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Poll: Does having anonymous usernames within a forum cause too much trolling?

5 points by whyme ↗ HN
On one hand I think anonymous usernames allows some people to be more honest/opinionated/engaged, but on the other hand it also allows some to troll more than they normally might.

I relate it to driving. Many people are comfortable to honk when aggravated on the road while in an armoured car capable of driving away, but face to face they would never say anything.

With the hacker news forum being up for a while and me being new here.... I am interested in your thoughts.... my company has an option to have a forum, and I can decide if usernames need to be real or not.

Thanks.

11 comments

[ 21.3 ms ] story [ 897 ms ] thread
wmeredith
I'm not going to vote in the poll, because "too much" is a completely subjective standard. I will say that it definitely increases it by large margin. Maybe an order of magnitude or more.

Whether that is too much for your company or not will probably have to be decided by someone with a lot more information that you're providing here.

whyme
I am not worried about "too much" being a subjective standard. I am ok with biased opinions based upon personal experience and independent ideas.
JacobAldridge
whyme, by 'anonymous usernames' do you mean all people post anonymously (without any identification, or the choice to do so), or are you asking about the difference between real names and web names, for example, your username (whyme) and mine (jacobaldridge)?
whyme
whyme vs. jacobaldridge.
JacobAldridge
Then I would err on the side of 'Yes', but say it ultimately depends. I wouldn't know swombat or patio11 if they walked passed me in the street, but discussion works fine and those of us that want to share our real identity do.

On my own business' site (Shirlaws Online), I encourage everybody to use their real name. We're a B2B professional services type firm, and our clients expect that Jacob Aldridge on LinkedIn will be on Shirlaws Online as 'Jacob Aldridge' not 'a1bizcoach'.

russell
I think it's more a matter of strong moderation. HN is a strongly self-policing site and it works very well here. Drive by commenting doesnt make it. Another site with a high signal to noise ratio is Charlie Stross's http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/. He has a strong moderation policy (read it) and deletes anything he doesnt like.

EDIT: I just went over to Charlie's blog. He notes a comment by Jaron Lanier that "drive-by anonymity fosters vicious pack behavior on the net.

frossie
I am not going to vote on the poll, because I think the trolling is a side-issue, once you mentioned a company forum.

If you have a company forum, you should have real names - doesn't have to be their full names if you are a small commpany - forex if someone's known as "Joe S. from Accounting" let them register as "Joe S. from Accounting" if that is what they want, rather than insisting on "Joseph Smith III" or whatever they are on your payroll. But don't let people pick random names because that, I think, lulls them into a false sense of security.

When you are working, you are your professional self, and you are expected to keep some aspects of your private self at bay (yes, even in some of those informal and I am sure fabulous startups you may work at). Insisting that people keep identifiable work names helps them remember that posting on a company forum is still being at work.

ThinkWriteMute
I voted no because I've actually done research into this and I've talked with the *chan software developers.
roundsquare
When you say your company will have a forum, do you mean internal forum for the company or a forum hosted by the company?

If its former, I assume there will be a way to find out who is trolling if it gets out of hand.

If its the latter, it really depends on the company and type of forum, I'd think we need more information for your situation.

However, I voted "NO" in general because we see here that it works out quite well, so its possible to avoid.

bediger
I voted "YES", but I also think that trolling, sockpuppetry and composite entities are part of the charm of The Internet.

I'd also like to note that this is the same question that people on Usenet were dealing with in 1993. I'm pretty sure that history will regard the failure of Usenet to deal effectively with trolling and sockpuppetry to be the cause of its downfall.