This has been bothering me for a while as well. I don't do facebook due to the privacy problems there and general contempt for customer. Many sites have comple

This has been bothering me for a while as well. I don't do facebook due to the privacy problems there and general contempt for customer. Many sites have complex authentication and identity management systems for adding a simple comment. I don't contribute to these sites or return to them, no bookmarking. Too much of a hassle. Studies done by topix and others have shown that authentication does not increase the quality of posts. It's not even clear why comments need to be authenticated anyway. If the visitor is not purchasing something, there is no need to ascertain their true identity. Look at both the hacker news and reddit systems for a reasonable example of doing it right. Choose a name and password and you are done. For reddit an email address is optional. Both of these sites are examples of places where there is intelligent interesting discourse. The same can not be said for sites with complex authentication systems.