Anonymous comments have value
I love anonymous commenting because it’s from the heart that people speak rather than from their pedestal. By this I meran that when you make an anonymous comment you don’t need to know anything. You can say what you feel and you’re genuine. Of course that feeling might last ten seconds and you regret it.The point is that you can speak as part of the uninformed mass, you can afford to be wrong and your sentiments reality the feelings of the crowd.
The crowd is important. Understand the crowd and you understand how to please them. You see worries of anonmity, worries of stalking, feelings that the whole community you need is within three miles of where you live. Those comments have value.
To be attacked both as an individual or a community doesn’t matter. That’s where dialogue and conversation come into play. That’s when we get to see each other’s points of views and it may result in friendships, or the disagreement doesn’t continue. We are the privileged with our blogs and our advanced mobile phones.
For marketers and opinion hunters though it’s great. I read this post and I find myself disagreeing that anonimity is a bad thing. Everyone that comments on this blog lacks anonmity, at least for me because I know them on twitter or other websites. I lack anonimity too.
I use a nickname online but within a minute of searching you’ll find who I am. The effect of that is quite concrete. Whenever I post on a blog, a newspaper or anywhere online I have a personality I want to show. I have a reputation I have to attempt not to damage too seriously. That’s because we all have our own egos to feed. I don’t mean that in the self loving sense that those dissenting voices use against the event and against twitter.
I mean that I want to be taken seriously. I want to be valued. As a result if I flame someone who is part of twitter there is fallout I would immediately suffer from. I’ve seen it happen to others in forums, on twitter and in a number of places.
Great Post. I am still in two minds. Defining anonymous is the problem, I know you and the others – it's not about that really, it's those people that simply spread hate and use names that are never seen again. Maybe we should all have Open ID anon identities too!
Of course, if you're being harrased that's something different, at least by requiring an e-mail address you reduce the chances, and if you use disqus you can probably block them more easily.
But then again a french blogger friend of mine wrote a blog post about that topic yesterday. She addressed the issue of the person who was being targeted and how her life in a few years may be affected.
Hate is something that we find everywhere though. It's just a matter of seeing whether there's any substance to the hate that's being spread or not. There are a few things we would all like to complain about but rather than be direct about them we try, through reasoning to demonstrate why another point of view might be more beneficial.