What concerns me about RN policies is the immoderacy with which they're often pursued, not the idea itself. It's actually (gasp!) a good idea at root. I have no

What concerns me about RN policies is the immoderacy with which they're often pursued, not the idea itself. It's actually (gasp!) a good idea at root. I have no problem with allowing pseudonyms and role accounts-- I think G+ and Facebook should-- but Google is right not to want profiles with names like Fuckhead89 and MiKeY ~:~ j0n3S on the service. Giving less leniency (in terms of the decision whether to can spammers) to non-real-name accounts makes sense. Stopping impersonation is obviously the right thing to do. Preemptively treating accounts as negative-value accounts simply because they look* pseudonymous is the wrong thing to do. What I think needed to be said in the boardroom conversations is that the damage done by deleting a good (even pseudonymous) profile is about 100 times that done by allowing a bad profile. Bad profiles (spammers, trolls) will ruin a site, but they're only dangerous if numerous enough to establish a critical mass. The cost of ripping out a good, potentially pseudonymous profile, is a nasty blog post that makes the rounds on the internet.