Yesterday Blizzard decided it has had enough potty mouth at their forums they're going to do something about it! In a near-future version of their forum, posters cannot be anonymous. Accounts are tied to your RealID which Blizzard had previously linked to the billing information for their subscribed games, most notably World of Warcraft. In other words, to play their games you have to be billed for them. To be billed you have to have your billing information added to your Battle.Net account. To get into their forum you use your Battle.Net credentials. There is no way to post using an anonymous account.
This move is of course unpopular with Blizzard's customers. The announcement has broken their record for longest thread on their forum (1200+ pages as of this writing). This is significant news not because Blizzard has no right to do this, but because they have chosen to risk so much of their business while simultaneously ignoring the Internet Zeitgeist. Privacy and security are of paramount concern at this time and for good reason.
The announcement has been slashdotted and reported at other IT and gaming blogs sparking a fresh discussion about anonymity, privacy, defamation, libel and the Internet. Recently AT&T and Facebook have come under fire for doing similar things with customer data. I wanted to mention it here in light of recent flaps over publishing real names. Some of you were very interested in that and I think what was said nicely reflects the larger debate even if the circumstances are somewhat different.
I prefer an Internet with optional anonymity. Yes, it comes with caveats that intelligent people must accept. There is definitely more vitriol in forums, blogs and chats. Jerry Holkins of Penny Arcade best described the average Internet forum as a "crap spigot with the valve snapped off." And there are sometimes problems with data quality. It's one of the reasons Wikipedia isn't exactly the most reliable source for information on a given encyclopedia entry. The whole thing is written by a discordant mob.
Security and privacy aside, anonymity invites a kind of honesty that we need, whether we're talking about Mormonism, politics or game features. Without it we return to the bland but civil discourse of chatting among mixed company at a party. There most of us are reserved and resist introducing subjects that would be off-putting to other guests. It is difficult to learn what people are really thinking. On my Facebook account I seldom post anything other than links to interesting but mostly neutral curiosities I find. Anything else would drive away half my sensitive friends and family members whom I have "friended".