The Virtues of Moderation

3. Identity The final community characteristic is the distinction between identity and anonymity. At one extreme, participants in an online community could be completely identified, bringing with them a complete biography of their online and offline lives. At the other, they could be completely anonymous. (151) Compare Google+, which launched with a strict, stringently enforced, and much-criticized "real names" policy, (152) with 4 chan, where "most posts ... are disconnected from any identity." (153) There are many gradations in between. (154) Participants could have identities that mostly match their offline lives, but in which the details are potentially questionable, as in an online dating service where participants sometimes lie about their height. (155) They could have rich and persistent but avowedly fictitious identities, as in virtual worlds where they play the same avatar thirty hours a week for years. They could have stable but thin identities, as on a discussion board that uses pseudonyms and keeps users' real names and email addresses secret. They could have thin identities purely as a matter of convention, as in some blogs' comment sections, where a commenter can pick a fresh display name with each comment. Participants could even have one level of identifiability at the infrastructure level (supply a valid email address to sign up) but a different level at the content layer (that email address is hidden from other participants). Whatever its nature, the most important role of identity is creating stable reputations through time so that others can link past behavior to a present identity. (156) All four verbs of moderation can tap into identity. Exclusion absolutely depends on it; without identity, the distinction between "outsiders" and "insiders" collapses. You can identify the unwanted outsiders and blacklist them or identify the wanted insiders and whitelist them, but both versions require some notion of identity. (157) As anyone who has moderated a blog's comments can testify, this is a huge problem for communities that are open to new and unknown members from the Internet at large. There is often no way to tell that a "new" commenter is actually an old and well-known miscreant, back from a ban for another round of malice. (158) In theory, pricing could be identity-free--transactional and transitory. But in practice, any explicit pricing system will depend on some non-trivial identity infrastructure, such as a credit card processor. Having a credit card number is not necessarily a guarantee of anything, but it is a significant identity hurdle, and one that many online businesses, for example, use to create some minimal level of accountability among users. More complex pricing builds on persistent identity. "For $10, you can post as often as you want for a year" requires a notion of "you" that will be stable for a year. Organization can both piggyback on and produce identity. Filtering and deletion both often treat the identity of an author as a significant data point. Most anti-spam systems, for example, use whitelisting to allow trusted senders' emails to bypass the spam check altogether. In reputation systems, participants provide annotations on each other's actions, and those annotations become part of one's community identity. (159) eBay's feedback system, in which buyers and sellers use feedback left by others to decide whom to trust, is an example of reputational annotation. Slashdot's multi-level moderation system has several variables that use others' ratings of one's actions to decide how much power one will have to moderate in the future. (160) It is well known that identifiability plays a significant role in setting social norms. (161) Persistent reputations make it possible for participants to build credibility as respected elders within the community. (162) They make it possible to hold participants accountable for their actions, enabling the effective monitoring and graduated sanctions beloved by commons scholars. …