Anonymity

I think someone called me a tosser in the comments here once. Believe it or not, it takes more than that to make me dwell on the issue of anonymous comments. I’m thinking about it this week, though, along with everyone else.

Anonymous comments can get out of control. It isn’t a new issue. Ever been inside a Volano chat room? Twelve years ago, commenter ip addresses were publicly displayed to try to quell the issue. If you got out of hand, your isp would be notified.

I’m amazed the issue hasn’t progressed beyond that in twelve years. Web 2.0 has acted as a huge catalyst for two-way discussion. Social participation is often cited as the identifying characteristic of the entire movement. So why hasn’t anyone thought about potential abuse?

I have to assume everyone is able to ignore the “tosser” comments. And like the frog in the warming water, we don’t notice it’s boiling until we see the bubbles. Well, it’s boiling.

We need a working identity verification service. OpenID could even handle the need, but it needs a head kick. Limiting the organizations that can actually host identities would be the first step. From there, it wouldn’t take much for communication platforms (blog comments, etc) to require a simple identity key hosted by a reputable organization. Comments could still be nameless, but a trace path would exist in the case of extreme abuse.

There’s an opportunity here to create a better communication platform. I hope it happens without government regulation.

Aside: For those of you thinking “Yeah but most of the comments were coming from another blog…” don’t worry, the government regulation I hope we can avoid is unavoidable. I can almost hear the bills being drafted now. Laws are already on the books that require ISP’s to provide certain information at the request of law enforcement. Blog owners are probably looking at similar regulations in the not so distant future.