Research shows that if you remove anonymity, you won’t hear from most of your readers

gigaom reporting:
Many media outlets seem to believe that by forcing readers to use their real identities, they will solve the problem of bad comments — but in reality, all they are doing is making it less likely that most of their readers will ever respond to their content...
..
Many online publishers and journalists believe that there’s a simple solution to the problem of internet comments — the trolls, the flame-wars, and so on — and that is to require that people use “real” identities, usually by forcing them to login with Facebook or some other external service. But as I’ve argued a number of times, doing this only appears to solve the problem, while creating an even larger one: namely, that by removing the option to be anonymous, media companies will never hear from a majority of their readers.

...As Livefyre points out, there are a number of ways that sites can cut down on bad behavior, including pre-moderation. But the best way — as long-time blogger Anil Dash pointed out in a post in 2011 — is to actually engage in the comments with members of your reader community, and even set up ways for them to help you moderate. Some new-media sites such as the crowdfunded De Correspondent in the Netherlands see their commenters as partners rather than antagonists, or use tools like Gawker’s Kinja platform to make it easier for readers to become contributing members of the community....
http://gigaom.com/2014/08/27/research-shows-that-if-you-remove-anonymity-you-wont-hear-from-most-of-your-readers/