> A true "psuedonym" would provide you with insulation, but would follow you everywhere and you would only get one.
I don't see a big advantage to this, or at least, prefer communities where it's unnecessary. Why do you need information about how someone conducts themselves elsewhere on the net? Imo, if an online community (like any community) is functioning well, its members develop a familiarity with each other based on internal interactions.
For example, in its heydey, I knew all the regular kuro5hin posters by their k5 pseudonyms, and had positive and negative impressions of them based entirely on their k5 posting. Same with the mailing lists I'm on, the smaller (non-Reddit-sized) forums I post on, etc. Knowing external information about what they post on Slashdot or LKML or Usenet doesn't really seem necessary, and tracking people cross-websites like that even seems a bit creepy/stalkerish (unless they themselves link to their own activity elsewhere). Heck, I didn't even care if someone was a troll on Slashdot, so long as their posting on k5 was interesting.
I sort of like that one-reputation-per-community model. It does require communities that are actually communities, though, and have regulars who recognize each other. Gigantic communities with tens of thousands of transient commenters aren't really communities, so run into more problems.
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> A true "psuedonym" would provide you with insulation, but would follow you everywhere and you would only get one.
I don't see a big advantage to this, or at least, prefer communities where it's unnecessary. Why do you need information about how someone conducts themselves elsewhere on the net? Imo, if an online community (like any community) is functioning well, its members develop a familiarity with each other based on internal interactions.
For example, in its heydey, I knew all the regular kuro5hin posters by their k5 pseudonyms, and had positive and negative impressions of them based entirely on their k5 posting. Same with the mailing lists I'm on, the smaller (non-Reddit-sized) forums I post on, etc. Knowing external information about what they post on Slashdot or LKML or Usenet doesn't really seem necessary, and tracking people cross-websites like that even seems a bit creepy/stalkerish (unless they themselves link to their own activity elsewhere). Heck, I didn't even care if someone was a troll on Slashdot, so long as their posting on k5 was interesting.
I sort of like that one-reputation-per-community model. It does require communities that are actually communities, though, and have regulars who recognize each other. Gigantic communities with tens of thousands of transient commenters aren't really communities, so run into more problems.