The ideal solution would be to make users sign in through their Facebook page, but then let them comment under whatever pseudonym they wanted. That way commenters could have anonymity, but abusive users could still be permanently banned.
Essentially it's extremely difficult to create a new Facebook persona and have it look at all authentic. Not impossible, but at least 250x more difficult than creating a new GMail account.
I have never, nor shall I ever, maintained an account on Facebook.
This means that I will forever opt out of commenting on TC articles.
I let my Yahoo account die over half a decade ago.
:)
IM(NSH)O the massive drop in comments on TechCrunch is an indicator of how many people don't have (and don't want) an account on Facebook.
Fake accounts get shut down very quickly, they have a mechanism that seems to detect those accounts very quickly.
We also used to create fake people using photos from stock art libraries and try to create realistic social lives for them, with our aim being that our real friends would eventually start enquiring after the fake people as if they knew them.
We were pretty bored.
I have encountered numerous fake profiles that have survived for months/years. Many of these represent businesses that should really be pages. Others are accounts that are used on hate groups/pages exclusively and have highly offensive fake names.
The worst example I've seen was a vicious cyberbullying profile that Facebook allowed to accumulate hundreds of friends, under an obviously fake name, despite a large number of abuse reports.
As a cryptography researcher I've come across numerous cumbersome anonymous reputation systems, but it didn't occur to me that Facebook is in a position to roll one out right now with a minor change if they chose to. The caveat, of course, is that it is centralized and controlled by FB. Whether they have the incentive to implement it is an entirely different question.
What's the best one you've come across? The only way I was ever able to dream up was basically requiring an iris scan to create a new account, but then not connecting the iris data to the account, just using it to ensure the user couldn't create a second account. This may actually be feasible now that every laptop has a built in camera and the patents have finally expired, but at the time I wanted to create this it wasn't yet possible from a business perspective.