Website Comments: Anonymous or Not
Cnet reports on comments made at Digital Hollywood by the Washington Post Executive Editor of their online division. Essentially, Jim Brady said (and confirmed after) that he thought the best way to elevate discourse in the comments sections was to force individuals to identify themselves in order to post. Like spam, griefers and other abusers of the comment sections have created problems for major media organizations. The media organizations either have to block comments or overfilter -- in which case they get accused of being elitist -- or they open up the comments to very few restrictions -- in which case the quality of the discourse goes down and people revert to name calling and other sorts of ugliness. I come down on the side of hoping that media organizations will do everything they can to preserve the open and anonymous nature of commenting, but as someone who avoids reading and making comments in many cases because of the level of discourse, I hope we can find a solution that will work.
this has really been a hot topic lately. With the creative director from DDB's suicide and other instances...people want blog commenter's to step forward more and more.
I am still torn on the issue (although I am always transparent)