ALA: Anonymity and Online Community

Worth reading. Good points about controlling and communicating with users, but not enough about trust and communication among community members. The article discusses the known drawbacks of anonymity, but not enough of its benefits. For example, people can share "inside" information or an honest perspective without reflecting on their career or loved ones. In the drawbacks, there is also insufficient attention paid to the importance of disclosure in building trust and good communication. Social sites need more ways to reward disclosure while allowing for anonymity. The most complex system it mentions is Slashdot, which combines anonymity and pseudoanonymity with a ratings system. However, to my knowledge, Slashdot does not have any incentives for disclosure or special status for those who use their real names or professional information. Existing online social communities may not be the best place to look for examples. Better to also learn from and adapt the successful models in other areas. E-commerce communities, career networking sites, and traditional professional societies all have good elements for building credibility and trust in communities. Amazon has the "Real Name" system, which means more to me than someone's proclivity for writing reviews (i.e., their ranking). Professional societies have criteria for designations in subject area groups ("associate", "member", "expert", etc.). Career networking systems allow for endorsements of colleagues, contacting people through a common acquaintance, connecting people based on similar experience (same employer though at different times, same industry, same aspirations, etc). Rather than a list of recommendations based on insufficient practices, it would be worthwhile to explore how these concepts can be utilized in communities which also allow for anonymity.

The article discusses the known drawbacks of anonymity, but not enough of its benefits

I have been thinking about this a lot in the context of my own blog. I recently invited a large number of family members/friends to read my blog and I wanted to encourage them to comment. These are mainly non-tech people for whom 'to read a blog' still sounds like a foreign phrase. I use live journal and they allow the author to enable anonymous commenting. I chose to enable this feature because I felt fairly certain that my parents would never comment if they had to register for anything. I've been lucky so far and the comments have been great. However, it did set up a weird dynamic. I didn't expect anyone to be commenting that wasn't a part of my immediate circle of people I invited. But, as will happen, a friend forwarded my link to a friend and that person began posting anonymously. Not a problem but I found it interesting that I immediately knew it wasn't someone I had invited. My response was to post a request that he sign his post with some sort of name or initial so that I would have something to respond to. I don't know if he used his real name or not but I do know that the tone of my interaction with him changed once he was willing to attach his comments to a name.

Is it possible that your tone changed because you were pleased that the poster had cooperated with your request? It is interesting how we assign more credibility to someone with a name than without one, even though the name is not verified. The increased credibility of pseudoanonymity over total anonymity is one example of how the issue of anonymity is not really about the name. Aside from names, there are other ways we can demonstrate our good nature and facts we can disclose about ourselves that make us feel more like we know each other and be more comfortable interacting. Potentially, some of these things, such as affliations, could even be verified while preserving anonymity.

Important read. Mykola Bilokonsky addresses the concern for Newsvine credibility in my latest article "Newsvine struggles with credibility issue".