patrick.net

I appreciated your suggestion and I did try making all commentary completely anonymous for a while, but it was disturbing, like having a conversation in a dark room, where everyone has the same voice. Hard to keep things straight in your head. At least at first, and then after a while you can kinda tell just from spelling and comment content who is probably who.

And there is some pleasure in being able to connect a comment with a history, even if it's the history of an anonymous person on the internet. It feels like more of a community with user names.

I am working on a base level kind of automated moderation, using a pattern recognition system which can classify comments into spam, personal attacks, and acceptable. Not sure it will really work though, since machines are generally not as smart as people, yet.