with this, which arrived in my spam box today:

I wonder if it’s always true that a new area attracts charlatans? I suspect so. There have been plenty of medical charlatans in recent years. You look back at the history of science and there’s all sort of whackos.

In the case of social media, though, I think we’re all aware that there are an especially large number of hucksters out there. Why?

• It’s easily faked. Put some ‘read-write’, ‘paradigm change’ and ‘transparency’ into your presentation and everyone’s game.
• Multiple Personality Cash Order. Create a load of fake accounts and your client will be delighted that so many people are commenting on their blog post about goat collars, or something.
• Preying on the fearful. There’s still an idea, among some execs, that the web is very new and very scary. Show someone a negative review on a blog and they shit their pants.
• The basics are *so* easy. Whacking up a twi/fac/mysp/4sq/etc account is a piece of piss. So is blogging. I am living proof.
• People fall for these crappy formats = easy again: You wouldn’t stand for a ‘top five reasons why’ post in your favourite newspaper, so why are these silly lists continually at the top of social media tracking charts? I think it’s because we all want easy rather than hard, even though hard might be better for us.

Doing these things well is an entirely different matter, of course. Despite reading about social media and practising it in some ways every day for five years, and as a social web user for 20 years, I’m learning new things every day. And I’m still rubbish.

Should people be allowed to be anonymous online? World of Warcraft developer Blizzard seems somewhat undecided. Earlier this week, it introduced a Real ID scheme that would force people to post under their real names on its forums. Following widespread protests at this movement of goalposts — from pretty-much 12mn of the game’s 12mn subscribers — the company has today backed down on the idea.

The anonymity debate on web forums is a timeless classic. I last tackled the subject here, where I argued that being able to hide your identity is a key, important characteristic of web communications and ought t0 be protected with as great a fervour as net neutrality, if not more.

According to Blizzard CEO Mike Morhaime, in his statement announcing that the move was to be retracted, the idea was to improve the quality of interaction on the forums and make them more welcoming to new users:

Our efforts are driven 100% by the desire to find ways to make our community areas more welcoming for players and encourage more constructive conversations about our games. We will still move forward with new forum features such as conversation threading, the ability to rate posts up or down, improved search functionality, and more.

I think we all understand why a community manager might be tempted to outlaw anonymity. Web comic Penny Arcade pretty much nails it here, back in 2004:

You may also have come across Godwin’s Law:

As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.

People are asshats on the Internet. Quite a lot of the time. As a gamer, I’m sorry to say that this is especially the case in the gaming community. By forcing people to reveal their true identity, the thinking goes, they are made to regard other people as human beings. Calling David Browne a “f**king ret**d idiot” is a bit harder than saying it to DethSlay84. Similarly, when you make that remark, as Eric Smith, rather than h8core666, you might pause to reflect that this will appear against your name in Google searches forever. [Names invented off the top of my head].

Or not. When people get upset, drunk, slighted on the Internet, then they tend to pretty-much blow caution to the wind a lot of the time. Look at any number of horrible hate campaigns on Facebook for plenty of evidence of people behaving badly despite their comments being linked to their own name. Unlike in real life, of course, the consequences don’t blow over after a week or so, though. They’re Googled — but people don’t often seem to think about that at the time. I’m not lecturing there — I have published some nasty posts right here that I later regretted. I think it’s the lag between regular social norms and the cybernetworked future: it’s just bound to happen.

I’m also bound to add that there are a lot of weird people out there. Some of whom are really unpleasant in their off-screen life, as well as on-screen. Having them able to track you down because you didn’t like the look of their Shaman’s buffs might well be a little off-putting to people. Remember, this isn’t a closed, consensual community, like your Facebook friends: it’s 12mn frothing lunatics. ;-)

Women and minorities have a pretty tough time as gamers. Take a look at this tremendous post on Metafilter for some education there. Short excerpt:

If you do post a picture (I never did) people either go nuts over how hot you are and won’t leave you alone — and the guys that perv on you treat you in a condescending way because hot=stupid; having to hear that shit addressed to other girls on Vent was really infuriating and uncomfortable — OR they make a point of constantly telling you how ugly you are and won’t leave you alone. There is no middle ground. They either want to fuck you or deride you. And it actually doesn’t matter how hot or how ugly you are, either; the hottest girls will get called ugly (and FAT, ALWAYS FAT), and the ugliest girls still have to deal with lonely guys who aren’t superficial. Any time the girl posts something thereafter, people will comment on her appearance, even though it has nothing to do with whatever is being discussed.

