Persistent identity is an important building block in community formation. Clay Shirky goes into some detail on this in "A Group is Its Own Worst Enemy" http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html
"If you were going to build a piece of social software to support large and long-lived groups, what would you design for? The first thing you would design for is handles the user can invest in. [...] It's pretty widely understood that anonymity doesn't work well in group settings, because "who said what when" is the minimum requirement for having a conversation. What's less well understood is that weak pseudonymity doesn't work well, either. Because I need to associate who's saying something to me now with previous conversations. The world's best reputation management system is right here, in the brain.[...] If you want a good reputation system, just let me remember who you are."
I am not sure what the problem is that you are trying to solve, but full anonymity will undoubtedly cause the HN community much more headache than whatever you believe is afflicting is now. Whether there is a "PG bias" or not, he is accountable for his words because they are associated in a persistent fashion with his login.
One final point, I don't know about a pg bias, but I certainly have a positive nickb bias, because he has submitted so many good articles, I will normally follow whatever he posts even if I am not thrilled about the title. Doesn't mean I vote him up no matter what, but making the submissions anonymous would remove an important signal/attribute.
I think you raise an interesting point. There are actually TWO problems here. One is that there is possibly a bias based on the content submitter/creator.
But the other is that, people who are followed will naturally get more votes, just because they get more views. Is that a bad thing? I dunno. But what if it got to a point where there were enough different people being followed that the only way onto the first page is by being one of them. That kindof sounds like a problem too.
I understand that some of Digg's changes relate to this second concern. Their issues (I'll admit to limited understanding, so feel free to correct me somebody) relate to their rating algorithm being linked to how 'popular' a contributer is. This naturally weights power users more and pushes their contributions to the front, where they get more views, more votes, and therefore more power.
My (similarly limited) understanding of the HN ranking system is that it's more a factor of time and votes - ie, the question of who contributed is not relevant to the ranking system, only to all of us users who decide which articles to read and vote on, which brings us back to the original question.
I like how this discussion has evolved away from "an interesting social experiment" to a look at how to best promote quality and diversity on HN.
I don't think the original question was identifying a problem and trying to solve it, but the points made here all seek to improve what's working already today.
Comments
Persistent identity is an important building block in community formation. Clay Shirky goes into some detail on this in "A Group is Its Own Worst Enemy" http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html
"If you were going to build a piece of social software to support large and long-lived groups, what would you design for? The first thing you would design for is handles the user can invest in. [...] It's pretty widely understood that anonymity doesn't work well in group settings, because "who said what when" is the minimum requirement for having a conversation. What's less well understood is that weak pseudonymity doesn't work well, either. Because I need to associate who's saying something to me now with previous conversations. The world's best reputation management system is right here, in the brain.[...] If you want a good reputation system, just let me remember who you are."
I am not sure what the problem is that you are trying to solve, but full anonymity will undoubtedly cause the HN community much more headache than whatever you believe is afflicting is now. Whether there is a "PG bias" or not, he is accountable for his words because they are associated in a persistent fashion with his login.
One final point, I don't know about a pg bias, but I certainly have a positive nickb bias, because he has submitted so many good articles, I will normally follow whatever he posts even if I am not thrilled about the title. Doesn't mean I vote him up no matter what, but making the submissions anonymous would remove an important signal/attribute.
I think you raise an interesting point. There are actually TWO problems here. One is that there is possibly a bias based on the content submitter/creator.
But the other is that, people who are followed will naturally get more votes, just because they get more views. Is that a bad thing? I dunno. But what if it got to a point where there were enough different people being followed that the only way onto the first page is by being one of them. That kindof sounds like a problem too.
I understand that some of Digg's changes relate to this second concern. Their issues (I'll admit to limited understanding, so feel free to correct me somebody) relate to their rating algorithm being linked to how 'popular' a contributer is. This naturally weights power users more and pushes their contributions to the front, where they get more views, more votes, and therefore more power.
My (similarly limited) understanding of the HN ranking system is that it's more a factor of time and votes - ie, the question of who contributed is not relevant to the ranking system, only to all of us users who decide which articles to read and vote on, which brings us back to the original question.
I like how this discussion has evolved away from "an interesting social experiment" to a look at how to best promote quality and diversity on HN.
I don't think the original question was identifying a problem and trying to solve it, but the points made here all seek to improve what's working already today.