Slashdot Mirror
Will Real Name Policies Improve Comments?
TechCrunch has a story about the recent trend of websites wanting users to use their real names in an attempt to make comments better. The story points out that the practice didn't work in South Korea. From the article: "...In 2007, South Korea temporarily mandated that all websites with over 100,000 viewers require real names, but scrapped it after it was found to be ineffective at cleaning up abusive and malicious comments (the policy reduced unwanted comments by an estimated .09%). We don’t know how this hidden gem of evidence skipped the national debate on real identities, but it’s an important lesson for YouTube, Facebook and Google, who have assumed that fear of judgement will change online behavior for the better."
homosexuality is a politically protected class
Not anywhere that still goes after apostasy. To the contrary, running on a platform of rounding up and executing the gays would be a great way to get elected (or appointed) in places like saudi, iran, uganda, etc.
It will also help governments demand people say supportive things. For example, right now lots of authoritarian regimes are happy to demand people show up to parades and pretend to be excited (and leader speeches and so on). Now imagine being told you don't 'like the dear leader enough' on the north korean future equivalent of facebook and twitter and so on.
> I don't see any reason why every site should allow ACs unless they just wants lots of trolls and flames. I mean once in a while we'll see an insightful AC comment but for every one of those we'll see a dozen "nigger faggot shill" comments that just derail conversations.
Confirmation bias much? Just went to a random article and searched for pure troll/offtopic/spam anonymous comments. There's 112 anonymous comments (out of 498) and about ten of them are pure offtopic/namecalling and another dozen with flamebaitish content. 6 comments are scored -1, 3 of those are anonymous.
IOW, contents of anonymous comments are mostly the same as for registered, though with 0 starting score you don't notice them so often amongst default 2 starting score for registered posters with good carma, and with ACs being in minority poor behaviour stands out more.
Actually, even on anonymous boards niggerfaggot crowd is pretty much localized and shooed from actual discussions, especially if you go to thematic boards and not /b/.
AC's are necessary for getting some gold nugget bits of information. due to nda's and so forth.
the easiest way to leak stuff is to write it to slashdot as ac, really, and all such information has to be judged by what the information is. it's sort of beautiful in a way, a nugget of information that might be totally false but might be true. if people had to use their real names everywhere then some industry wide problems would never get discussed(typical problems at offices, with projects and so forth).
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
What an immense waste of a sub-200 UID.
FC Closer