Now go read the rest.

Anonymity gives a lot of people a freedom they would not otherwise have on the Net. That’s worth something, isn’t it?

Finally, I so loved this in the RPS wrapup on the issue, despite the fact that it undermines my whole argument:

Plus the obligatory Downfall skit (totally inpenetrable to non-gamers, I suspect):

Matt McKeon has created a great infographic to explain what is now automatically public for anyone using the default settings:

The bloggerati are incensed. Jason Calacanis writes:

Over the past month, Mark Zuckerberg, the hottest new card player in town, has overplayed his hand. Facebook is officially “out,” as in uncool, amongst partners, parents and pundits all coming to the realization that Zuckerberg and his company are–simply put–not trustworthy.

Video podcaster Leo Laporte tweets:

OK @jason has convinced me. I’ve deleted my personal Facebook account. I will delete the rest tomorrow during TWiG… http://bit.ly/aEgNVj

Peter Rojas – founder of engadget and Gizmodo – follows suit:

Just deactivated my Facebook account. […] You really don’t have control over your personal data and who it is shared with.

Geek opinion seems to be that the new social network Diaspora will offer users more respect and control. It is intended to run in a similar way to BitTorrent, with no central server and ‘friending’ equating to giving access to highly encrypted information on your own computer or hosted server space. It will be open-source and use open standards. So better?

I can’t really buy that. It may be a better solution, technically and even morally, but my father-in-law and ninety-year-old aunt are on Facebook: they will not be installing open-source software on their own server space. Facebook is the social network where I can communicate with non-geeks. (BTW, the non-geeks in my life are considerably more cautious than a lot of geeks about privacy online – very few of them have opted for public profiles). What’s more, on a technical level, Facebook already supports a raft of open standards such as OAuth and Open Graph Protocol as well as its Open APIs for creating third-party applications. If they saw demand, I’m sure they’d add more. I’d suggest that Facebook app vendors might think about creating services around privacy — ‘My Private Photos’, ‘Private Wall’, that sort of thing.

I’m not suggesting that the distress that’s been reported over declining privacy is a storm in a teacup. It’s not. But ultimately, the age-old advice that anything you write on the Web is in the public domain, so think before you post, remains a better solution than some kind of exodus to unknown and untried new lands. If one thing will persuade Facebook that it’s made the wrong decision and so reverse recent decisions on privacy, it would be people using it less.

Regular readers may recall that in February I reported on a Pingdom study that basically said the opposite of this research – that the majority of social network users were much older. The age splits in that study were much narrower than Pew’s and can’t be directly compared, but nonetheless suggested a much more even age distribution in social media usage than this does. One clue as to the disparity comes in a later graph that covers what respondents had done in the last 24 hours.

Here, there’s much less of a contrast between the 18–29 year-old cohort and those aged 30–45. Maybe one thing you might reasonably say from this is that younger people are more inclined to try out new things. Whether they stick with them and use them on a regular basis is much harder to call.

BTW, where did the expression ‘silent’ come from for over-65s? I thought ‘boomer’ and ‘Gen X’ were bad enough, but ‘silent’… I would suggest the author has not met many 65-year-olds.

On a related note, in a research round-up from e-Marketer, using yet a third way of dividing age-groups, there’s the suggestion that blogging is a major force in younger people’s online activity. Apparently, 40% of the respondents who said they wrote blogs were aged 18–25.

Perhaps comfortingly, the main reason given for blogging – by all age groups – is for pleasure: ‘self-expression’ is the #1 answer, closely followed by ‘fun’. Respondents could choose multiple answers, but nonetheless less than a third thought they were going to make money out of their blogs. I’m pleased that most people have woken up from the blogging-for-benjamins delusion. There are two ways to make money from blogging: (1) get someone to pay you to write their blog for them and (2) get a proper job on the basis of your blog. Option 3 – where Google AdSense puts a roof over your head – is not available.

Word-of-mouth (WoM) has influenced all my mobile phone contracts, where I took my wife on Valentine’s day and the last jar of instant coffee I purchased. It has for you, too, probably. Maybe not those exact items, but you’ve been influenced by people saying that they had a great meal here, that you really need to get some X and their holiday in Y at the Z hotel was fantastic.

