For those of us who believe banning anonymity is an answer to anything, please ask yourself how you would feel if this site did that -- or even, in fact, if HN

For those of us who believe banning anonymity is an answer to anything, please ask yourself how you would feel if this site did that -- or even, in fact, if HN didn't actually make anon accounts (without even requiring an email confirmation) so easy that it's an incredibly common occurrence. For a moment, leave aside the deft and light-touch moderation that HN moderators such as dang performs, and how hard that may or may not be to enable at "scale"; just consider: do you really want anonymity to be gone forever, or do you engage in some very deep discussions with other anonymous people on a daily basis, right here on HN? Because that seems to prove the point; maybe it's the exception that proves the point, and perhaps older people who remember what Eternal September was might remember that sometimes anonymity without any moderation at all means a breakout of trolldom, but it's simply balancing the power of anonymity and rights to privacy against the inevitable things (like spam) that go along with anytime you grant someone freedom. And that's really what this is about. In the United States, freedom is granted by the Constitution, even though those very freedoms is often abused (or taken for granted.) Innocent until proven guilty? How many times do the guilty get away scot-free because of that precept? And, yet, this "grand experiment", again and again, proves its value, even in the face of repeated attempts to reign in (usually other people's!) freedoms. The Interwebs can be the same, or they can be different, but yanking anonymity will certainly tilt the playing field in a particular direction... so what direction should it really be tilted in?