On the ideal of real names on story comments

March 23, 2009 by Kurt
Filed under: commenting 
Joel Kramer

Joel Kramer

Last week, the Nieman Journalism Lab featured a piece by Joel Kramer, former editor of the Minneapolis Star Tribune and founder of MinnPost.com. Buried deep into the piece, Kramer writes this of reader comments on his site: “Those who want to leave a comment must register, and their full real names are attached to their comments.”

There is no doubt that signed comments — rather than anonymous — would elevate the level of discourse on our web sites. A segment on WNYC’s “On the Media” last week even taught us the name for “how cruel people can get, given a little anonymity on the Internet. It’s called ‘online disinhibition effect.’”

Kramer’s site isn’t the only one that says it requires real names for reader comments. Former Gatehouse Media digital publishing director Howard Owens requires them on his blog. One of my readers noted in an earlier post that the Downtown St. Louis Residents Association uses software called Disqus (and Facebook Connect) to require real names. The Nashua Telegraph web site also uses Disqus.

In spite of that, I haven’t been able to figure this out: How, really, do you require real names? Even Facebook can’t prove I’m not who I say I am, if I’m required to register there. When Howard Owens and I exchanged comments about this on his blog, he acknowledged that it would be tough for a large-volume site to guard against fake names.

I asked MinnPost.com how they do it.

“We ask people to register using their real names and do a little spot-checking if the name looks suspicious to one of the comment moderators or to someone on the staff,” said Laurie Kramer, in charge of membership, outreach and special events. “We’ve talked about ways to verify names but haven’t come up with any system that we like.”

MinnPost.com has volunteer moderators who review all their comments. Kramer said MinnPost.com has gotten 10,543 comments since launching Nov. 8, 2007. That’s in the neighborhood of 150 comments a week. Last week, the site got 319 comments.

On the Nashua Telegraph site, the four top stories at this hour have a combined 10 comments (here’s the leader, with seven at the time I looked). 

On that scale, it’s reasonable to work on spot-checks and good graces. I can’t imagine how it could be scaled up to the volume of my newspaper’s site or, heaven help us, USA Today, where this hour’s top story alone currently has 512 comments.

(In fairness, I should point out that another Disqus-powered blog called JakeandAmir.com has a post with 143 comments.)

“If we had 10 times as many comments, it might mean we’d need a few more volunteer comment moderators, and I’m confident we could find more of them, but otherwise things would be the same,” Joel Kramer said.

As for requiring real names, he said, “I don’t think our situation would necessarily change if we had 10 times as many comments.  There presumably would be more people using fake names, but the vast majority would continue to comply.  I don’t think it would work as well for a site whose content attracts a national or global audience; I’d guess the fake rate then would be a lot higher.”

And there will be a lot fewer comments. In fact, we know some readers value anonymity (fourth paragraph, here). Laurie Kramer noted it herself in her comments to me: “Many readers say they like the real name policy and the civility of our comments. Others say they will never comment on a site that requires real names.”

I like the idea (and the ideal) of real names; I’m not sure it’s worth the loss of comments. And I simply don’t know how to do it. But I’d be a lot more in favor of more aggressive comment moderation than any of us seem to be able to afford.

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Comments

  • Kurt - we do use Disqus but not sure if you were implying we require 'real' names on http://www.nashuatelegraph.com? .

    In fact we allow a mix of anonymous comments, screen names and real names. Our only requirement is that you may register a 'real' email address in order to avoid the moderation queue.

    Verifying names may be logistically possible but it would not be practical or audience-friendly given our specific situation. In terms of scale we get about 300 comments per day and get probably dozens of new users per day. But, the problem is more related to the large number of registration points we already have for various internal and 3rd-party products. We would need to unify those authentication systems before name verification would have business value.

    As we move to a new CMS this fall there is some consideration of creating a new level of commenter who would not only be registered/verified by email but would also gain additional privileges (a la submitting 'trusted' letters to the editor, possibly some moderator rights etc.) In order to gain that status we would verify name and identity by phone - much as we do for letters.

    Thanks

    Damon Kiesow
  • Damon: Thanks for your comment. You're right, I wasn't clear about that. Nor does the JakeandAmir blog use real names. I think I was including them because both yours and JaA have the connection with Facebook Connect, which I presume could help if you wanted to require real names (in as much as Facebook "requires" real names). As I understand it, the tool could be set up to require people to have accounts on FB...but perhaps I'm mistaken about that.

    I'll be eager to hear more about how it goes with your tiered registration under the new CMS. Good luck!
  • The only company I know of that seems that has the solution for real names really figured out is Amazon.com. They enable you to prove your real name by checking it with the name on your credit card. Of course, that's only as secure as the credit card, but it goes a lot further than anything else on the web that I know of. When a reviewer has "proven" their real name, a "Real Name" marker is added after the reviewer's name. I hope more sites will do something alike.

    Newspaper websites could do this for paid subscribers I think. On other sites, people are probably not comfortable sharing their credit card details. Paypal or Google Checkout might be able to provide a service for this...
  • Different point of view from that post. Interesting to say the least.
  • We really have different points of view. People are not the same on thinking.

    - Christian Rock -
  • In terms of scale we get about 300 comments per day and get probably dozens of new users per day. But, the problem is more related to the large number of registration points we already have for various internal and 3rd-party products. We would need to unify those authentication systems before name verification would have business value.
  • hookey4
    Newspaper websites could do this for paid subscribers I think. On other sites, people are probably not comfortable sharing their credit card details. Paypal or Google Checkout might be able to provide a service for this...

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