a homeless guy to death, I’d be worried. But I never mention that stuff, so it’s fine.
I’ve never made my real identity a secret (though it’s less obvious since I was told not to put a link to my web page in my sig). There’s nothing here I’m embarrassed about.
Other than, maybe, getting in hot water for posting at work, I think the impact would be nearly nil. Despite the high emotions in some threads, nothing here not posted by a troll is ever anything really outside the American norm. The opinions expressed here are seldom anything but mainstream.
I don’t post anything about my identity because I wouldn’t want to offend someone in the future and have them identify me from some old posts. If my identity was released, I guess I would just keep posting fairly mild-mannered stuff, like I already do.
I don’t post anything that would get me in trouble, but I have a crazy stalkery ex. If he could find me here, then I’d not even feel comfortable sharing the most mundane and pointless of things. Just the fact that I called him a crazy stalkery ex would cause me endless headaches.
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