Official announcements and happiness!
Who Are You Online?
Special Edition: Virginia Streit - Who Are You Online? by Comatose Podcast
Comatose had a chance to talk with the creator of the Online Identity Project, Virginia Streit, and ask her some questions about community and identity on the internet. ---------------------- Special Edition: Virginia Streit - Who Are You Online? Editor/mixer -John Bauer Narrator -Nizar Babul Interview -Virginia Streit Music -Narration: nepo - hautnaehroel.
I had Imzy regular @puregin on /comatosepodcast recently and she talked all about identity and the internet.
She also mentioned her hope for Imzy and how it may have found a way to get over some of the worst that internet communities have to offer, while retaining everything most users would want from one.
It made me curious what Imzy on a whole thinks about how Imzy tackles things like anonymity and monetization.
And on a more fundamental level it made me want to ask Imzy this:
Who are you online?
EDIT:
Shoutout to /online_identity_project as well!




I've been orangerful since 1998 so I always feel like it is my other name, my online name. I think growing up at the start of the Internet and message boards and being told never to use your real name online for safety reasons has always stuck with me. I actually deleted my Facebook account earlier this year because they demanded I change it to my real name and PROVE IT to them afterwards (I had signed up for the site when it initially launched so I was orangerful on there too). I use my real name for professional things and I don't need anyone googling me for work reasons only to find long blog posts about why Buffy is the best show ever and my piles of Star Wars toys.
I saw this title and was like, ooh you should crosspost this to /online_identity_project but then I finished reading and was like, oh, right! Y'all are way ahead of me :p
Excited to listen to this! :)
Edit: this is fantastic, thank you so much for sharing it with us, @Coffee and @puregin! And it's super cool that you think so highly of Imzy so far. I really hope we can continue to live up to that. I think the model that we've started off with has some pretty amazing possibilities, and I'm excited (and somewhat terrified!) to see where this path leads us.
Popping in, but I just wanted to say, thank you for letting your members choose the name they wish to use. As a non-binary person, this is very important to me. I identify much more with my author name than my "real" name, and I appreciate the respect you have for people with an identity that doesn't fit the norm, for personal freedom, and creativity. So again, thank you!
Thanks for the compliment!
I meant to give a shoutout to /online_identity_project, but must've forgot. I'll go edit it in now.
I'd love to have you on the show too sometime if you'd be interested in that!
Oh jeez you should try to get kaela or jessica or someone far more articulate than me :)
I'm super excited to listen to this!
I made a post a couple weeks ago that talks about some of the things we took into consideration while building out our identity system.
I know I'm going to love that post by the use of SatW!
Hope you enjoy the episode :D
EDIT: Read the post and that's really cool. I don't really know how I feel about using internet handles all the time and whatnot.
I was thinking about it recently in regards to big events like the GDQs and how all this speedrunners with hundreds of thousands of people watching them still go by there internet usernames.
Speaking only for myself here:
"Weffey" comes from my inability to say my own name due to a lisp when I was a child. When I first got online, I remember thinking I was going to use it to "reclaim" it to an extent. People called me that to make fun of me, but by using it myself, teenage me was rebelling against it.
So for me, it's more about real life bleeding into the internet, rather than a username crossing over to the real world.
I go with the Gandalf approach to online identity: many are my usernames on many websites, etc. Here on Imzy feels weird because I can be multiple people on the same site and it's cool. I'm very much sort of trying to delineate boundaries between my various identities on here - I'm using one more than others, but basically, I have a fannish one, a mod of a particular community one, a more RL-focused one, a couple of others, and it's hard to decide between them when I make that first comment in a community.
I haven't used it much yet, but Imzy has the best set up I've ever seen for maintaining different profiles and/or posting anonymously. It's a breath of fresh air to be on a site that respects the concept of compartmentalization instead of expecting people to use their "real names" for every aspect of their lives like Facebook or Google+.
Hahahahahaha!
I don't know who I am on Imzy after the last few days. Maybe more this than this or this.
Listening to the podcast now. Very interesting!
All that mystery :P
I hope you enjoy the episode!
I've always tried to keep as consolidated an online identity as possible, but my regular username is from an old legend (that was reused as a sword in a video game) so I have to use an alternate ID on some sites (like here.) On pretty much every website I'm one or the other name, but here I decided to try out the different names for different communities thing and it's kind of neat. I can change the face I put forward to match the mood of the community. It's neat, I've tried out a kind of name I've never used before and its a side of myself I never bring online.