Did you ever pretend to be someone you are not online?

That seems dishonest.
Of course!

Nope.

No. I am absolutely a 9 year old girl. I have been that for several years.

No, and it makes no sense to me why anyone would.

Nope. I’ve lurked as another identity but didn’t say I was something I wasn’t.

I haven’t joined any dating sites, any game playing sites or any sites other than 3 Q and A sites—all 3, same identity. My life’s too complicated to create an alter ego. Maybe someday :D

I have gone on philosophy sites and argued for the opposite positions of those I actually hold. It makes for a wonderful exercise in seeing the other side.

I did it briefly in order to develop a character for a story that I wanted to write, but I abandoned the project. Every other online endeavor has been me.

Do you think my real name is El bandito?

On a different website, I portrayed myself as an anal, bible-thumping prude for the first few months, just because it was amusing. I finally got bored with it, though, and “came out of the closet”.

No, my name and cop car is a dead giveaway.

When some friends and I in college discovered IRC for the first time, we made up a character called “BigBoobs” and tried to get guys to have what we called “text sex” back then. We got lots of guys who wanted to chat with us, but I don’t think we ever actually went through with the sex part. At least I didn’t. There were at least 3 of us running her so maybe one of us did.

Her bra size was 69 XXX. I dont think the bra size of all of us combined was that big. She loved to talk about sex and was always alone in her bedroom. In reality, there were always at least two of us looking at the screen and we were always in a public lab.

I’m actually Prince William, but royal protocol suggests I masquerade as a harmless buffoon on these pages….oh dash it all to hell, one has just given oneself away!
Still, never mind, i’ll be shagging Kate tonight, she really does go like a shithouse door in a hurricane…..tally-ho!

No.

Not that I can remember. What would be the point?

What is the point? Why to get people to like you, of course!

@wundayatta But, who would they like, not the real you.

Well duh, @YARNLADY. The whole idea is that you believe you are unlikeable as yourself. Your only alternative is to pretend to be someone likeable. That has it’s problems, since eventually you realize they don’t like you, but some image of you that you have created. But for a while, people who do it get off on being liked. It’s a novel thing for them.

For some, it is so enjoyable, they can’t stop, even when they do realize that it really isn’t them. They reach an existential crisis about it.

You are lucky. I’d have to say you’ve always liked yourself if you have no idea why someone would pretend to be someone else. You are very fortunate. Many other people are nobodies. That’s how they feel. They feel like no one could like them as they are. They get desperate and they try to act in a way someone else would like, and when it works, they get hooked.

They are trapped then, with two personalities. One, the real them, that no one likes. The other, the fake them, that has friends and lovers. It is horrible when they are pretending to be someone of the opposite sex, because then they can never meet their lover. They get all kinds of love online, but it can’t become real. Very sad.

I don’t think you can imagine it if you never felt like nothing. Or worse than nothing. It is only real desperation that motivates people to play at being someone else. It can also happen from danger, too. Like Jerzy Kozinski’s novel, “The Painted Bird,” which is supposedly pretty autobiographical.

@wundayatta I did feel very bad about my self as a child, but even then, it never occurred to me to pretend to be someone else. I always felt very alone, even in a crowd of people, but I got over it by reading a lot of the popular psychology books of the early 1960’s, and by becoming a hippie.

Ah! One can not help but wonder what would have happened if the internet had existed in the 60s!