Despite the tone of your message you are the first person to actually give me a good reason not to sign my messages. Here and on Reddit people have objected to me signing my messages (which is odd because for _years_ I signed like that on /. without a peep) without any real justification.

Your argument that I'm wasting vertical space makes a lot of sense, especially given the clean look of reddit/news.yc compared with /.

From now on I'll stop signing.

What annoys me is not the wasted space, though. It's the principle of it. You're imparting information in the readers of your comments that has no other purpose than to serve your ego. When I read a comment, I only look at who wrote it when the comment is something special. But you force me to know that John wrote it. Why? Do you think you deserve a special place in my (and everyone else's) mind?

But that would be fine, if you didn't try to pass off your personality defect as an ideology for everyone to follow, as you did in this thread. That was what sent me over the edge.

There's a distinction between me signing messages and me not being anonymous. My lack of anonymity is guaranteed by the user name I chose plus the fact that my profile links back to my personal web site.

Signing messages was unrelated to anonymity, it's a years old habit that I started on Usenet and continued in online forums like this one. I don't claim that signing messages is part of the ideology I was talking about above. If I did I wouldn't have stopped.

It amuses me that you choose to describe it as a 'personality defect' from behind an anonymous account here. If we were standing face to face would you describe me signing messages in that way?

No, I probably wouldn't, and our discourse would be poorer for it. Anonymity guarantees honesty and impartiality. Face to face, why would I want to make an enemy out of you, when I could make a useful acquaintance? It's not like I get paid for pointing out the truth.