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Comment by ProfessorLayton | Hacker News Reader

Pity, mainly because there seems to be a market for local anonymous communications, but a relatively small, and very vocal subset of users can ruin it for everyone.

I wonder if some sort of anonymous reputation system could have saved them from making product decisions that were counter to the reasons for using the app in the first place.

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A hackernews user, `pkfrank, wrote about some of the strategies for mitigating bad posts here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7663064

The posts would get auto-deleted if their vote count got to -5. It was popular enough at my university that this kind of community moderation worked reasonably well, but in a lot of other locations it got abused.

whisper is a much superior, still alive platform that does the same thing.

I really disagree. I've used the app maybe 2-3 years ago and looking at their website, it doesn't seem like the main UI or features have changed much. If I didn't know what the app was, going on their website I would think it's a Buzzfeed clone given all their listicles and clickbaity headlines.

Listicles are not how it's mainly used. It's basically a chat app. Most of the activity on the main feed is people looking to chat. And there are very active groups.

Been running anonember.com for a while now without issue

comment karma like here on hackernews is sort of an "anonymous reputation system" is it not?

Pseudonymous, not anonymous. People can recognise your username and treat you accordingly. Conversely if you start a new username it doesn't retain any karma from your "main".

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