The most valuable online communities, newsgroups, forums, etc, that I've been taking part in over the past 23 years have been pseudoanonymous. In the 1990s, we

The most valuable online communities, newsgroups, forums, etc, that I've been taking part in over the past 23 years have been pseudoanonymous. In the 1990s, we were attached to our handles/aliases/pseudonyms. We would become known by these online names, separate from our "real" identity, but they did have meaning. People knew you online by that identity. You could stop using that pseudonym but you would lose the connection to your community built up on that name.