Jimmy Wales on WT Social, His New Social Network: Pseudonyms Allowed on the Platform's "Real Names Culture"

WT:Social is a new and much-needed social network led by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, which unlike Facebook, Twitter, and the other market leaders, won't make money on targeted (often intrusive or dishonest). Instead, like Wikipedia, it'll be run on donations. It's not however affiliated with the online encyclopedia. As Wales puts it to me: "This is just me having fun trying to invent something new." 

You can go here to sign-up  as Wales and his team scale up the system to take on more new users.  "[We have] only 2 developers who are mainly scrambling to keep the site running," Wales explains. "I am hopeful that the waiting time will end in a few weeks time as we beef up our infrastructure (again!)"

While Facebook in particular has ongoing controversies with real name identities, and the company's insistence on them, Wales tells me WT:Social will have a more nuanced approach to that question. When I ask him, "What's WT Social's policy around anonymous/pseudonymous user identities, such as game handles?", here is his take in full:

 "We want to have a real names culture of responsibility.  Having said that, we aren't strictly enforcing it either.

"Certainly for some higher level community positions of trust, some form of real name validation is important.

"Why a real names culture?  I think that a huge amount of the abuse that we see on platforms like Twitter come from
a culture of throwaway fake name accounts created just to abuse people.  And we are a social network where we want
people to invite their friends, family members, and coworkers.

"Why not strictly enforce it?  It's pretty impossible and there are absolutely legitimate reasons why some people need
to use a pseudonymous identity.  So it's about asking people to strike a reasonable balance.

"This is part of my broader views that culture matters, as opposed to what is traditionally dealt with as a matter
of using code and algorithms to enforce things!"

I like this approach and his open acknowledgment that pseudonyms are valuable in many cases. (For instance: For people, mostly women, endangered by online stalkers.) Then again, I'd expect nothing less from Jimmy Wales -- aka Jimbo Berkman in Second Life.