Washingtonpost.com Wants Identities of Posters 336
mytrip recommends a News.com account of a panel discussion in which the Washington Post's online executive editor Jim Brady argued against anonymity on his site. He's welcome to try to carve out a space for civilized discourse, but it seems that he can't help alienating the Net-savvy whenever he opens his mouth to speak of it. "... he would like to see a technology that could identify people who violate site standards — and if need be — automatically kick them off for good. ... Brady also lamented that closing user accounts doesn't keep bad eggs off a site. They just come back and create new ones ... Brady believes that in the next five years people will be required to identify themselves in some way at many sites. 'I don't know whether we do it with a credit card number, a driver's license or passport ...'"
Re:Good for the gander (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Yeah, great (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Good for the gander (Score:2, Informative)
Re:It would make Slashdot polls scientific finally (Score:1, Informative)
There is also the problem of getting people to vote honestly. This is of course a problem with offline polls, too. (Conceivably, though, people take online polls less seriously than offline polls, and thus lie more frequently...)
Moderation is the only way (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Yeah, great (Score:5, Informative)
BTW, those bastards are letting the googlebot freely roam their pages, but when a user follows the resulting link, he's slapped with the registration page. It's dishonest if you ask me. I don't even click on a New York Times link anymore. Mind you, I know I can just select the googlebot in my User Agent Switcher and get right in, but I don't need them to get the news, and I want them to know that.
Re:Yeah, great (Score:5, Informative)
A) The newspaper under discussion here is the Washington Post, not the New York Times.
B) The Times dropped their registration required policy some time ago.