Most media websites, blogs and discussion groups allow anonymous comments, where individuals can have their say without identifying themselves. Is this a healthy way to encourage free speech and robust debate — or an excuse that lets cowardly commentators rant and rave while hiding behind the screen of anonymity?

Here’s a different take on the anonymous comments issue:

http://www.salon.com/life/feature/2010/08/03/in_defense_of_anonymous_commenting

Great. It shows us what humanity is really like….as if we need to be reminded of that!

This topic isn’t going away. The clear trend is toward more moderation, removal of offensive comments, registration of commenters, etc. The alternative is a further coarsening of our culture. Who needs that?

Agreed, it’s definitely not going away.

Let’s just hope that the web moves forwards and adopts a more innovative system, such as ranking and credibility indexes that could somehow weed out the bad posts without further taking away what I see as a vital freedom, which is to share information without fearing for one’s own safety.

@heididietrich just pointed out changes in the comment section of hyperlocal Seattle neighborhood site MyBallard

They are using Disqus, which is a system I’ve seen adopted on many other sites as well. It allows users to flag and according to them, has a feature that helps weed out users that impersonate under many names in order to inflame a discussion.

This is what I want to see. More innovative solutions rather than throwing out the baby with the bath water and forcing everyone to show their papers when they register for a website.

“Tracy Record, West Seattle Blog: If they want to, they are certainly welcome to. I absolutely, vehemently, do not believe in requiring it. You are not required to identify yourself when speaking publicly in any venue or forum and I don’t believe you need to be required to do so when speaking online, either”.

Well, of course that’s wrong. As anyone who has ever addressed a city council meeting or a school board meeting knows, you identify yourself before rending your comments at that particular meeting.

But, here’s something I don’t think has been discussed: How can one be guilty of committing a virtual “personal” attack on a poster who is anonymous? How does someone, using a handle, lose standing in the community-at-large for being insulted online? There can be no libel since the true indentity of the poster is hidden from the public.

Defending the made-up persona of someone seems to be a task ill suited to the mandate of local newspapers. To the thinned skinned, any opposition to their viewpoint is an insult and/or personal attack. How can absolute boundaries be set when such things are constantly moving targets?

Does refereeing the discussion lead to better discourse? Can this be proven or is just subjective guessing?

Somewhere, as you read this, unnamed staff at some local newspaper are deciding for the rest of us, what is and what isn’t “appropriate”. How are these arbitors selected? What are their marching orders? How are they made responsible for their power to censor good ideas packaged in coarse vernacular?

Is it just the words that matter most or the thought process behind them?

I would like to advance the notion of comment sections being a profit center for newspapers.

I recently bantied about with a Seattle Times poster who scoffed at my suggestion that comment sections should be subscription only. You should pay to have your say, is my premise. The speech may be free but the platform and the larger audience for the speech costs money.

The poster had earlier admitted, per the article, that he didn’t look at any of the advertising and was just freeloading off of the paper. He said that if the comment section was subscription only, he would read another paper.

I told him that it was no threat for him to take his non-existent business elsewhere.

If folks want to vent and rant and spew, let them pony up to do it and then let ‘er rip. You want to raise the quality of the discourse, then put a small price tag on it and watch the better writers emerge to strut their stuff.

It’s worth a shot.

Besides, why do papers put the effort into comments? Altruism? Relevance in a changing culture? It can’t be “feedback” because some pretty terrific newspaper people wrote some absoluely amazing stuff before comment sections ever existed. They didn’t need no stinkin’ feedback. Is it that maybe they’ll get some spillover into advertising?

If that’s the case, then what happend to The Wall?

Maybe papers should inspire competition from it’s cadre of “citizen journalists” for a spot in actual newsprint. Would bloggers become subscribers if the best of their stuff appeared in a real newspaper? How many copies would they send back to Cedar Rapids (or where ever)?

Papers punish the bad but don’t reward the good. If it weren’t that way, would that be web 3.0?