When I joined HN I decided to do an experiment. On reddit and slashdot, I go under a pseudonym except when I need to make an announcement. But on HN I always go by my own name. The result is dramatic: I'm much more careful and considerate on HN. It's a clear verification of Penny Arcade's famous theory (http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/3/19/).
I think that the elimination of anonymity is ultimately the only thing which can keep HN from the inevitable slide toward 4chan that all comment sites are on.
Facebook knows my True Name, therefore I'm so careful there that I don't say anything controversial or substantive at all. It just gets a bit of cheerful pap, and mostly I don't use it at all. HN get what I'm really thinking about precisely because it's pseudonymous.
One thing a lack of anonymity forces you to do is to present your entire feelings about a story, instead of the one point that you feel is missing or needs correction. When people present points in isolation, it's easy to get the wrong impression about how they feel.
I didn't comment in the thread under discussion, but if I felt there was one point that needed to be added to the original story, it was the one made by many posters, roughly, "This smells like glurge, and when people are mourning for an inspiring little girl, it's common sense not to take what they say about her at face value." Of course that wouldn't reflect my whole reaction as a human being.
And that's the difference between reacting as a non-anonymous human being, where you are careful to present your whole feelings about a topic, and reacting as a member of a message board, where you're like to dismiss most of what you think and feel as commonplace and not worth mentioning.
Like any problem in communication, it's a problem of readers as well as writers. Reading a message from "asdf1234" or "prgrmrd00d4u" (not real names AFAIK) and reading it as representative of a human being's feelings doesn't make any sense, but it's irresistible for a lot of people. If the nerds on Slashdot and HN can't resist parsing comments that way, I think it's time to give up and accept that as human beings we can only see each other as whole human beings and not merely as contributors to a conversation. So the burden of solving this communication problem is on the writers to act like whole human beings.
The primary psychological resistance -- and believe me, I do rebel against being "human" on a discussion board with every bit of my being -- comes from the fact that most of us would prefer to sound more like scientists than like politicians. Scientists say, "Here is my tiny marginal contribution." Politicians say, "This is who I am." Geeks roll their eyes when a politician answering a question about tax policy in a debate spends all of his allotted time talking about how much he loves his children and then caps it off with half a sentence stating his position on the issue. We hate that and don't want to be like that. We want to hear how he differs from his opponents. We don't want to hear everything he has in common with everyone else. We want the diff.
Our humanity is what we have in common, exactly what is excluded when we present ourselves as a diff. If you read the original discussion and read every comment as a diff, then you don't see comments by inhuman people. You see whole human beings whose common humanity was redacted by the diff filter running between their brains and their keyboards.
Maybe the need to relax that diff filter a little bit so we all sound like human beings needs to be part of a FAQ somewhere....
When I joined HN I decided to do an experiment. On reddit and slashdot, I go under a pseudonym except when I need to make an announcement. But on HN I always go by my own name. The result is dramatic: I'm much more careful and considerate on HN. It's a clear verification of Penny Arcade's famous theory (http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/3/19/).
I think that the elimination of anonymity is ultimately the only thing which can keep HN from the inevitable slide toward 4chan that all comment sites are on.