I imagine the user resistance is more due to a) not wanting to pay to join a ghost town, and b) not having significant issues with the quality of community on H

I imagine the user resistance is more due to a) not wanting to pay to join a ghost town, and b) not having significant issues with the quality of community on HN/Reddit (or being satisfied with the local methods of filtering). I wouldn't draw any conclusions about Real Names from this exercise, except perhaps that users don't consider them valuable enough to overcome the other frictions created by your product.