While on the Internet nobody knows you’re a dog (or at least until you turn on your web cam), there’s still a matter of online identity. Even though you can constructy any kind of identity you want with nicknames, avatars and everything – at the end of the day, you’re still playing the role of that persona.
As your participating in your favorite online community, you’re slowly getting reputation points for the things you say or do. With time the community will either embrace you and you’ll start climbing the ladder with more privileges or they’ll shun you as someone who’s not wanted there.
With this in mind, we can ask ourselves an interesting question – what would happen if we took away online identities of forum participants? What if the forum would be completely anonymous?
That’s exactly what Slovenian tech community site Slo-Tech did. Being a moderator there, I’m having an unique chance to see how this experiment is progressing.
First the setup:
- separate section of forum where everything you write is anonymous
- nicknames are gone, your identified by sequential post id (e.g. a343546). There’s no way to know who wrote what.
- Moderators operate in the area, but they can only delete and the deletions are not signed, allowing them to be as trigger happy as they want. Nicknames of people who can moderate are known.
- Basic rules of forum are still valid.
The idea was to create a space where you could discuss things without hurting your only identity and not another 4chan.
Two weeks later, how did it develop?
Screen shot shows thread listing. White and blue ones are normal threads while red ones are deleted. Content of typical thread doesn’t look much different.
That’s on a forum that typical deletes less then one post per thread and very rarely whole thread, mostly in connection with piracy.
What essentially happened is that a small of group of people started misbehaving, posting trash as much as they could. Massive quoting and answers like “just kill yourself LOL” appeared in every thread. The topics of threads are often just trash.
Since you don’t know who’s doing this stuff you can’t do much about it, other than delete it faster that they can write. Sooner or later they’ll get tired of it.
- Image by Getty Images via Daylife
There’s also a positive part of the whole experiment, after we manage to clean away all the thrash, we are left with a handful of interesting topics, mostly dealing with political and personal issues where people post long and insightful answers. As long as we get to delete trolls from there topics soon enough, interesting alternative debates crop up where nobody is worried that their statements can be later used against them or their name.
I wouldn’t recommend repeating this experiment for communities that doesn’t have powerful moderating force and enough of good seeds. If you can afford it, it’s a fun experiment.
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Sounds like an interesting experiment, although i guess in some ways the results will depend on the nature of the questions, that is to say some subjects need more anonaminity that others. It is also much harder to create communities when there is no identity, i often spend more time answering a question to someone i know than someone i don't and adice i give is often based on understanding friends situations after long aquantances.
it is a useful think for web masters to think about are there some projects where the extra effort of extreme moderation is worth it to get some real unbiased insites into what people are really thinking.
it would be perhaps a little braver that i could be with mysites though lol.