The two papers by Donath et. al. and Bernstein et. al. study the implications of anonymity in online communities.The first paper studies how user anonymity and deception can lead to antisocial behavior and loss of credibility. In contrast, the later displays how some communities thrive despite extreme anonymity and ephemerality.
Dolan et. al. describe with examples, how identity deception and anonymity cause biases and anti-social behavior on Usenet newsgroups. They argue that identity plays a valuable role when people are looking for credible information and advice. The paper goes on the discuss the effect of various assessment and conventional signals such as email domain, language, signature which will be discussed in the last paragraph of this review as comparison points with the second paper. The second half of the first paper addresses anti-social behavior on Usenet. Although the examples provide a detailed explanation of different behaviors such as trolling, concealment, impersonation the examples seem highly case/user specific. For example, there is no quantifiable way to determine whether the question asked by the college junior in “Rec.motorcycles” is actually a troll or not. How would you measure impersonation, trolling or category deception? Further, what is perceived as anti-social by one group of users, might not be considered as that by a different group. One important research direction would be to just analyze the sensitivity of different communities towards anti-social behavior based on user profile distribution such as gender, location, age group, lifespan, and expertise.
Bernstein’s work studies how the design elements of rapid content deletion and complete anonymity drive the user behavior on 4chan. Regarding ephemerality, the authors argue that the fast-moving board /b encourages users to rapidly generate creative content and increase community participation. It retains “fresh” content on the front board /b. This prompts the question: whether such temporality works only because of the anti-social, meme-oriented nature of /b board and whether it might be discouraging in forums with higher community standards. This question persists when analyzing the anonymity implications. Authors claim to observe increased dis-inhibition, more intimate and open communication and masking of failure. Again, in this case, the success of the anonymity feature appears highly content driven. Taking examples from other communities like Quora, responders rarely stay anonymous while answering intellectual, philosophical or non-personal content while they prefer to answer anonymously while recounting a personal, embarrassing, or alarming content. As a further research contribution, it would be interesting to observe how anonymity and ephemerality influence different types of virtual communities serving various purposes.
Coming back to what I found as the most interesting concept in the first paper (assessment and conventional signals) there are some parallels between Usenet and 4chan even with the extreme perception of anonymity. For this, it is important to understand the difference between “anonymity” and “identity”. While anonymity is discouraged on Usenet and highly valued on 4chan (due to the content), they both use same assessment signals for establishing identity, either group or individual. Usenet users are observed to use specific language and signature cues similar to the use of slang and “triforcing” on 4chan. Both sets of users practice posting identifying photos (time stamped on 4chan) to establish credibility. Does that indicate that users value identity more than anonymity? How would the community react to an anonymous and a non-anonymous user with different community status or identity?
In summary, I believe that to observe the complete effect of anonymity and deception, across social network study needs to be performed considering the context(content) of communication and signaling behavior.
