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Option to allow anonymous commenting on a post

Maybe you want to let people give opinions without fear of judgment. Maybe you just want to allow silly confessions. As for me, back in the old days of livejournal, there was a whole subculture of submitting anonymous story prompts using the anon reply feature and other people writing those prompt fills (also anonymously) for fun. It died out as livejournal died, but it would be a fun medium to revive.


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Assuming this is something that could be toggled by the poster on a per-post basis, I think this sounds like it could be a lot of fun for smaller accounts. I definitely worry about it being a vector for harassment, however, and I could see it being unusable for anyone with a following over a certain size. 


For this to be implemented, I think it would need to be something that could also be turned off after a post was created, and a big switch to disable anonymous comments on all past posts would also be useful. (I'm envisioning a scenario where a user becomes a target of harassment, and the harassing users go back through their page to find old posts with anonymous comments turned on.) Additionally, the ability to fully delete anonymous comments under your posts would be good. 


16 people like this
Seconding this idea with jigs' suggestions. Anonymity can be fun, but it needs some controls in order to not become a vector for harassment. I'll also propose something similar to how Imzy did anonymity, where for every anonymous post you commented on, you were assigned a randomly generated anon name like AnonVioletLlama. (This was per-post - so on one anon post you would be AnonVioletLlama, and on another you would be AnonBlueBat.) This allowed for context to be kept in discussions between multiple anonymous users. Also, it would be helpful to be able to block people even if they're commenting anonymously - it wouldn't show you who the anon is, but it does at least give you some more control over your experience. Granted, you COULD hypothetically bypass this by using different pages to comment on an anon post - though you could tie anonymity identifiers to account rather than page? And hypothetically, you could figure out who an anon is by blocking them and seeing if a certain user disappears from view...

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Yesss this would be so fun, I love this idea and the suggestions from jgs and Bazelgeuse-apologist.

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