A neat finding about pseudonymous commenters—and why you should question it

By Maggie Koerth-Baker at 11:37 am Tuesday, Jan 17

Here's some interesting data that I would like to believe is true—mainly because it matches up with what I've experienced here at BoingBoing. Many of you use some kind of pseudonym in the comments, whether it's first-name-only, an Internet handle, or a completely fake name. My experience here has taught me that, despite this, you all are perfectly capable of writing fascinating, informative, worthwhile comments and having good discussions that add to the usefulness of the original post. (That doesn't always happen, as I'm sure Antinous will attest. But it happens often enough that I talk y'all up to other journalists and bloggers who are nervous about having a comments section on their site.)
After an analysis of 500,000 comments, Disqus now says that pseudonymous commenters are the most prolific commenters—and that the quality of their comments are actually a little better than the quality of comments from people who logged in through Facebook, using their real names.
If this is correct, it's pretty cool. It might not be correct, though. So do think about that before you start touting this as absolute fact in the #nymwars. For instance, the key measure of quality here is whether or not a post generates "likes" and replies, and, if so, how many. Another thing I've learned from watching the comments on BoingBoing: Likes and replies are not necessarily indicative of actual quality. Likewise, the measures that branded a post as "low quality" seem designed to really only address the worst-of-the-worst: Comments that get flagged, deleted, or marked as spam. There's a lot of room left over for comments that are low quality, but not outright trolling/spam.
Another issue: "Real identity," in this case, means "logged in through Facebook. I can think of several of you, off the top of my head, who I know use real names in the comments, but don't log in through a social media site.
Finally, I can't find anything about where the 500,000 comments were pulled from. Depending on the site(s), this may or may not be a representative sample. After all, the site you're posting on—what the content is, what the community is like, how well moderated it is—probably does a lot to influence how you behave there.
So, basically, what I'm saying is this: Disqus has published an infographic confirming my personal beliefs. Hooray! The problem is, I don't really feel like I can trust it.
Image: jack masque, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from speculummundi's photostream

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