I think the face-to-face rule is a bad one. Even PG in his Things You Can't Say concludes that you shouldn't say certain things to anyone but close friends, val

I think the face-to-face rule is a bad one. Even PG in his Things You Can't Say concludes that you shouldn't say certain things to anyone but close friends, valuable though these ideas may be. Of coure, that only applies face-to-face. If you are anonymous on the internet, as I am on this forum, you don't have to self-censor. And yet, I do it anyway, just because the spirit of conformity and self-censorship permeates this place so much. My comments were better on Reddit, when Reddit was still worth going to. And so were the comments of others. Quality of the average comment is not what matters. It's the quality of the best comments that does. If you eliminate half of the top 5% and all of bottom 50% of comments, you've made the community worse.