No need to be ashamed. It’s the easiest and best source of advice in most circumstances. Nor would it be an appropriate subject for this blog.

A recent McKinsey Quarterly article (registration required for this venerable organ) focusing on how marketers might measure and evaluate WoM through social media and other means, however, is definitely of interest. It’s entitled ‘A new way to measure word-of-mouth marketing’.

The Marketing blog at Brand Republic has already had a few stabs at this piece of tosh, but I felt morally compelled to join the pile-on.

The article shows how important WoM can be, especially in areas where there isn’t an established market, like many technology sectors:

In the mobile-phone market, for example, we have observed that the pass-on rates for key positive and negative messages can increase a company’s market share by as much as 10 percent or reduce it by 20 percent over a two-year period, all other things being equal.

It’s at this point, sadly, that the article starts turning from informative to utter nonsense.

As is ever the truth in editorial, there must be a list of three and long words. McKinsey identifies three 4–5 syllable types of WoM influence:

Experiential: your mate tried it; it was rubbish/great; s/he tells you about it.

Consequential: brands put out messages (e.g. ‘this face cream will make you look younger’). People believe it and pass it on.

Intentional: appears to refer to product placement or buzz marketing.

From here to insanity. McKinsey ‘develops’ a theory of ‘WoM Equity’, which everyone else calls ‘Share of Voice’ but <snark>they wouldn’t be good analysts if they didn’t make up new words for things we already know about</snark>. So what is this revolutionary new formula? WoM value is:

the average sales impact of a brand message multiplied by the number of word-of-mouth messages.

Colour me gobsmacked. This is revolutionary stuff indeed.

No, it isn’t: it’s bullshit. Nearly 3000 words to say “People pass on their opinion about good and bad things. Agencies can try to influence this by creating clever stuff people will pass on. You should measure it by multiplying the (undefined) impact of the message by the number of times it is mentioned”.

The first two conclusions are fine, if inane. The formula is bullshit on so many levels that I don’t know where to begin.

• we still don’t know from any of this what makes an ‘impactful’ message, other than it might be like the Cadbury’s Gorilla campaign (which appeared shortly after the Cadbury’s food poisoning scandal, so sales would always be significantly better than the previous quarter).
• they’re saying a clever advert is more important than a genuine conversation. Really, always?
• and that life-long loyalty is less important than a quick hit?
• isn’t this WoM stuff about your brand’s reputation to at least as great an extent as flogging stuff?
• a model based on interruption, then, rather than interaction or engagement? Are you sure that’s what the Cluetrain is about?

I did quite like their chart (below), though.

picture credit: Mareen Fischinger

It’s already a superpower on the Net; but it wants a lot more.

You’re probably already well-aware that the company introduced a couple of new features this week:

Community Pages – new pages around the hobbies, brands and favourite things you’ve included in your profile that automagically link from there. Your profile link will also appear automatically on these pages. You say you like ‘cooking’ – now you’re visible on the cooking community page.

More connected profiles – not just your favourite things, but also the places you studied at and the companies you worked for might have auto-generated pages. Again, your profile will be added to these pages without you having to do anything, such as make your own choice on the matter.

Like Button – instead of ‘become a fan’ buttons, there are ‘like this’ buttons. I actually appreciate this bit in some ways. Saying that I was a fan of a brand always seemed very fake. My relationship with most brands that I don’t hate is more along the lines of ‘it’s alright’. I would be 10X more likely to agree that I like them as opposed to being their bitch fan. The other side to this is that it’s available as a plug-in to third-party sites – giving publishers more information about yourself if you click their ‘like this’ buttons than you ever did by clicking on the old ‘share on facebook’ equivalent that you’re used to.

So, to sum up the changes…

What’s in it for Facebook?

Advertising placement opportunities: creating a page that links from your hobby of – say – archery allows archery-supplies advertisers to know that their ads are appearing on a very targeted page.

Better ad-profiling of your tastes through your ‘likes’ enabling more accurate delivery of behavioural advertising.

What’s in it for you?

Nothing.

Oh wait: the ‘like’ not ‘fan’ semantic distinction.

If you believe the hype, Facebook says that it’s “helping people find connections”. Like you need more random stalker opportunities and entrance vectors from spammers and malware distributors in social media.

How to get rid of it

You can switch off the automatic community and profile-connection pages in Facebook by logging in and then going to the Account menu (top right of the page), then Privacy Centre, then Applications and Websites. Once you are into that screen, select and switch off Instant Personalisation.

