>>27
My experience with this is based on a particular online community that uses pseudonyms. In that community, it is normal (expected, even) to meet strangers (who you might not even know very well online) offline with basically complete trust. That community is old (older than 4chan), huge (not as big as 4chan, but what is?), and thriving (nobody is accusing it of declining quality).

There are probably many other communities that are similar.

(The site itself is grotesque technically, running on phpBB and full of giant avatars and miles of signatures on every post. But that has nothing to do with pseudonyms or the site's success.)

I wonder if the reasoning behind anonymity is a little bit like the reasoning behind modern art. "The old way had problems, so we are going to tear down the entire system in order to make it impossible for those problems to occur." For anonymity, you can summarize it as "you can't trust anyone or anything on the internet, therefore you shouldn't try."

To be clear, most of the disadvantages of pseudonyms are real. Most of the arguments against them are valid. But perhaps the importance of those arguments is overblown, and the tradeoffs are worthwhile, at least in some cases.

For what it's worth, it's pretty amusing to meet someone in real life, and continue using their pseudonym from the internet. It's not entirely dissimilar to the Anonymous rallies and meetups, although the level of interaction is probably quite different (greater, in the case of pseudonyms).