In the 90's I kept arguing [to deaf ears] how anonymity is useful to a limited extend. My idea was that we can have real identities but we can anonymize credent

In the 90's I kept arguing [to deaf ears] how anonymity is useful to a limited extend. My idea was that we can have real identities but we can anonymize credentials too. You can continue to call yourself Donald Duck and still be a lecturing professor in computer science. The denial of that possibility continues to this very day on Wikipedia. There it is argued that validating credentials of named professionals is not possible. In my mind it is as easy as adding a (hidden) token to the html for the professional profile on the university website or nuclear reactor. (Should also have a machine readable tag with the professional title in it) Say for example: You add a link to your professional profile to your HN profile, (check a checkbox if you want it to be on public display) HN then provides you a html sniplet, you paste it into your uni professor page, HN crawls it and appends your title to your username. The funniest anecdote: 2 users on a forum spend weeks disagreeing and fighting over subjects. Their blood was truly boiling. At one point one asked: How old do you think I am? (As a rhetorical) Then it turned out one of them was 14 and the other 72. It completely explained every single disagreement they "enjoyed". Anonymity is great until it isn't.