Robert Scoble, who took the picture above [thank you], is characteristically bullish about these announcements, but recognises that the company is treading on thin-ice:

So far I’m hearing all the right things from him and the employees around him. They know that this is a major, ambitious, move and they are going to move carefully and deliberately from here. They better or else we’ll see regulators move into control this business like we’ve never seen in our industry. One CEO, who asked not to be named, told me in the hallways today that Facebook is now a utility that the industry is going to rely on and he noted that utilities usually are heavily regulated to make sure that they don’t abuse the power they have over people and businesses.

I think that current regulation is sufficient, if it’s actually acted upon. The trouble is that few people understand their rights or are in a financial position to be able to fight for them. Furthermore, the existence of people who either can’t be bothered with Facebook or who have actively revoked their accounts means that the rest of the Web would be unwise to march in line behind a single leader.

With reports of sackings on account of Facebook profiles and careless tweeting, a lot of people are probably rather worried about the Internet and what it might dig up about them. Everybody has some skeletons in their closet that they’d rather didn’t see the light of day: those pictures from the stag weekend and that drunken debate you got into about Paul McCartney being the best Beatle*. But the Internet is dark and mysterious and it remembers everything, so what chance of absolution for ordinary people?

The answer is good news, Mayfield explains. You don’t need to be a technical genius or have to hack into Google’s servers to make sure that your online representation shows your good side. All you need is to be diligent; create a plan and stick to it. The thing is that Google is desperate for information about you – so if you make it, and it’s well-written, clearly structured, interlinked and kept up-to-date, then that is what will appear in a search result. Slurs and dodgy pictures won’t disappear, but you have every opportunity to become the de-facto source of information about yourself. Then, if you get involved in professional or social networks and offer value, people will link to you and your material, giving even more weight to your credentials as a source. As I wrote recently, yes, there will be pictures that make you look silly, possibly negative remarks and perhaps things you regret – but your online reputation is the balance of positive and negative, and tilted towards the recency of the material and its credibility. Unless you’re a celebrity under daily scrutiny by national newspapers, you’ve got the opportunity to control of all of that.

The first part of the book explains how to find out what the Internet thinks of you, through Google Searches and more specialised tools like Spezify and Social Mention. The second part sets out how you can claim and control your online identity by joining social networks, making sure your profiles are fresh and accurate and possibly starting your own blog or website. The third and final section goes into more depth on how to make the best use of Linked-In, Facebook, Twitter and blogs. At every point, there are well-considered and wise tips on best practise and other sites you might like to explore, as well as advice for problems like negative comments, people who ask too much of you or who post information you’d prefer to remain private. While Mayfield is one of the world’s leading experts on the social web, he maintains a humility and willingness to learn that is not only extremely endearing, but also makes him more credible as an advisor.

So, a thumbs-up. It’s probably not for you, of course. If you read this blog, you’re likely to be well-versed in all of this, but maybe a great present for loved ones who really ought to be more aware of their options. This book is an empowering, well-written and non-technical guide that they will appreciate.

*I once claimed this. In a drunken debate. Sorry, alright. I KNOW.

First, what we might call the ‘good news’: as social media marketers have been telling us for the last five years, more useful, fun, non-pushy content is more likely to engage people than straightforward advertising.

The reports says the sponsored content was a St Patrick’s Day page containing a video and UGC. The video mentioned the brand sponsoring the content. ‘Give’ widgets let you create a present – like a badge or a greeting card – for friends. ‘Get’ widgets let you create similar things for your own profile page.

But there is a significant caveat here. Yes, people said they’d click links on sponsored content and give/get widgets to a greater extent than on banners, newsletters and non-interactive brand pages. But not by as much as you’d think. The ‘likely to click’ score for sponsored content is 3.3; for old fashioned banners it’s 2.8. That’s a 10% difference in impact. I suppose you might argue that it all depends on how good the content is, and how relevant it is to the site’s users: I can’t really comment on that since I haven’t seen the media used.

Sponsored content is a good thing, then, as far as getting people to click through is concerned. It’s good for awareness and improving sentiment. Unfortunately, there’s absolutely no correlation between this and persuading people to buy things.

