I'm working on a hosted forum/community platform, and the feedback we received when asking customers (site admins) and users was strong, and unequivocal: They w

I'm working on a hosted forum/community platform, and the feedback we received when asking customers (site admins) and users was strong, and unequivocal: They want to present themselves as an alias and not have their interactions with their interests be tied or related to their real identity. When asked why, various reasons were given: People view their hobbies and pastimes as a sanctuary from real life, home, family, a safe space, and they don't want that safe space ruined by being forced to use real identity. People distinguish themselves in ways that their real identity might not allow. Their work or social position might not grant them the ability to express themselves fully as an avatar in an online world, or as someone into tap-dancing, but a constructed alias allows them to immerse themselves more fully. People fear that engagement in their interests/pastimes will lead to them being judged by future employers/partners/others. Aliases allow people to really engage with their interests, and from that it becomes more likely that the experts in a community will congregate and share information. That the value for a community is realised. And if you need to cite an example of that: Hacker News For all this, the downside is that you have to have ways to deal with trolls and spammers that do not use the very easy and simple mechanism of "who are you?". That's harder to do, and so you either allow it (4chan) or you create complex flagging/reporting/moderating layers. The really interesting part for me is how active/engaged and in-your-face that moderation is, or how invisible it is, and where the line of transparency is (the more transparent the easier to game, the less transparent the harder to trust). tl:dr People want anonymity so that they can share freely, but the price you have to pay is managing spammers and trolls.