I think this makes it clear that people are deliberately being anonymous rather than carrying over old internet habits.
Also I think there’s a possibility of information leakage if someone tries to be too cutesy with their pseudonyms. Eg, fluttershy_forever might lead someone to look for similar names in the My Little Pony forums, say, where the user might be more willing to “out” themselves than if they were writing a critical piece on the EA forum.
This is even more true for narrower interests. My Dominion username is a Kafka+Murakami reference, for example.
There’s also a possibility of doxing in the other direction, where eg, someone may not want their EA Forum opinions to be associated with bad fanfiction they wrote when they were 16.
The deliberate anonymity point is a good one. The ideal would be a distinct anonymous username the person doesn’t use elsewhere, but this particular issue isn’t very important in any case.
I think this makes it clear that people are deliberately being anonymous rather than carrying over old internet habits.
Also I think there’s a possibility of information leakage if someone tries to be too cutesy with their pseudonyms. Eg, fluttershy_forever might lead someone to look for similar names in the My Little Pony forums, say, where the user might be more willing to “out” themselves than if they were writing a critical piece on the EA forum.
This is even more true for narrower interests. My Dominion username is a Kafka+Murakami reference, for example.
There’s also a possibility of doxing in the other direction, where eg, someone may not want their EA Forum opinions to be associated with bad fanfiction they wrote when they were 16.
The deliberate anonymity point is a good one. The ideal would be a distinct anonymous username the person doesn’t use elsewhere, but this particular issue isn’t very important in any case.
You could write that the username is deliberately anonymous in your Forum bio.