Some things I have seen in the last couple of weeks have made me want to talk to you about my views regarding anonymity in general and this blog's comment system specifically.
Let's get this out of the way first: no, I am not just talking about 4chan. I'm talking about account-creation, moderation, commenting and other general stuff like that. Yes, I have advocated anonymity before and will certainly do so again today.
It all started when someone on Stack Overflow brought up the question How can I moderate trolls algorithmically? My answer was, of course, you can't. There is no way to detect a benevolent human from a malevolent human, at least with today's technology. The best we can do is detect non-human spammers based on their predictable behaviour. Malevolent humans will pass any Turing test by definition.
Therefore, moderation has to be something a human does. That means you have to hire moderators (or find volunteers) who spend significant portions of the day keeping discussions on track, removing spam and content that doesn't fit into the site's scope. This last part is largely subjective and, left in the hands of a single moderator, is largely undemocratic. That's why I advocate either no moderation whatsoever, or a system where users decide what to do with offending content (and moderators just execute the steps the users lay out for them).
As a libertarian I fundamentally believe in the freedom of expression, which is why I won't moderate comments on my site unless they are spam. But at the same time I believe every site should govern its own community in any way that it wants. I simply won't use most communities that have authoritarian moderation policies.
What I found most disturbing about the Stack-Overflow question was an answer advocating the abolishment of anonymity by linking user accounts with actual people, across the entire Internet. Kind of like an ID card you take with you to every site you visit, so that if you make a mistake on one site, everyone will know about it on every other site. The idea, put forward by ReadWriteWeb, is that malevolent Internet users (called "trolls") are only thus because there is no connection between their online personas and their offline ones. If there is no direct personal consequence of an action, trolls will take the action.
I disagree with this idea. ReadWriteWeb is confusing separation of person and persona with anonymity. I agree that separation of person and persona is a bad thing. It usually causes people to create astronaut personas in order to gain as much attention as possible. ReadWriteWeb says that if an actual person is attached to the persona, it will be harder to gain attention illegitimately. To me, it's more likely that people will simply create fake persons in order to back their personas. In fact from my point of view this is already being done all over the Internet.
ReadWriteWeb talks of requiring accounts on every site so that individuals can be tracked and followed wherever they visit. In order to post something to a site, they would require an account be created. I consider accounts to be a terrible thing. Accounts are a barrier to entry and instead of leaving an insightful comment, I'm more inclined to go look at something else if I need to sign up to leave it. Similarly, if I can't access a website's content because I need an account, I'm more likely to not access the content at all rather than sign up.
This is what I had in mind when I set up this site's comment system. There are no accounts, no signups. If you have something to say you can say it without any barriers other than your own typing ability. Good ideas need not be hindered by password prompts and account-profile maintenance.
What does deal with the attention-grasping problems of the Internet is anonymity. True anonymity: no barriers to accessing or adding content to anyone; no way to trace content back to its author. The idea, advocated by image boards, is that authors can't be tracked. Since they have no accounts or names, they can't create astronaut personas, which makes it impossible to gather attention in any long-term way. The best you can do is gather short-term attention, and the best way to do that is to be insightful or funny.
Likewise, I accomplish the same idea in my comment system by not requiring names, and by not leaving tracking cookies of any kind on users' PCs. There is nothing linking comments together other than a name, which can be faked or changed at any time. I also don't store IP addresses in anything other than my Apache logs, but you've only my word on that one.
I realize the irony of what I'm advocating since I'm doing it non-anonymously, but even if I were posting anonymously dedicated readers would still be able to determine who the person behind the site is through IP address tracking and whatnot. If you can't be 100% anonymous then the next best thing is to remove the separation of person and persona. I could be fake, but you'll just have to trust me.