Maybe it's not!
One of the most distinctive features of 2ch is the complete freedom of anonymous posting. This is a large departure from most English language internet forums which require some form of registration, usually coupled with email verification for further identification of an individual. On 2ch, a name field is available but seldom used. Entering your name in the field, unless you do so with an obvious lack of purpose, would identify you as a newbie who doesn't understand the forum, an administrator, or someone attempting to be a Web celebrity.
The reason for allowing anonymous posting was given in an interview with the founder of 2ch in the Japan Media Review:
Q: Why did you decide to use perfect anonymity, not even requiring a user name?
A: Because delivering news without taking any risk is very important to us. There is a lot of information disclosure or secret news gathered on Channel 2. Few people would post that kind of information by taking a risk. Moreover, people can only truly discuss something when they don't know each other.
If there is a user ID attached to a user, a discussion tends to become a criticizing game. On the other hand, under the anonymous system, even though your opinion/information is criticized, you don't know with whom to be upset. Also with a user ID, those who participate in the site for a long time tend to have authority, and it becomes difficult for a user to disagree with them. Under a perfectly anonymous system, you can say, "it's boring," if it is actually boring. All information is treated equally; only an accurate argument will work.
Wow, you know Japanese 2ch. Japanese 2ch came to my mind a bit but I didn't think you were mentioning to it.
Thank you for your quotation. I didn't know it's described in Wikipedia.
Do you think anonymous BBS works fine when people discuss openly or frankly? I've seen discussion at 2ch being ruined horribly so many times by childish, cruel comments (or people). It sometimes becomes very cold place such like the Antarctic Ocean. (Sorry for having forgot telling you I'm Japanese.)
I know thread at Prince.org can be cruel place as well. However, I see differences. In the thread at Prince.org, you can see who talks what. In the thread at 2ch, you can't know it. As far as I see both, the difference with feelings that derives from this difference is big.
At Prince.org, you can recognize the existence of specific person behind another computer. At the thread at 2ch, you can't know the population there to begin with and it sometimes makes you think, a lot of or all, people there are attacking you when seeing just several rude comments given to you. I mean you easily fail to know whom you are talking to. Showing ID does not help much because it changes when ISP re-assigns different IP address. (Of course, it seldom happens in a short term. However, the longer continues the thread, the more times changes the IP address.)
I understand the reason why you suggest to use the tripcode. I hope it will works fine.
Anyway, what I tell here is just what I experienced at 2ch. I know the environment is quite different and think similar disaster is unlikely brought here. (Millions of people access 2ch a day and it makes situation more serious.)
PS How can I attach the tripcode here?
Okay, your points upon taking 2ch style taken.
Although talking logically through the whole flow while adapting to changing context is very important for discussion in many senses, trying to keep it can be obstacle for some people to move to the next step of discussion. For them, anonymous posting is easy to handle to place themselves into the new context. The balance seems to be important.
Does my expression make sense?
Indeed :D I guess the most confusing for the novice user is the way old comments are hidden.
test
Test of SecureTripcode.
hello
I may not be Rob Liefeld but I can hide my feet behind stuff.
bd's doing a test for WakabaMark format now.
Does anyone know how is this called Wakaba-Mark?
"Wakaba" means young leaves if it's a Japanese word.
I'll add 'em.