Many people on the Internet display their real names. Other people refrain from doing so. The people that display their real names on the Internet rarely are trolls, as they have an identity to keep up. Those that are anonymous on the Internet area almost always the group with the trolls, spammers, and so forth. Why? Because the best part about being anonymous is that you can change your identity. Being more mobile allows you to be a troll and then change your nickname. There are those that don’t like anybody that is anonymous on the Internet because of this reason.

I, being anonymous myself, don’t believe in that anonymous people should be treated worse than people that go around the Internet with their name publically displayed. See, plenty of anonymous people have built up a very powerful identity, and it would be difficult to move that to a new username to act as a totally different person.

If I decided to go be a troll, and then abandon all my user accounts and start using a new username, that would be difficult. I would have to abandon my Flickr photos, FriendFeed account where I have 382 comments and 727 likes. del.icio.us account with 31 bookmarks (I only started using it recently), and my blog with currently 87 posts (including this one). I would have to abandon the domain name too, which would destroy every link to this website, and mean losing a website where I get 300+ visits a day. Clearly, that would not be easy,

So, what is the conclusion? An anonymous person can build credibility as well as a powerful identity online. What people should really be wary of is new users. If I had this blog hosted on Blogger, and it only had three posts on it, I wouldn’t feel so bad about abandoning it. And who knows, after building a credible online identity, maybe an anonymous person might choose not to be anonymous anymore.