It has nothing to do with anonymity. It has everything to do with the content on which people comment. For example, political articles are bound to bring in opposing viewpoints. And if you allow anyone to comment, you're bound to bring in a lot of people.
I'm convinced if you want to keep the level of discourse up, you can have a (mostly) homogeneous group of commenters and a large scale site or a small group of heterogeneous commenters, but you cannot have both scale and heterogeneity.
By charging your users to comment, you're probably going to reduce scale.
It's a great point that there aren't any obvious examples in the US of large heterogenous groups with good comments. That said I also am not aware of any attempt to do even Slashdot-like crowdsourced voting (including explanation of reasons for voting, meta-moderation) at scale, or to take the next step and provide a richer user experience to make it easy for users to be able to filter out what they don't want do see.
Comments
It has nothing to do with anonymity. It has everything to do with the content on which people comment. For example, political articles are bound to bring in opposing viewpoints. And if you allow anyone to comment, you're bound to bring in a lot of people.
I'm convinced if you want to keep the level of discourse up, you can have a (mostly) homogeneous group of commenters and a large scale site or a small group of heterogeneous commenters, but you cannot have both scale and heterogeneity.
By charging your users to comment, you're probably going to reduce scale.
It's a great point that there aren't any obvious examples in the US of large heterogenous groups with good comments. That said I also am not aware of any attempt to do even Slashdot-like crowdsourced voting (including explanation of reasons for voting, meta-moderation) at scale, or to take the next step and provide a richer user experience to make it easy for users to be able to filter out what they don't want do see.
it has a lot to do with anonymity. simply look at techcrunch and what happened overnight with real names- quite large and homogenous too.
From a publisher's point of view, it has a lot to do with anonymity. Ever try to block a determined troll?