Christopher "moot" Poole's TED talk was posted online last week. In it, the 4chan founder talks about the culture - and the cultural impact - of the imageboard. 4chan is often credited with originating several popular Internet memes, including the Rickroll. Users can post anonymously on the board, and as a result, in the words of moot - and if you've never visited the site, just trust us on this - 4chan is notoriously "raw" and "unfiltered."

But moot notes that sites like 4chan are going "the way of the dinosaur," with most websites tracking who comes and goes, maintaining some sort of persistent identity. He concludes that with the move to demand users' identity and remove their privacy, we're losing something valuable.

And yes, I realize, 4chan might not be the most convincing example for me to give if I'm going to argue in favor of the protection of online anonymity and pseudonymity. Some people see 4chan as the Internet at its wildest, least civilized, most base.

Some argue that matching a name (and even a face) to our online behavior will somehow make us nicer and friendlier. It'll raise the bar of public discourse.

And "public discourse is the highest form of democracy." Those are the words of venture capitalist Mark Suster, who wrote a blog post earlier this week that was highly critical of the anonymity and, he contended, subsequent incivility on Hacker News.

Suster praises Hacker News as a source of information in technology startup community, but he notes that the site can be "downright mean" and chronicles the profanity and personal attacks that some of his writing has elicited there.

Suster observes that those attacks tend to have a silencing effect on him. And he admits that he's been reluctant to tackle certain subjects on his blog, knowing they'll elicit the vitriol of the Hacker News commenters.

He offers a number of suggestion on how the site could be more civil, most notably:

Make all users post under real names that you verify - This in and of itself would help temper comments. It's totally acceptable to me for people to harshly criticize my points-of-view. No problem. But calling me a f***ing a**hole or some of the other epithets used goes too far. If people used real names and if these were crawlable and searchable in Google the transparency alone would help regulate people. Not everybody but many. ... Better still add photos the was Disqus and Quora do. It humanizes everybody and drives more civil conversation. As Paul said in his blog posting, don't say anything in a comment thread that you wouldn't say in person. Photos drives this closer to reality.

Skud responded to Suster yesterday in a post on the Geek Feminism Blog, and let me quote her as she sums it up so well: "No. No no and again no."

It's not simply the ability to leave anonymous comments that necessarily makes or breaks an online space in terms of hostility or civility. Skud observes, "People aren't ashamed or afraid to make abusive comments under their own names, and the necessity of using real/verified names will only exclude those who don't want abusive comments to follow them back to their own email inboxes (as Suster himself experienced) or worse, their homes or workplaces."

There are lot of reasons - gender, sexual orientation, political affiliation, for example - that might make it utterly unsafe for someone to be unmasked online. And contrary to the claim that we should be able to say things to people's faces, well, not all of us are in the position or have the power to do that.

It sucks that Suster doesn't feel comfortable posting his some of his ideas. It sucks for anyone who is silenced from participating in an online discourse because they don't feel safe to do so.

As Skud notes, women in particular are often encouraged to assume pseudonyms online - to make them feel more sake, for their own protection. Many sites that allow or even encourage pseudonymity have a high proportion of female participants, perhaps because women feel like there is some safety, some assurance of privacy, that is afforded them with an obscured identity.

Just because you don't attach your name and photo to your online persona doesn't mean you can't be part of a community. (Shout-out here to BitchPhd, to Phantom, to Snick and the myriad of other pseudonymous bloggers I've befriended over the years.)

In his TED talk, moot describes the case of 4chan users tracking down a person who'd posted pictures of him torturing a cat. In other words, anonymity did not stop the 4chan community from holding someone accountable. And in turn, I would say, that revoking users' privacy does not insure civility.

Don't get me wrong. We have to work at that in the tech world. Looking at the statistics that NCWIT released this week documenting women's participation in IT, I'd say we need to work a lot harder on creating an environment that welcomes difference. But I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that banning anonymous commenting online isn't really the secret to making the tech world a nicer place.

I've spent almost my entire online life operating under one pseudonym or another. And maybe that's why I agree with Skud and moot's analysis. Having a pseudonym has never divorced me from responsibility or accountability or community. The reputation I had as a gamer was tied to my identity as Juuniper. My first blogging personae, Badger. I still wanted credibility. I still tried to be authentic and honest. I took these identities as seriously as I take my identity as Audrey. These identities just weren't linked to my real identity, to my address, to my photo, to my body.

And it's only now that I have a more public persona that I feel it necessary to be (somewhat) more transparent with my online behaviors. OK, that and I have three mean dogs and a big boyfriend who will kick your ass if you try to fuck with me. And, incidentally, that's privilege. It's not a demand that everyone else around me surrender their privacy and cough up their real names and photos when they interact online.