Taking the Pulse on Anonymous Commenting
We’ve been getting more and more requests from readers to eliminate anonymous commenting. (The topic has also been on the front-burner because of a certain article this week.) There are clearly major flaws with a system that allows commenting without accountability, but doing away with it carries its own set of drawbacks in the form…
We’ve been getting more and more requests from readers to eliminate anonymous commenting. (The topic has also been on the front-burner because of a certain article this week.) There are clearly major flaws with a system that allows commenting without accountability, but doing away with it carries its own set of drawbacks in the form of diminished information flow, opinion and overall energy on the site. We’re curious to know how the community feels about the issue so please take a moment to fill out this survey and chime in below.
Thanks,
Mr. B
p.s. Just to clarify, just because you register, and comment under, a username, does not mean that your true identity is on display for the world to see. It means we can easily block a disruptive commenter, or contact him/her by email about bad behavior. It also means that other readers can begin to associate comments over time with a particular online identity, theoretically improving the ability to carry on discussions.
Dave in Bedstuy is shooting blanks…as usual.
I understand (and was shown) that Biff corresponded via email with a certain poster on here, and with enough information, may be able to tell you all his real identity very soon!!!
Friday afternoon, 132 comments…and still there will be lots of people with nothing to do on a Friday night…I bet when I check back over the weekend there’ll be 250 comments here.
What scares me is that many of them will come in at 1AM, 2AM, 3 AM!!! Please, go to Union Hall or somewhere for the evening. Just don’t wake John Crow and the lovely Roberta (you recent N Y mag commenters need to research that)
Please, get your pets spayed or neutered, and log in…or not…who cares.
dave and biff are just pissed they weren’t on the cover of new york mag.
i’m anonymous and had TWO of my past comments in that article.
go screw each other and be done with it.
Because, as much as you hate us, we; as logged in users, have integrity. More importantly though, I don’t think anyone of us could actually be bothered to login, logoff, login, logoff back and forth when we want to start something up here…we just do it under our login…rile you all up, sit back, have fun with it.
Right Biff?
Right Nokilissa?
Right Putnamdenizen?
jerri blank we miss you!!!
3:24, um, that is not The What, ok? Please buy a clue. Hilariously, amazingly and ironically, you just punked yourself!
Some of the posters here seem to think that it’s quite difficult to create a fake identity and that it would be relatively easy to use user names to track individual posters. My guess is that a fair number of you are older and don’t have a tremendous amount of experience with the internet. I can assure you, though, that it is not just easy to produce fake identities, but trivially easy. Seriously, the kinds of control and accountability you guys want is not a matter of everyone’s having a user name. There might be ways to achieve the kind of accountability you want, but with user names you are barking up the wrong tree.
Dave, if you think it’s wrong, please explain how.
3:35…overanalyzed, way overanalyzed. On the one hand… and on the other hand…