Comments on: In Defense of Anonymous Commenting?

By: It’s Not Too Late to Spring Into Reading 5 New Blogs | Guilda Blog

It’s Not Too Late to Spring Into Reading 5 New Blogs | Guilda Blog — Sat, 02 May 2009 14:33:58 +0000

[...] In Defense of Anonymous Commenting? [...]

By: Jake

Jake — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 21:56:40 +0000

Got it. I'm hoping OpenID will get some wind in its sails when Facebook supports it. Not holding my breath tho, since Digg promised years ago to support it.

I still agree though. I'd like to own the comments again. Fewer failure points, faster load times, etc. Then we could support OpenID too

By: jpiwowar

jpiwowar — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 21:26:58 +0000

Not knocking your choice to use Disqus. By “owning my comments,” I just meant that I make an effort to maintain consistent identity across commenting systems, via username, avatar, etc. That is, if I'm going to bother leaving a comment, I want to feel like I'm standing behind it somehow. I'm not worried about owning the *content* of the comment so much…if I have something that substantial to say, I'll write my own post.

Still waiting for the magical ID-aggregator to appear (seems like a tough problem, so I suppose I'll be waiting a while). chi.mp and BackType are interesting to me in that respect, but not quite there somehow. And I wouldn't be the first to lament the provider:consumer ratio in OpenID…

By: Jake

Jake — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 21:17:20 +0000

Good points. Blogs do tend to be a bit nicer than forums, from my experience.

I agree about owning comments, but our period of just trying out Disqus went long. And now it's pretty late in the game. I guess I could try reclaiming them, but that sounds like work.

Same issue with comment moderation from the moderator side: too much work.

I'm lazy.

By: Jake

Jake — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 21:12:44 +0000

Pseudonymity is fine the way you did it, i.e. creating a persona and using it everywhere. More nom de plum than anonymous.

Aside from the eight things meme, not much generates that kind of emotion here. Thankfully. I hope I don't have to make those calls in the future.

By: jpiwowar

jpiwowar — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 19:30:10 +0000

I think it depends on the nature of the forum. A news organization is probably just as likely to want readers' reactions as their thoughts, and requiring registration, or even filling out a username/contact field, may impede the former. A blog that targets a particular audience, however, benefits more from a sense of community, and that can be reinforced by requiring the small commitment of self-identification. Besides, conversations between “Anonymous #2 @9AM” and “Anonymous #4 @10AM” are annoying to follow. Excluding thoughtful (yeah, I know, roflcopters) people who only want to drop anonymous comments is probably not a big loss, overall. And, as John B. mentions, pseudonymity is always an option.

From a participant's perspective, I prefer to “own” my comments whenever possible, and I tend to apply a more selective mental filter to anonymous comments. Of course, lack of anonymity is no guarantee of civility; lots of fora have their loud-n-proud named trolls, erm, self-appointed contrarians. And the forum self-policing seems to happen no matter what. Starving trolls is clearly harder to do the more that one cares about the issue at hand.

One thing's for sure: comment moderation can't scale. After almost a year, I've finally turned off moderation on my blog, because Askimet has only let through about 2 of hundreds of spam comments. Not that I have a huge volume of real comments to deal with; but approving even an occasional legit comment from my phone got to be pretty annoying.

By: John E. Bredehoft (Empoprises)

John E. Bredehoft (Empoprises) — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:25:07 +0000

As someone who posted the majority of his comments over a ten-year period under a pseudonym, I have a somewhat different view of anonymous comments. (I recognize that pseudonymity is not necessarily equivalent to anonymity.) However, we are in agreement on moderation.

My blogs don't get huge amounts of traffic, but the occasional post does generate some traffic. In the last several years, I can only recall one time in which I deleted a comment (although there may have been one or two others over the years). Ironically, the deletion was not because of the substance of the comment, but because of the name that the commenter chose to use for his/her comment. My post concerned a rather prominent member of the social media community, and the comment was attributed to…well, let's just say it was attributed to a body part of the subject of the post. In my view, that crossed a line.