[frozen_tomato]

I wholeheartedly disagree with this, what you're essentially describing is just watered down identity. The whole point of the value of anonymity is that all posts are equal.

[TeMPOraL]

This is unrealistic and won't work in practice. If all posts are equal then all posts are equally worthless. It's a sad but basic truth that we need identity and ability to accumulate reputation to be able to hold a meaningful, informative conversation. If everyone is fully anonymous (in a stateless sense), then everyone is basically a "random internet dude".

[amirmc]

> "It's a sad but basic truth that we need identity and ability to accumulate reputation to be able to hold a meaningful, informative conversation."

Not true. We do not need to accumulate reputation to have a meaningful conversation. For example, I've seen informative conversations on Secret with the only identity mechanism being the icon they're assigned (presumably at random per thread).

Edit: I also don't recall usenet having a mechanism that 'kept score'. Slightly before my time so I may be wrong about this.

[chipsy]

Think of books, though. They're the best available counterpoint to what you're saying. People don't necessarily care about the author of a book, but they do care about the content of the book and its ability to piece together a larger idea.

Within forum post culture there's a built-in tendency for content to be fast and disposable. This makes identity relatively more valuable, because it allows a stream of posts to be put in context, just like with a book.

[k__]

The problem of pages like HN and SO is the artificial interaction, which the voting generates.

Yes, they probably can't find out that the 10k-karma-guy is Jack Miller, but all readers of his posts will be influenced by the 10k-karma.

HN hides the karma mostly. But SO shoves it right in your face, that some gold-20k-guy wrote an answer.

Also people will vote stuff up because they like it. This may be because it's high quality, but it doesn't have to.