But enabling anonymous comments would just hurt things in the long run, no matter what kind of additional positive short-term effects it would have. People would feel little need to "join" the community, as they could interact with it as guests, and thus they would always feel out-of-touch with it, and apathetic to it (it would be outside their Monkeysphere.)

I do have one possible solution, though: for every 50 karma points you earn, say, you get a "free gift" of some sort within the system (because otherwise it would encourage gaming of the system to earn such points). One gift could be a one-use "post this comment anonymously" checkbox that would then disappear. Another would be, to use a fun example, the sort of "mega-upvote" everyone wishes they had around for when something truly deserves it.

I think it'd be interesting if people could use their own karma for the "mega-upvote."

EDIT

Part of what's neat about this idea is that support now can cost people something, so they have to really be behind what they support. On the other hand, it would probably establish a oligarchy.

The problem is that capabilities on this site in particular are partly based on your karma. Spending away your ability to downvote would be a problem, especially if you're a very prominent member of the community, and then even more especially if you served in a sort of vigilante "moderator"/"role model" role, keeping the community clean and pointed in the right direction by your actions. (I know this site can't really be influenced as heavily by its users as that sounds, but it could head that way if pg wished: giving users with a karma total of over 3000, say, automatic moderator powers makes quite a bit of sense to me.)

Sure, it can be a "noble sacrifice" and generate some sort of epic story retold throughout the community where user-Gandalf sacrifices their karma in the fight against troll-user-Balrog, and then others step in to "forge ahead without them," but just because a notion is romantic doesn't mean it's Utilitarian (in fact, they're almost opposite by definition.) Although boring, the community as a whole is likely better off if the others could restore Gandalf afterwards, as long as they thought his actions were justified. Since, in a database, there's no difference between taking something away and instantly finding reason to give it back, let me phrase it this way (thank Doctorow for this):

You don't spend whuffie; you just have it. However, if you do something stupid with it, it can be taken away.

I'm not sure if this has been tried on a social news site before, and it sounds stupid on face-value, but, what if, instead of each comment having an individual score that also affects its author's karma, the comment's score (and therefore its page placement) simply _is_ the author's karma? That is, a comment by a user with 3000 karma starts off with a score of 3000, and is placed on the page accordingly.

As such, you wouldn't really be voting on the comment itself anymore, but rather voting on the user by considering the comment as an action by that user. Taking all your points off of a user for one especially bad thing they did--considered on sites like this and reddit to be quite uncouth--wouldn't be a "sin" any longer, because _you're not rating their comments_ any more; you're just rating _them_. When you give someone one downvote, it applies across the "scores" of all their other posts, and likewise for upvotes.

I'd love to see this system tried out. I don't even have a special attachment to its success or failure; it simply sounds like a great experiment in virtual sociology. I might even be motivated to implement it myself if anyone else shows interest here in being part of the resulting community.

I wish there were a good way to try out all these ideas. I've considered the idea of wikiable applications, perhaps on top of a common database, that might be a possibility.

It takes <30 seconds to create an user account here; If you really have some insights to share and don't feel comfortable making those remarks in a non-anonymous way, you should probably consider creating a new user account and share your wisdom.