It's cool that folks who want their pronouns now have the ability to have their pronouns used, and their wishes respected. I'm all for it.

There's some old farts on here from way back, when people purposely logged onto the internet and took great pains to avoid exposing anything about who they were, off the internet. I kinda groused about it here. It's where that phrase "On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog" comes from. People didn't want people to know who they really were on the internet. The internet was a whole new plane of existence, something that you could use to escape the confines of "meatspace" where for the most part your station had already been determined for you by circumstances of birth and socio-economic status.

I think it's a shame that Web 2.0 shattered that mindset. People were encouraged to log on as who they were in meatspace, which brought all the bad baggage from the real world straight into the internet. It really ruined it.

Sure, back in the day you could choose to post with your real name. But it was optional. I feel like something was lost though, and we're more confined these days by the change in culture of the internet where more and more of our identity comes from who we are behind the screen.

I'm sure there's a ton of caveats. I mean, let's be real, who was on the internet in the 90's. I have no illusions about how homogeneous the people using the internet back then were. But the idea was still something beautiful and had so much potential.

Anyway, it's cool that there's a "None/Use Name" option, that sort of captures the spirit of what I sort of remember about the Good Old Days, but I figured it was worth maybe sharing a perspective. There are people who aren't choosing pronouns for their handle and it's not malicious. It's just some of us came up in a different time....