zlacker

>>pg+(OP)
We could penalize commenters not using their real name.

Techcrunch comment quality has improved by an order of magnitude and trolls have been largely wiped out since they started requiring people use Facebook or Yahoo accounts to comment.

>>ig1+j7
I'm considering that, possibly without disclosing on the site who the user is; just having to authenticate oneself at all would probably help.

>>pg+Sj
I value my privacy. If I was required to use my real name here, I'd wish HN good luck and move somewhere else.

>>gnosis+Rv
That's why I used the term "penalize", rather than "require". We could for example give comments from named users a higher default score.

>>ig1+3B
This reminds me of how Slashdot allows unregistered users to post under the monicker "Anonymous Coward" (AC), and by default gives all such posts a score of 0, while the posts of registered users start off with a score of 1.

Combined with Slashdot's default filtering (only comments highly rated comments are visible by default) and the huge flood of comments that popular stories get, very few people ever read the posts of AC's.

I've never had a Slashdot account myself, and have always posted anonymously. I haven't posted a lot, but I feel the posts I did make were all carefully considered, polite, and contributed to the discussion. But, because of Slashdot's discrimination against anonymous comments, they were rarely upvoted (and therefore rarely read by most users, who have thier comment filters set to only read higher rated comments).

Which is kind of sad, when you consider some of the utter garbage that gets upvoted there all the time, and considering that every comment (no matter how awful) made by a registered user starts off with a higher score by default.

Now that's not to say that Slashdot doesn't have good reason to rate anonymous comments lower than the comments of registered users. There are plenty of anonymous trolls of Slashdot, and that's one way of dealing with them.

That's also not to say that on HN, giving lower default ratings to pseudonymous comments than to comments left by authenticated users would necessarily be a bad thing.

But it should be noted that there are many high quality pseudonymous comments on HN right now (as only a relatively small minority of people use their real names here), and I'm not so sure how the HN community would react if the people who've revealed their names started to dominate the discussions, or if the comments by pseudonymous users were penalized by default.

I suppose that as long as pseudonymous posts weren't censored (as AC posts effectively are through the filtering mechanism on Slashdot), then it wouldn't be so bad. But I have a feeling that such filtering (and effective censorship) will inevitably come to HN sooner or later. And then pseudonymous users would become even more second-class citizens. And to that I'd really have to be opposed.

There are better ways of dealing with the decline in comment quality than penalizing pseudonymity.