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Comment by xerophtye | Hacker News Reader

I like how HN handles that problem. Users are associated with an "account" so their posts etc on THIS site are linked together. And it helps identify trolls and throwaway accounts easy.

But it also gives you a sense of optional anonymity as your HN account doesn't have to necessarily link with the rest of your web presence. No one can find you in the real world just from you HN account if you don't want them too. And still, the option to provide further information gives you the OPTION to present your credentials and connect "who you are" with the HN account.

I find it really interesting how sometimes VERY simple features are solving relatively complex problems

View on HN

I think Quora handles this better than HN. It gives you the option to be completely anonymous on a case by case basis, reap the benefits/upvotes even when you are anonymous. Most people on HN/Reddit resort to throwaway accounts when they want to be completely anonymous and not tarnish their username, even though that username has no connection to a real world ID.

People/usernames are brands in online discussion, so the way we generally weigh people's opinion is affected by those brands, which is kind of a function of their comment history and any IRL connections. Say, if the username is 'pg', even if it's a hit-and-run comment with not much thought put into it, you view it differently.

As said earlier, identities is quite important to many users. Quora has done it quite well.

However, with the anonymous feature to ask question, I have seen a rapid degradation of the quality of questions coming on Quora. I am not the only one who has felt this way. We can find a lot of people complaining about the quality of questions of late.

Yes. HN or forums do have this advantage and it has solved the issue of troll to a large extent.

Quora on the other hand, has this feature of being able to ask or answer questions as anonymous, and this has resulted in an avalanche of stupid questions and unrelated answers.

We are somewhere in between, while we like to give a real identity like Quora has, we also believe, anonymity is an important feature to have, for many different reasons.

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