I think you need to be much clearer about the exceptions to your theory, otherwise it's far too easy to refute by example. I'd guess that most people on HN hav

I think you need to be much clearer about the exceptions to your theory, otherwise it's far too easy to refute by example. I'd guess that most people on HN have been online since before Facebook was a twinkle in Mark Zuckerberg's eye, and long since before it became popular. They created massive amounts of content, both long-lasting and ephemeral, and did so without the benefit of a Facebook profile. If I understand you correctly, you're saying that they had proto-Facebook profiles, or 'home pages' as they were known, and these served the same basic purpose. I don't think that a home page is a proto-Facebook profile, and I think that this refutes your argument that a profile or substitute profile is a necessary precondition for taking part in online discussion. Almost every online interaction requires some kind of identity. IRC nicknames, handles or usernames on most websites, the contents of your sig on Usenet or mailing lists; these are all used to identify individuals. But there's no sense in which these need to be 'real' names, or that these different identities need to be correlated across different online social spaces. Plenty of ordinary people used AOL chat years ago without needing a rigid identity as a stepping stone. There might be a case that extremely socially conservative people ('settlers' in 'values modes' theory [1]) might need to feel that they're part of a community of 'real' people in order to interact online, and it's notable that the groups most upset at G+'s 'real names' policy were those least socially conservative, but the causality is tricky here. Either way, I don't think your argument holds up as anything close to a universal argument. [1] http://www.cultdyn.co.uk/valuesmodes.html http://www.cultdyn.co.uk/valuesmodes.html - I don't claim this is at all factual, but it's useful in the context of analysing how groups adopt technology differently