Walled gardens are probably necessary for honest discussion.
If everything is open and tied to a meatspace identity, contributors have to constantly mind what they can and can’t say and how what they’re saying could be misinterpreted, either by an outsider who isn’t familiar with local jargon or by a genuinely hostile element (and we’ve certainly had many of those) bent on casting LW or that contributor in the worst possible light.
If everything is open but not tied to an identity, there’s no status payoff for being right that’s useful in the real world—or if there is, it comes at the risk of being doxed, and it’s generally not worth it.
The ideal would probably be a walled garden with no real name policy. I’ve considered writing a site along these lines for some time, with many walled gardens and individually customizable privacy settings like Facebook, but I’m not sure what model to base the posting on—that is, should it look like a forum, like Facebook/Reddit, like Tumblr, or what?
Walled gardens are probably necessary for honest discussion.
If everything is open and tied to a meatspace identity, contributors have to constantly mind what they can and can’t say and how what they’re saying could be misinterpreted, either by an outsider who isn’t familiar with local jargon or by a genuinely hostile element (and we’ve certainly had many of those) bent on casting LW or that contributor in the worst possible light.
If everything is open but not tied to an identity, there’s no status payoff for being right that’s useful in the real world—or if there is, it comes at the risk of being doxed, and it’s generally not worth it.
The ideal would probably be a walled garden with no real name policy. I’ve considered writing a site along these lines for some time, with many walled gardens and individually customizable privacy settings like Facebook, but I’m not sure what model to base the posting on—that is, should it look like a forum, like Facebook/Reddit, like Tumblr, or what?