/puts on tin foil hat

I’ve not been here long. I came with the big toss up from ARSTechnia. When they deemed that blocking ads was somehow stealing from them, I granted them their wish and left both that site and Reddit who is also owned by Conde Nash. I feel all the pressure to present that side of the issue came from on high.

While I haven’t and probably won’t register, I do always give a nick to those that agree/disagree know they are talking to the same poster, whether we see eye to eye or not.

One of the reasons I have stayed is the polices in place here. In today’s trace everything said on the net mentality of government, I’m not sure I want to give out addresses and at least would like to think they gonna have to work a smidgen to get that info rather than me hand it to them on a plate. It’s not that I am up to anything in the sense of wishing and physically doing some one harm, it’s the looking over your shoulder that gives me the willies. I keep feeling like we are sliding towards Nazism with our present directions.

So I support the Anonymous posts. Like others, I would like to know that whom I think a troll, is really just one and not many expressing the same idea. If it is many, then maybe my viewpoint on some issue is wrong and I need to reconsider my stance. If it is a single individual trying to sound like several, that gives validation to my thought.

Again, this is just my opinions and I am sure the rest of the community will have theirs.

I like posting anonymously simply because registration is annoying. I’ve had to register for hundreds and hundreds of sites over the years, usually just to post one or two comments, and it’s not worth it anymore.

It’s not worth it to fill out all the required fields with bogus information. It’s not worth checking the email account I use for spam purposes to find the verification mail. It’s not worth writing down the username and password, which because of unique constraints, will be different from every other site I’ve ever signed up for. It’s not worth looking the username and password up again the next time I want to comment because my cookies have been cleared. Single sign-on solutions may have solved this, but they were a solution nobody wanted.

When a site’s registration is too annoying, I just won’t bother commenting. Luckily, Techdirt doesn’t annoy me, so they get to bask in the glorious genius of the comments that I do supply.

I often find I want to contribute something (some personal experience or knowledge of a topic or issue) on comments at sites but find the demand to register too much bother when simply wanting to add some small part to a conversation.

What would it mean if I did, and used some free throwaway email address to register with? Nothing, no proof of ID or assurance that I’m not a spammy scum sucker.

Demanding registration does not avoid anonymity, it’s just a barrier that requires contributors care more than momentarily about submitting. It’s a jdgement call if that’s worth anything.

Considering the way I’ve seen registered users behave on various blogs or message boards, I don’t see how anonymous posters are the bane of internet discussion.

Anon is a fast way for interested users to join a discussion, and whether or not that gets abused is no different from any other tool.

i miss TAM. he went off at half-term and never came back.

it is too much work for me.

That said, I only post under known coward, to have the sense of some constancy, but i get the idea of true anonymity, which our founding fathers supported. They also supported rum running, and other terrorist acts against the british, so they were just a bunch of outlaw ruffians anyway.

Now as a Federal prosecutor those kind of remarks could be career limiting. But as an anony mouse. I would be safe from the hackles of Ed Meeese limiting my career to cleaning pornographic statues.

Besides any idiot can post as known coward, not just this one