Should we ban anonymous comments?
April 4, 2008 //
I asked the question on Twitter this morning, “Why can’t people who are nasty or sarcastic have to be anonymous on my blog?!”
Jemima Kiss’ response was so funny I felt it deserved a permanent placeholder.
Posts that mention me on TechCrunch seem to attract anonymous comments so bad that the type of people leaving them, are formally known as ‘trolls’. I don’t mind anonymous comments per say, mainly because we get them from companies such as Google and Microsoft on the Segala blog - they leave their real names and judging by the conversations I know their identities.
In general, I hate anonymous comments. If you don’t feel you can associate your name with a comment, don’t comment. Should we ban anonymous comments altogether? Should professional blogs such as TechCrunch ban them?
By the way, if we’re not yet connected on Twitter, feel free to follow my feed.
Helene Haughney says 
Paul G says 
Ted says 
Ross Tweedie says 
Interesting, because I have been chatting with several people lately about some of the (inevitably) nasty behaviour of a portion of people on the web.
I’m not naieve, but neither do I think people should necessarily have to put up with overly negative/critical abuse/comments from complete strangers, but perceived blogging/socialmedia wisdom seems to imply it’s part and parcel of ‘being involved in the conversation’.
I hope to write a fuller blog post on my own thoughts on this soon, in the meantime I’ll just point to someone elses related post: Death Threats, Intimidation, and Blogging
So in my long winded answer to your question, if anonymous comments on your own blog are annoying you, or distracting in any way from achieving what you want with your blog - ban them and let criticism come from those who stand over what they say.
April 4th, 2008
Have you seen Shel Israel’s Living Room Policy? I think I’d endorse that.
April 4th, 2008
I have my doubts. First of all, it’s hard to verify who a commenter is, and there is plenty of trolling done where people just register either a quick email address or just fake it.
I don’t think trolling can be stopped, and I think that sometimes it is, weirdly, an advantage in that it can show the value of some commenters more readily than if they had to restrain themselves.
I’d be interested to know what you think constitutes "anonymous" - is it no name, a nickname? I might not want to publish my name directly, but would you want to force me to in order to comment?
April 4th, 2008