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Comment by frozen_tomato | Hacker News Reader

I wholeheartedly disagree with this, what you're essentially describing is just watered down identity. The whole point of the value of anonymity is that all posts are equal.

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This is unrealistic and won't work in practice. If all posts are equal then all posts are equally worthless. It's a sad but basic truth that we need identity and ability to accumulate reputation to be able to hold a meaningful, informative conversation. If everyone is fully anonymous (in a stateless sense), then everyone is basically a "random internet dude".

> "It's a sad but basic truth that we need identity and ability to accumulate reputation to be able to hold a meaningful, informative conversation."

Not true. We do not need to accumulate reputation to have a meaningful conversation. For example, I've seen informative conversations on Secret with the only identity mechanism being the icon they're assigned (presumably at random per thread).

Edit: I also don't recall usenet having a mechanism that 'kept score'. Slightly before my time so I may be wrong about this.

But you have an identity mechanism; even if it is per thread, it allows you to attribute a collection of writings to a single author.

I'm not talking about "keeping score" in a system. I'm talking about the ways human handle identity and associate properties with objects. I may not see your karma, but I see your nick. I don't know your name, or anything about your life, but I know your nick is a reference a person somewhere. If I keep seeing comments written by user amirmc that stand out because of their clear argumentation and reasonable tone, I start to recognize the author and accumulate a feeling of respect. So the next time user amirmc disagrees with me, I treat the arguments with little more care and consideration than usual, because I recognize author as a reasonable person.

This is a natural mechanism of human interaction. My point is that if we reject the entire concept of identity, we will lose a lot of information vital to evaluating an argument.

Think of books, though. They're the best available counterpoint to what you're saying. People don't necessarily care about the author of a book, but they do care about the content of the book and its ability to piece together a larger idea.

Within forum post culture there's a built-in tendency for content to be fast and disposable. This makes identity relatively more valuable, because it allows a stream of posts to be put in context, just like with a book.

On the other hand, I might well not bother with a book unless I know the author of good. I'll almost certainly prefer a book with a known good author over one without. This is just to prevent my time from being wasted, to maintain a decent signal to noise ratio.

Not really. I might not know the author, but I rarely read completely random books. Most of the times I read things recommended by other people. The context is not in the book, it's in the way I found out about it.

The problem of pages like HN and SO is the artificial interaction, which the voting generates.

Yes, they probably can't find out that the 10k-karma-guy is Jack Miller, but all readers of his posts will be influenced by the 10k-karma.

HN hides the karma mostly. But SO shoves it right in your face, that some gold-20k-guy wrote an answer.

Also people will vote stuff up because they like it. This may be because it's high quality, but it doesn't have to.

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