I’m not sure how many of you have had to deal with online communities, but one of the things holding them back definitely seems to be that a certain segment of people seem to be far more willing to be… unpleasant, when they feel anonymous. Spam is another branch in the same family, if the people sending all those e-mails, or running the bots which spam blogs and public forums actually knew the people using the forums/e-mail/etc, you can bet they’d think twice before they ran amok.
What brought this on is the following website: Someone keeps stealing my letters…
It’s pretty frustrating, there seems to be a high number of people who exist simply to try and mess up what other people are doing… I very nearly had a nifty sentence before someone came in and decided to wreck it. In fridges with more than say 20 people, it’s impossible to write anything at all.
This is great! I really like how it is anonymous and yet people’s personalities come through anyway. It’s exactly the type of thing that the Internet allows that is totally and completely different from any we could do without it.