Draconian Moderation Practices

Hard to believe that some people are still whining about my public disapproval of anonymity and pseudonymity in the Moot and my newfound quickness to moderate comments there.

Look, I actually wrote a dissertation about privacy and well understand the necessity for a thriving public sphere in general for secrecy (secret ballots, for example), anonymity (whistleblower protections, for example), pseudonymity (in spaces devoted as this one is not, primarily, to devil's advocacy, emotional venting for persons other than the proprietor, and so on).

But I really must remind you all that I blog for my own purposes -- to clarify my thinking in real time on issues that concern me, to ridicule ridiculous things that annoy me, to solicit conversation that will enrich my thinking on my terms. And I happen to have found that anonymity/pseudonymity lowers signal/noise in a blog with low readership such as this, that a tent big enough to include the loons and the stoopid (whether of the futurological or the wingnut varieties) quickly becomes a tent in which one finds little but the loons and the stoopid. Meanwhile, it is enormously difficult for me actually to track positions in a coherent conversational way when people adopt more than one handle or each other's handles willy nilly and so on.

My purposes are simply not served by any of that, and that's all I need to say to justify the practice.

My blog, my purposes, my rules. That really is the end of it.