

Ask HN: Anonymous vs. real identities for your communities? - tsurantino

I'm not sure whether we've seen this argument before, but I am curious what people's thoughts are regarding online communities (whether they be blogs, chatrooms, websites, forums) and your identity on them?<p>Chris Poole (founder of 4chan) had this awesome talk about the fact that your identity, not your audience identifies the context and substance of online interaction: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3Zs74IH0mc<p>Perhaps Chris isn't <i>absolutely</i> right - but I know, from experience, that I've struggled not conforming to one way of interacting online when my identity is public (I can only be one kind of 'Joe', but I can make many people when I am 'spez', 'tsurantino', etc). There is an additional struggle to get the attention of certain people when they can easily identify your background (vs. you being an anonymous name).<p>I'd like to stir up the discussion in light of Facebook/Twitter integration into site user authentication becoming more prominent. Communities like reddit, Hacker News and the discrete forum on topic X thrive on anonymity.<p>I'd like to hear thoughts people have about how they designed their user systems, communities and what thoughts they've had in regards to the identities of their users (if they even thought about it).
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tsurantino
I also forgot to mention - one might also make the argument that you are more
likely to "own" your identity through anonymous registration (vs.
Facebook/Twitter/Google). I'm not sure how valid that is - or whether that's
even appropriate for this thread.