Sponsored content was found to be the least successful in terms of converting exposure into sales. I’d imagine that this is probably down to context and the lack of any particular call to action. If you load up a flash game – some sort of Farmville knock-off – and it happens to be sponsored by Corona beer, I’d wager you might think: ‘oh yes, Corona beer – that exists’. If it’s a good game, then you might think: ‘Fair play to you, Corona. Nice one.’ What you probably don’t think is ‘Right, I’m off down to the shop to buy some Corona’. [Actually, that might have been a bad example. Mmm… beer.]

Better targeted, relevant sponsored content would presumably work better: a good example is the free recipe cards that supermarkets give away. If I worked for a supermarket, I’d be all over allrecipes.com with my free recipes, but not with a car-racing game.

The big winner for brands is having a profile page with fans. The ‘with fans’ difference is that fan pages give users a badge that shows on their own profile. Straight brand pages without fans are just there to look at, and are not so successful. The commitment – however slight it may seem – of publically saying that you like a brand turns out to be a fairly strong motivator to buy things from them. The report’s authors suggest that this is because people hate being seen as inconsistent, or displaying cognitive dissonance, science fans. If you’ve joined the Marmite fan page and then buy Vegemite, then that’s odd and wrong, even to you:

…once people purchase products from a brand, they report liking the brand more. But the reverse is also true – when people declare publicly that they like a brand (by putting a logo on their profile for all of their friends to see) they are more likely to buy from it.

This also explains why ‘Give’ widgets work better than ‘Get’ widgets. If you send your friend a virtual pot of Marmite, then that’s a much more public display of affinity than making one for yourself, so you’re more likely to stick to your professed tastes.

The full report is here [PDF]. via. MediaPost

picture credit: CaptPiper

As you know, the rumour is that the cool kids aren’t blogging anymore. Oh no, they’re microblogging (Twitter, Facebook), or what I’m going to call miniblogging (tumblr, Posterous, Soup.io). Miniblogging is more than status updates, but not as onerous as a fully-fledged blog.

This category has really taken off in the last year. The not-so-reliable figures from Compete suggest their number of users has trebled over the last twelve months, something that you’ll already know anecdotally from the number of links you’ve encountered to these sites in your daily reading.

These sites are very similar in most respects, with a few genre-defining characteristics:

• Automatic import of social network content e.g. photos from flickr, delicious bookmarks.
• Quick posting using a bookmarklet (a javascript activated from a bookmark in your browser’s toolbar).
• Emphasis on frequent, short-form content rather than lengthy essays.
• Easy to repost others’ content, something that’s encouraged and seen as a mark of respect rather than ripping people off.
• Content is often ephemeral.
• Posts likely to be ‘secondary’ information – a youtube video, a picture you found elsewhere, a quote from someone in a mainstream website source.

Tumblr has been around the longest. And appears to be the market leader, with around three times the users of the other two. The different networks have a slightly different vibe. Tumblr users seem to be younger (on average), more likely to post images or multimedia than words and the site seems more sociable than the others. There are some great music blogs on it. It also picked up some geek appeal through the ability to automatically pick up on tags or a custom RSS feed such as the PRFail blog. Perhaps most crucially on its path to mainstream acceptance, the platform has also attracted celebrities such as Katy Perry and John Legend.

Posterous is technically superior to Tumblr, with its killer post-by-email feature taking a lot of pain out of posting from a mobile, posting MP3s and video. It also does a clever automatic posting to your other sites depending on rules you choose. Despite (or maybe because of) these technical innovations, though, it appears to have attracted a smaller but wordier crew, who use the platform as an easier, cheaper blog. A lot of the people whose regular blogs I follow have adopted Posterous as a lower-commitment, low maintenance secondary site (e.g. Steve Rubel, Charlie Peverett).

I’ve tried all of them and have currently settled on the underdog Soup.io as a secondary site. I set up a tumblr a long time ago but made the mistake of making it a lifestream site. As it turns out, my life is quite boring and trivial, especially if you’re not me, so the site was boring and trivial too. Posterous seemed like a good idea, but I realised I was using it as a proxy for posting here, which seemed a bit pointless. I was looking for four things, ultimately:

• a better bookmarking site than delicious, one that would capture pictures, videos, and music as well as bookmarks.
• a scrapbook for things I find interesting and want to keep/share but don’t warrant a blog post here. Sometimes it’s a place where I gather materials for a future article.
• some curation of my social networks – it automatically gathers favourites from youtube, ffffound, visualize.us etc. Theoretically, I will be able to find these later without visiting lots of separate sites.
• but without the boring bits – it doesn’t gather status updates or twitter conversations.

