is there any evidence at all that forcing real names in Internet comments improves quality? Its a sentiment you hear parroted a lot, and it's a justification for a lot of pretty damn user unfriendly moves.

For instance Facebook comments are far from the height of civility and well thought out discourse.

Our local paper (stltoday.com) uses Facebook comments on its stories and the discourse is notoriously bad. Either these people don't realize their real names are attached or they don't care.

Are you sure those are real names? I've had around five fb accounts, only one or two used my real name.

I think in most cases the average user will only have one account, with their real name attached.

Really? Maybe because some people still remember how things used to be in the good old days when people themselves were a little more caution about privacy on the internet.

Heck, even youtube was like that: http://i.imgur.com/H0VCNde.jpg

And now you are supposed to use your real name. Yeah, that reduces the stupid comments. But it also reduces every other type of comment that isn't on the "This is nice" or "I like this video" kind of null comments.

Even if you are okay with just these types of comments, would you want your network to see that you commented like that on My little Pony videos? Or anything else that isn't illegal or shady but basically just embarrassing.

I myself would not want a google search for my name to produce my comment history I left on youtube videos. But that's just me.