Your point about valuing an opinion more highly from a person who is known to be accurate on a subject is valid. In the arguments case, I think it's easy enough to follow an A/B conversation, even without names.
In the first case though, it still seems that the majority of comments here are not so specialized as to require the posters identity to determine if the content is accurate enough or not. Ideally, if you could not judge the accuracy of the comment on your own you would leave it alone. There would be enough others that could judge it impartially that the comment itself would get voted up or down appropriately.
There's still the matter of confusion when [name withheld] is responding to [name withheld], though -- and for that reason alone, I'm afraid I have to disagree with your suggestion.
It's also the case that sometimes I'm not entirely sure what someone's trying to say unless and until I look at it within the context of his or her earlier comments in the same discussion. If I can't match someone's comment with the context of previous comments, I sometimes can't tell if they're being sarcastic, accidentally saying "can" instead of "can't", and so on.
I judge by the content of a comment rather than by name, and I agree that's a good way to do it, but I don't think that needs to be enforced by withholding information from us.
Comments
Your point about valuing an opinion more highly from a person who is known to be accurate on a subject is valid. In the arguments case, I think it's easy enough to follow an A/B conversation, even without names.
In the first case though, it still seems that the majority of comments here are not so specialized as to require the posters identity to determine if the content is accurate enough or not. Ideally, if you could not judge the accuracy of the comment on your own you would leave it alone. There would be enough others that could judge it impartially that the comment itself would get voted up or down appropriately.
There's still the matter of confusion when [name withheld] is responding to [name withheld], though -- and for that reason alone, I'm afraid I have to disagree with your suggestion.
It's also the case that sometimes I'm not entirely sure what someone's trying to say unless and until I look at it within the context of his or her earlier comments in the same discussion. If I can't match someone's comment with the context of previous comments, I sometimes can't tell if they're being sarcastic, accidentally saying "can" instead of "can't", and so on.
I judge by the content of a comment rather than by name, and I agree that's a good way to do it, but I don't think that needs to be enforced by withholding information from us.
You could simply name all respondents by their response position in the thread, first is person1 (hope that's not too limiting!):
person1:yay person2:people here like intelligent comments person3:go to digg if you want to yay all the time person1:yay
And have an option to reveal names and/or show them on the mouseover link for personX.