By slobizman on

I'm going to be building a multi-blog site where entries can be viewed aggregated or by blogger (user). It's going to be for a particular city/county (K city/400K county) and I am struggling with a question. Should I force people to use their real names to write their blogs with (assume I can enforce this for this discussion), or should I allow people to just use usernames/handles?

In newspapers, letters to the editor work just fine with real names, and I believe it keeps people more honest. But, I cna also see some situation where some people would not post if their identity were known. for example, a developer would not want top bash the planning department because of fear of (real) retribution on their projects.

Keep in mind that in a small/medium sized town like this, a lot of people know others.

All thoughts are welcome.

Thanks.

Comments

tb0701’s picture

tb0701 commented

I'm actually planning on doing something very similar and you bring up a good issue. Playing 'gatekeeper' is not easy. You cited a good example of potentially prohibiting worthy community news. Hopefully people will approach an anonymous blogger's site with more skepticism than they normally would, but that maybe asking for too much. My initial reaction is to take a hands off approach and let for anonymous blogging, but then there is the risk of some anonymous blogger irreversibly damaging the reputation of the site. A compromise would be to allow for anonymous blogging, but require real life info on your side. That's assuming that you could actually get people's real life info. This is the internet. Even requiring real life to be published along side their blog posting doesn't mean they won't falsify information. There really isn't much you can do is someone is hellbent on lying. You can definitely take steps to reduce the amount of false information being blogged, but you do so at the risk of potentially valuable content. At the end of the day it's up to the individual to decide what he wants to believe. And how would you go about fact checking every blog post? It's unlikely that you could. Youtube and digg have already answered this question by letting the community police itself. You could add digg like features to bury posts, rating system, and obviously commenting on posts can check the bloggers perspective.