The Anthropology of Software
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The Anthropology of Software |
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March 21, 2008 Anonymous Posting is the Backbone of the JOS Forums
"Frankly if every anonymous post disappeared from the Joel on Software discussion group, the overall quality of the conversation would go up, way up, and the discussion would be way more interesting." I'm a fan of Joel's writings, but in this case he couldn't be more wrong. Funny thing is how he could start with Dave Winer's argument about personal blog comments (which I whole-heartedly agree with) and then draw the wrong conclusion about forum posts and have all of the resulting discussions fall completely into this thought groove. All of the discussion following Joel's post centered around "the problem" of anonymous posting, and the higher quality of a discussion limited to logged on posters. They also argued about whether mandated logons would be abused or be inconvenient and so forth, but few glimpsed the yawning chasm of irrational leap under this notion that anonymous posting hurts Joel's forums. Let's break this down in order to observe the thought groove in action:
Woops! The last leap is the unfounded one. Due to the sheer volume of comments weighing in and quibbling over trolls and spam, everyone ignored my feeble attempts (and those of a few others) to point out the importance of anonymous posts. That's groupthink when a contrary yet simple point cannot be heard over the din. So to get more facts I've gone ahead and taken a sample of 131 Joel On Software Discussion Group posts and broken them down according to whether they were anonymous or not. I used strict criteria to determine whether a poster is anonymous. If a logged out poster provides a protected e-mail link, he is not considered anonymous, even though there is no way a reader can identify him. Anonymous posts are strictly posts where the tagname is empty or plain text, i.e. no link, no protected e-mail button, and no logon checkmark. Feel free to e-mail me for the full data in XML format.
Wow, significantly more anonymous posts! And based on thread size (number of comments) the anonymous posts generate the same average interest as the others! If I included anonymous posters with only a protected e-mail button, the dominance of anonymous posting would have been even more clear. The anonymous posts are often generated by people who logon for other posts. Why are they anonymous for some and not for others? Obviously it is because some topics are different from others; some are better kept anonymous. Here are some examples of anonymous posts where I show the title of the post, the anonymous tagname the poster used and the number of comments generated. A lot of valuable anonymous posts give insights into goings on at work, e.g.
Another valuable category is those letting off steam or in turmoil:
People who understandably don't want to link themselves to a wish or self-judgement:
Also there are posters who want to share sensitive revenue information or Micro-ISV internals, and many other kinds of posts that absolutely should be anonymous so the poster can discuss the subject freely. It is also useful how the tagname can be used to set a frame of reference for the original poster who is effectively moderating the thread, e.g. "family IT person." You could argue that if you disallowed anonymous posting, then those with something valuable to say would step up and logon even though they might still use an anonymous tagname without a link. Adding inconvenience is a troubling and sensitive hot button issue in web sites, and would it actually serve the declared purpose if they are logged on and yet still essentially anonymous? Messing with such a large majority of the posting activity on the forums is also a big concern. Does a quieter forum continue to attract new readers and first time posters? For me, and for many like me, chiming in with personal experience is out of the question if I have to attach my identity to it for any google search to pull up! Yet it is a valuable contribution, in fact moreso because it is anonymous. So it is very interesting that the general consensus was that eliminating anonymous posting would improve the quality of the site's discussions when it really is a questionable conclusion. Now if this had been a discussion about the means of filtering spam and trolls by using logons or captcha to limit contributors, then it might have made sense to focus on anonymous posting as a problem (though that kind of site policy discussion is forbidden on the JOS forums). But it wasn't that at all. It was a discussion based on the idea that a user who wasn't willing to put his identity behind what he said online was not a valuable contributor to the discussion. This ignores the tremendous value of anonymous posting. The Joel On Software forums provide a free and high quality venue for posting both anonymously and not, depending on the context. It would be absolutely devastating to the forums if anonymous posting was disallowed. I think that when Joel said his forums would be better without anonymous posts he was failing to see that open forums serve a different purpose than personal blogs. One way to say it is that a blog is moderated by one person providing a certain consistency but also limited by that, while a forum offers a less directed but potentially fruitful gathering of many. Anonymous posting is a key feature of open forums. I'd like to see Joel acknowledge he was wrong on this, but since he cannot do it anonymously, I doubt he will.
note by original poster Ben Bryant, 21 Mar 2008 01:01:00 -0500
note by original poster Ben Bryant, 21 Mar 2008 12:45:00 -0500
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A recent example of thought grooves at work -- or groupthink -- was spawned by 
actually, the reason he won't respond is because he'll never read this. :) I just thought it was funny to end that way.
