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<\/a>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.<\/p>\n
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?<\/strong><\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n First the setup:<\/p>\n The idea was to create a space where you could discuss things without hurting your only identity and not another 4chan<\/a>.<\/p>\n Two weeks later, how did it develop?<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n That’s on a forum that typical deletes less then one post per thread and very rarely whole thread, mostly in connection with piracy.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n\n
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