The Impact of Anonymity in Online Communities

The scale of participation on social news sites has challenged community managers, leaving them unable to detect and remove all inappropriate content by hand. Automated insult and profanity detection systems have helped, but have failed to address the problem of why this content is contributed in the first place. That is, what implications do interface design choices have on the content being generated? One such design choice is whether or not a site allows anonymous comments. What impact does allowing anonymity have on the quality or quantity of participation on a site? This case study analyses the impact of anonymity on a technology social news site, TechCrunch.com. TechCrunch is ideal for this study in that it underwent a shift from allowing anonymous comments (using the Disqus commenting platform) to disallowing them (using the Facebook commenting platform) in March of 2011. We compare the quality of anonymous and real identity comments through measures of reading level, relevance to the target article, negativity and presence of swear words and anger words. We couple this qualitative analysis with a quantitative analysis of the change in participation to give a complete picture of the impact of anonymity in this online community, with the end goal of informing design on similar social news sites.