The Soup.io platform is not perfect any means – navigation and search are rather too minimal when it comes to finding things you posted more than a few days ago. You can use tags, but there’s no tag cloud. There aren’t any categories. There are permalinks, but they don’t contain any intelligible information. However, it looks OK out of the box, and the posting bookmarklet is fantastic. There’s also pretty much no limit on how much you post or import.

There’s a bigger worry over this whole sector, though.

None of these platforms currently have any form of advertising, premium features or any other way to make their business sustainable. That’s a worry if you post much content direct to the site. It would feel like a terrible waste if your site’s owners went bust and closed down the server. Lifestreaming non-starter Storytlr will presumably not be the last site in this crowded sector to be closed down.

The trouble is that if (say) tumblr starts posting advertising on people’s pages, their users could easily dump the platform and move to a competitor. The same goes for premium features: if one started to offer (say) a lightbox plug-in for snazzier picture display as a $5 a month extra, its competitors would be motivated to immediately offer the same feature for free.

So is miniblogging doomed? Or all but one of them?

Not quite, but it’s tricky. Survivors might focus on offering a technical USP that its competitors can’t match, which seems unlikely, and not necessarily a saving grace, as the tumblr vs posterous figures show. Otherwise, they could try to create loyalty to the platform, which is again improbable since their whole attraction is low commitment. There are social features on each, which could work to spark the loyalty of users – but these tend to be very lo-fi – I find it hard to believe that many people care about the number of Posterous subscribers they have, for example. Similarly, I can’t see the trick of offering brands their own pages for a sizeable fee working too well, since they don’t have anywhere near the reach of Facebook or MySpace fan pages.

To me, the solution lies in greater differentiation. It’s not the case that only one of these platforms can win, but they do need to become different from each other. For as long as the format and features are the same on each, then they are after exactly the same users, which is very clearly a less-than-zero-sum game.

Tumblr has attracted creatives, as I mentioned, and so maybe should do more to allow art works, music and photography to be seen/heard at their best. Perhaps build in a really simple ecommerce solution so that artists can sell or license their content. Posterous could perhaps do more for wordsmiths, or go completely the opposite direction and create a paid-for review platform (I don’t condone this, but it seems to be a business model). Maybe one site should get serious about being all-about multimedia bookmarking; or get serious about being a collaboration platform.

There’s still the threat that competitors will implement every new feature, but the more these sites define their niches, probably as directed by existing user behaviour, the less likely it becomes that this will happen, since those competitors would blur the definitions of their own niches by doing so.

While we slept and watched England #fail at sport over the weekend, our American colleagues were having a rousing discussion of the rights and wrongs of allowing people to comment anonymously on news sites, blogs and forums. Mathew Ingram writes up the story here. In typical internet style, the debate moved quickly from pros and cons to GOOD vs. EVIL…

The Case Against Anonymity

There definitely is one and I’d sum it up as follows:

• The state of debate and personal courtesy on the Internet is fairly poor. On some very popular sites, it is awful.
• People make hateful comments; bully others; they ‘troll’ discussion forums and worse.
• This climate puts off people with milder opinions and manners, reinforcing the bad behaviour.
• Others fight fire with fire, again escalating poor manners and the likelihood of a Godwin incident.
• People would (mostly) not behave this way if they were (a) face-to-face with the people that they are debating; or (b) legally identifiable.
• There are other reasons sometimes suggested such as child protection and reducing the incidence of other illegal activity (e.g. file-sharing forums).

I think these are fair points. But, on the other hand, I completely disagree with making it necessary for people to legally identify themselves, even to a site’s owner.

Why’s that then?

There’s six big reasons that I’d propose for allowing anonymity on your site. These are above and beyond the fact that making people register reduces the number of comments significantly:

Privacy is a right. Making my online dealings linked to the-real-me and potentially Google-able without my control is wrong. I worked as a teacher by day in the late eighties and nineties and in the evenings contributed regularly and anonymously to far-left politics and computer game forums. Neither my students nor my employees needed to know that. At that point in time, it could have quite seriously damaged my professional reputation and prospects. Yet it shouldn’t have: neither activity impinged upon the other. It still shouldn’t. You don’t live in a house with no curtains; why should anyone be made to do so online?

