Do you feel like you are known personally here, or do you feel more anonymous?

Each time I visit Fluther, I feel very comfortable in this environment and I believe that I have a lot of freedom to answer questions and submit comments however I’d like to with very little restrictions.

As far as the reception I get from other Fluther members, it has always been cordial and friendly and that means a lot to me also. I don’t think I’m ‘well known’ around here, per se, but I’m not anonymous either. Maybe somewhere inbetween the two if that’s possible.

It’s funny, sometimes while answering a question and reading peoples response to my own and back and forth, I do get the sense of knowing these people. And it seems almost like, I leave them for another question to meet new people, and sometimes the people I met on another thread join me again. So yes, I feel as though I might be a regular to some and known well, but might possibly be unknown to others.

its comfortable around here.Its a good synthesis of a Q’n’A , networking,chatting site.Its good and quite fun as well. Amiable atmosphere as well.

I feel like I am representing myself in a state of semi-anonymity here. That is, I do not think that any of my friends or acquantances use Fluther—at least none have mentioned it to me—but my first name is part of my Fluthername and anybody who knows me in real life could easily guess my identity by looking at the list of interests in my profile, or by noticing that I tend to answer questions on certain topics.

I’m gonna go ahead and call myself a regular. And I’m also going to say that yeah, I feel known enough here. Like, I post here often enough that some of that shield of anonymity evaporates since it’s clear I want to come back and I’ve established who I am here. It might not be who I am in everyday life, but it is no less me. With that development of personality, the more I become known here and a well rounded figure here, the less I can really claim to be anonymous.

Should someone I know in real life stumble across this place, it would take them one or two questions to figure me out. While I do feel like I can represent myself however I want, I choose to represent myself as a more honest version of myself in a lot of ways. I probably wouldn’t, for instance, immediately start talking about my bad experience with birth control in real life, but here if someone asks—if course I’m going to talk about it.

So in a lot of ways, my answers here show a lot about who I really am in ways I would not divulge to Joe on the Street just for asking in real life.

I am myself more honestly here than anywhere else, but I don’t think people know me. I think it is very hard to know people over the internet. We describe ourselves, but there is so much we leave out that is important when together in person. Usually it’s stuff we never think to say, and notice without noticing that we’ve noticed.

I certainly can say that there are some people here that I know better than others. I’ve exchanged a few pms with a few people. However, it is difficult for me to keep things straight in my head. Several people here are struggling with mental illness, and sometimes their stories are similar, and I am constantly worrying that I’m confusing one with the other (is this the one on seraquel, or depakote?)

Also, if I don’t keep up a constant correspondence, I forget. I forget where they live, and their stories, and it’s embarrassing because I want them to remind me, but sometimes I can get it together to read through past correspondence.

I believe that if I knew these people in person, and had gotten their stories verbally, and spent time with them most days in person, as I do here, I would remember them and feel like I knew them better.

Finally, I have had some enlightening experiences online. I’ve gotten close to a few people, and I’ve thought I knew them as well as I could, and then discovered I was completely misleading myself.

I believe that because of the paucity of imformation here, we tend to fill in the gaps using our imaginations. We do this without even being aware we are doing it. Our imagined or fantasy person is usually very different from the person we’d find in reality.

I think that if you believe you know someone purely from what you’ve learned online, you are fooling yourself, and in serious danger of deluding yourself.

There are Flutherers that I see frequently here and readily recognize, but still leave very little sense of their personalities, and others who project such a strong vibe that their first few posts leave me with an impression. It’s hard for me to know where I fall on that spectrum with the rest of the gang.

If I look objectively at most of what I’ve written here, there’s not a whole lot of very personal stuff there. My friend daloon up there has been intensely personal in many of his postings, even giving us frequent guided tours of his inner processes fascinating, and there are several others who’ve spread enough of their lives out here to make me feel like I live a few houses down (or even in their bedroom closet). I don’t think I’m in that same league of intimacy at all. I seem to talk a lot more about externalities than about what’s going on with me. It’s not that I’m trying to be especially private; it’s more that I don’t find my personal stuff very interesting.

I don’t think it’s possible to get a fully accurate view of me from what I post here, because there are things that just don’t come up. But at the same time, it’s an accurate partial view; I’m saying what I think and what I know, and not putting on a persona or pretending to be someone else.

I think that for whatever reason there’s something of a gender divide: XX flutherers are more inclined to ask for advice on personal situations and use anecdotes to illustrate a point, yielding insight into what’s going in our lives; XY flutherers tend toward “how do I accomplish X task” or “what do you think of this idea” questions. Would be interesting if people put their genders on their profiles and we could track this stuff on paulc’s metrics site.

To answer the actual question—I definitely feel like I can be myself, but the lack of anonymity (on the internet in general) makes me wary of asking some kinds of questions or disclosing anything I wouldn’t want read by, say, a coworker.

(<3 the tags!)

I feel well known here, and anonymous at the same time. I am completely myself here and I think the regulars know a lot about me, my personal history and my points of view…maybe more than they’d like! On the other hand, no one knows who I am…if I wanted to say something completely outlandish I’d feel free to do so.

I’d say I’m known in some circles of users, but mostly rather inconspicuous.

Yea id say i feel pretty well known here, especially in the chat room. WHERE EVERYBODY KNOWS YOUR NAMEEEEEEEEE!(sorry broke out into song there for a minute)

I don’t know anyone here IRL although I have some tangential contact with a select few outside Fluther elsewhere.

So, no, I don’t really feel known personally. And it’s not important for me. That’s not why I fluther.

I have weird hang-ups.

I’m a bit conflicted about the whole idea of online identity performance.
A lot of people feel the need to create a profile to make themselves more known.
For myself, I feel like there’s a fine line between saying who you are and creating who you are.
In the real world, the words you choose are balanced out by other things. Here, not so much.
Following my fucked-up logic, the less I say about myself, the more you know about me.

I’m not saying that I lie about myself.
(I’m actually striving for some kind of perverse honesty.)
But that a one-sided truth is not much of a truth.
You may know yourself more than others, but that truth stops somewhere.
Sometimes there’s some kind of truth in the misconception of others.

That being said, I think you can get a feel for someone without knowing much about them.
And putting threads together, you can start to develop some kind of anecdotal familiarity.
I’d say that holds true for me…to varying degrees for different users.

I think “loser” is pretty annonymous…

Anonymous. But I also don’t think people recognize me in the grocery store.

I’m pretty much me here; I like that I find a lot of good answers to questions I didn’t even know I had, and I help out with an answer when I can, but I can never seem to give a 100% serious response to anything.

BLOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOP

@Nimis: I just came across a quote that reminded me of what you were saying up there ^^.

Talking much about oneself can also be a means to conceal oneself.
– Friedrich Nietzsche

Aug: Exactly!
Reading Nietzsche didn’t help with my weird hang-ups.