Anonymity : The Pros and Cons
If you are not a big time celebrity, the pros of anonymity outweigh the cons.
I have tried anonymity and I have tried using my real name. The thing is that if you are not hugely popular, you really do not get that much traffic from people looking you up online. Yet you can lose a job over your writings. Then you will not have a big enough network to recover from that, because you are not very popular.
On the other hand, popular people have the power to use their real names. They have that draw. For popular people, the pros of using the real name outweigh the cons. They have enough power to fight back if they are wronged.
It is worth noting that cancel culture is becoming increasingly aggressive as is firing people for taking pro-Palestinian positions. It does not really help you to be identified by the big Corporate bullies of society unless you are powerful enough to fight back. Therefore, in most cases I would actually recommend anonymity. You never had that much of a network anyways.
Long ago I was outed using another screename. Because of that I “manned up” and used my real name online. But guess what, I did not gain that much traffic from “friends” looking me up on Facebook. I was actually bigger when I was anonymous under that other screename way back in the past. So I’ll out myself. The Screename was “Kane123123.” I now go by “gb819.” But notice I dropped vowels from the main name on Substack at this point. This is because I was getting little benefit from adding the vowels in and using my full name, but could potentially suffer from it, especially with the Gaza situation (the real bullies are showing themselves).
Bottom line - unless you are big and powerful and can protect yourself with your own large network of people, you are probably better off dropping the real names because you do not gain much anyways traffic wise from using the real name. It is certainly consistent with the termite to be anonymous.
gb819.substack.com
