Something is betrayed, when this happens. It reveals something about how people think about pseudonyms. It would seem many people think of pseudonyms, in a sort of unconsidered way, as being things that don't attach to actual identities.

But my pseudonym is very much attached to an actual identity - I am very much a person, and a very distinct one, who exhibits a lot of personality, who moves freely through social worlds, with whom one can develop various types of relationship, from the parasocial to the intimate. For those who have the unconsidered assumption that pseudonyms do not refer to identities, the fact that mine does causes a category error, and causes them to forget (or maybe even never notice) that the appellation by which they know me as a pseudonym, and unsubtly one at that.

I've seen other evidence of this conceptual fault line, for instance in discussions of the threats and value of allowing pseudonymous commenters on the internet, around platform policies.

In any event, I think that in reasoning about pseudonyms and anonymity on the internet, a lot of people, maybe most people, make the mistake of thinking in terms of pseudonym usage, which is a behavior, and not in terms of pseudonym users, which is a demographic. An identity, if you will.

Allow me to explain. It is, I propose, extremely fruitful to look at pseudonym usage as something some people do not at all, other people do some, and yet other people do exclusively, or near to it.

I, for example, do not use public social media under my professional name. As a matter of policy, I do not socialize in public on the internet using the name my patients know me by. My reasons for this are several, and I bet at least one of them would surprise you.

As a consequence, if a public forum has a "real name" policy, I don't think, "Oh, bummer, I guess I'll have to use my wallet name". I think, "Oh, bummer, I won't be using this forum, then."

I'm pretty sure that's not what people who promulgate "real name" policies are thinking is going to happen. I'm pretty sure they think they're making a rule about how their users are to behave on their system. They think using a pseudonym as a behavior, and that they are regulating that behavior. I'm pretty sure it never crossed their mind that what they're actually doing is making a rule about who can be a user of their system. It didn't occur to them that what they're doing is forbidding pseudonymous users from joining their platform.

Allow me to put a very fine point on this: if your platform doesn't allow pseudonym usage, as a pseudonymous user, your platform discriminates against me. My reasons for pseudonym usage are good ones, and your social media platform is never going to be valuable enough to me to outweigh those considerations. I will not be changing that behavior.