Protecting democracy. People have a right to disagree; to have critical, minority opinions that would make them unpopular with others. The majority is a terrible bully if your beliefs don’t accord with its own. It will make you feel bad, turns you down for jobs and refuses to serve you in its shops. Simply saying that people have a right to free speech without the mechanisms to allow that to happen, is not democracy. Anonymity is that mechanism.

Personal experience. Before social networks, we used things like IRC (it’s like a chat board) and NNTP (like a forum) to talk to people and discuss the topics we found interesting. The thing was, there was no way to force people to identify themselves if they didn’t want to, and hardly anyone did. Most people – myself included – kept persistent pseudonyms, to allow discussion to take place and comments to form part of our overall persona.

That ‘overall persona’ thing is important. Because they way you became more respected by the communities of which you were a member was wholly in the value of what you said or contributed. Not your job title or your academic qualifications. What you looked like, your age or sex, didn’t matter. If you gave value to the community by making astute comments, offering advice or posting resources for others, then your prestige rose organically. At the same time, it was voluntary. If you were simply trying out a group or maybe discussing something particularly sensitive, then you could choose a disposable nickname for the period of one or more sessions. You could tell the people who were respected because their postings and comments got lots of praise and responses, even from people who disagreed.

Was it some sort of lost Eden? No, of course it wasn’t. But you could block/ban/ignore people who were rude or deliberately provocative. People knew not to feed the trolls and how to erase most spam. And here’s the thing. On many of the newsgroups and channels I frequented, the level of debate was higher than I tend to see on any Facebook group page, 90% of Twitter and nearly all blogs.

So no, there isn’t any correlation between accredited identities and quality of debate. On Facebook, where nearly all identities are confirmed, there are just as many spammers, trolls and idiots as there are anywhere else. [Check out this blog post from Malcolm Coles for some especially horrible examples].

Whistleblowers and the Silenced. Many institutions – banks, the Health Service, the MoD, large corporations – do not want their people to say anything online. And they make them sign documents to legally prevent them from doing so. That’s not good news for democracy either. But fortunately, there’s anonymous web posting. Often, these people can make others aware of things happening thanks to their anonymity. More often, they can offer expert opinion and evidence in a debate. Most often, they simply get the chance to express themselves. People still get fired for this sort of thing.

Sick/Vulnerable People. Health forums where people can discuss their ailments and treatments. Bullying messageboards. People seeking advice about how to get out of debt. Job posting boards. All necessary and valuable. All require anonymity in order to operate properly.

The Young. When you’re young, you tend to do silly things like download copyrighted software and music. You tend to say things that will make you very embarrassed in ten years’ time. Your emotions tend to be a bit fiery and disproportionate. But that doesn’t matter on the Internet, because it was NiteHawk99 who did those things not Paul Smith, 99 Hadley Gardens, Croydon. Do we really want to stigmatise teenagers with all the things they do online for the rest of their lives? We don’t; but our technology and state of cultural development makes it too tempting to remember people’s actions forever.

The other, equally important, side of the ‘youth’ point is that the Internet allows for roleplay and the exploration of one’s personality without commitment. That’s important to emotional development. Teens often operate several personae online — the flirt, the parent, the fool, the poet, etc. That’s a really healthy, danger-free way to develop without too much trauma — if one of your personae crashes and burns, switch to a new one. Oh, but some people who ought to know better want to stop you doing that.

One Last Note

The comments and discussions are terrible on Have Your Say and various newspaper sites for three very simple reasons.

1. The technical structure of the boards and the transient nature of their populations means there’s very little in the way of prior reputation and often few ways to counter objectionable input.
2. There’s no editorial input whatsoever. Comments and discussion boards are viewed, it seems, as autonomous traffic-drivers which sit independently of the real content. No one ever responds with a factual correction or a rebuttal, let alone any encouragement.
3. There’s often very little exercise of the sites’ own codes of conduct. Moderation is nearly always reactive [report this], rather than pro-active. Since site owners won’t employ people to watch and engage with discussions, pointing out transgressions and (yes) bringing down the ban-hammer, you can get away with murder. Almost.

If newspapers and other fora want good quality, humane discussion where intelligence wins over foaming-mouthed semi-literates, then they need to tend to the garden. They need moderators and editors. If commentators are treated politely but firmly, get feedback from the editorial team, know the rules and are encouraged to participate civilly through example then that is what will happen. Mostly.

picture credit: anjan58

Anyway, what do you reckon? Reckon away!