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"Online anonymity is just a leftover from the early days of the web - a time when there really just weren't other options." I disagree. I thought about this w
by pg 17y ago
"Online anonymity is just a leftover from the early days of the web - a time when there really just weren't other options."
I disagree. I thought about this when we were starting HN, and I deliberately opted for anonymity, though with profiles if people wanted to post stuff in them. When all people know about you is what you say, they judge you based on what you say, instead of who you are.
- tokenadult 17y agoWhen all people know about you is what you say, they judge you based on what you say, instead of who you are. But there is no such anonymity for the user known here as "pg."
- mapleoin 17y agomaybe he's got more users?
- ram1024 17y agothere's value to be had in both types of community. anonymous ones will have more participation and broader ranging appeal and subject matter, registered/profile communities with enforced social restrictions and reputations will be much more friendly for the mainstream troll-hate crowd
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- TheSOB88 17y agoWell, when it comes to talking about actually designing the site, I don't know if anybody else really has anything worthwhile to say.
- cosinepi 17y agoAnonymity creates a low barrier to entry, facilitating free participation. But at the expense of requiring manual moderation. I don't know how much time has been spent on troll moderation on HN. But let's say you have 100 small sites - moderation could be quite time consuming. And if the sites are too small to allow you to identify trusted users to offload the moderation to (perhaps through some application features), it is doubly problematic. However, identity verification is an easy solution, although at the expense of reducing participation by creating a higher barrier to entry.
- dsil 17y agoIt would be (mildly) interesting to see some stats on the difference in votes if pg occasionally posted under some other name. You could experiment over a couple weeks - before each comment flip a coin, heads you post with 'pg', tails with some new account. I guess ignore posts like this one where who you are is part of the comment.
- medianama 17y agoI am sure difference will be significant.
- asdflkj 17y agoMaybe not. I don't upvote pg's comments because it's redundant. He doesn't need the encouragement, and people listen to what he has to say regardless of the score.
- rms 17y agoIt's impossible because you'd have to separate the comments where pg is speaking as pg, administrator of this site and partner in YC, and comments discussing articles in a less official capacity.
- froo 17y agoI'll provide a counter-point. I used to frequent a forum for tabletop wargaming here in Western Australia that was used for discussing the hobby, setting up games etc. Anonymity really isn't an issue there because everyone knows pretty much everyone else. While it's not quite on the scale of HN, in the 4 or 5 years that it's been running with over a thousand users, it hasn't had a single trolling incident (except bots).... simply because of the lack of anonymity. I personally agree with one of the comments in the article which suggests a hybrid system seems like a quick feature-add could fix this: blog comments should just have a tick box that either displays or hides anonymous commentors. some people care what the trolls say, most people don't. so it should be optional. What a great idea, optional verification and for those people that want to disable non-verified comments, it can remove the incidents of trolling.