Good? Bad? Trip- and capcodes only sensible for mods and admins? Useful for suggesting more contributors than just Sling!XD/uSlingU? Good for a community with no vanity and attention whoring? Or promoting trolling and DQN behaviour?
Discuss!
Many of my best posts(or those that got the best reaction) were made anonymously. At the time I wouldn't have made them if I had to use a name, because I was afraid of being wrong.
>Useful for suggesting more contributors than just Sling!XD/uSlingU?
That requires more sources of material to contribute.
>Good for a community with no vanity and attention whoring?
Yes, with some light moderation. Zero moderation and you end up with Usenet.
>Or promoting trolling and DQN behaviour?
I think trolling is only promoted as readily as the community bites the flamebait lures. I get the impression that on futaba trolling is largely ignored and/or embraced, if that makes any sense.
Anonymous wins the internet. Let people ID themselves if they want, but don't force them.
As for suggesting a big community, personally I look at the quality/quantity of posts instead of who posts them. Do people REALLY care who posts stuff on an imageboard where 99.99% of the stuff isn't by the poster anyway?
> I get the impression that on futaba trolling is largely ignored and/or embraced, if that makes any sense.
It does. There's entire boards on 2ch.net devoted to collecting kopipe (like the Yoshinoya rant), trolling material and strategies and so on. You could say that the Japanese are pretty much familiar with their usual forms of online communication (never seen anyone on Futaba ask What's sage? ^^) - somehow the same does not seem to hold true for the west / rest of the internet.
>>2
I completely agree with you about fear of being wrong getting in the way of non-anonymous posting. I'm also afraid that if I end up being right, I'll become falsely committed--obliged to being committed, even--to what I said. Even if I'm open-minded and admit to being mistaken, it'll be difficult for me to politically back down from an old stance if my name is attached to it.
>>4
The western world has few usual forms of online communication. The brand-obssessed North American culture likes to distinguish itself at every available opportunity instead of building on others' existing work.
Everyone has their own forum, their own commenting system, their own skins and interface quirks, their own unwritten rules, their own memes, and so on. Unlike 2ch's function as a huge melting pot that blends every culture into every other culture and produces a kind of meta-culture where everything more or less fits in, western online communities are less expansive and less forgiving of elements that don't conform to expectations.
If 2ch culture can be described as a de facto standard, then western online culture may be described as many warring standards (PHP/Perl, DVD+R/DVD-R, PDAs/handsets, you know the sort).
There used to be Usenet. There still is, but it's long since stopped being relevant to anyone except old Usenet people and a few people who stumble in on Google Groups.
Me, I always felt web forums were a huge step backwards from Usenet. But 2ch-style boards aren't too bad. Much more simplistic than Usenet, but that might not be a bad thing.
And Usenet doesn't require registration.
Usenet isn't as anonymous as a 2ch-style board. As long as a message can easily be traced to its source, there will be things that are left unsaid for fear of commitment or retribution.
That said, I don't use Usenet enough to know about how different newsgroups and their users interact, compete, cooperate, or such.