Last week, Disqus published a blog post about Pseudonyms and their perceived effects on the volume and quality of comments received by the Disqus commenting system. The infographic presented in the post is rather interesting.
Disqus’s findings are that the volume of comments from “Real identities” is far less than those with Pseudonyms - the quality values seem to be about the same.
The real identity problem
IMO the real “problem” is that Disqus, and many other services, have not broken the connection between Authentication and profile. Why should it be that users on Disqus that sign in with Facebook should have to use that same identity to comment?
What about a type of account authorised with a Facebook ID, with the option of a pseudonym? That would create the benefit of easy sign in, combined with the perceived value of pseudonyms for commenting and it still works towards the “one person - one account” goal too banded around when this gets discussed.
Of course, with a system like Disqus there may be some issues under the hood that mean that a strategy like this may never be possible.
WordPress connections with Facebook
This week we’ve been planning a chunk of Fublo client work that will use Facebook for sign in to a client WordPress driven site. The designed code will populate the Member’s profile page with their Facebook information, however, the critical difference to Disqus’s system is that we will then allow the new members to change their name on the site if they desire… They will be able to pick their own pseudonym and also select how they wish that name to be published on the site.
Over all, we hope that that unpicking of the connection between Facebook for authentication and profile details will mean that the new members that join the site will be happy contributors with whatever name they choose, or leave as it is, to best reflect their online identity.
We’d love to hear your thoughts and comments and hopefully will also be able to share some metrics back here from that client project if the client allows!