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I made a reddit subreddit that did this. I used CSS to hide names and comment scores (yes people can still see them if they want, it was just a prototype). The overall response was pretty negative.


I changed everyone's name to "Spartacus" over at f7u12. Nobody seemed to mind much.


Yeah but f7u12 is one of the most popular subreddits with its own purpose. I made /r/hidden expressly to experiment with anonymity. I showed it to a good number of people and asked their opinion, whether they'd use it (assuming it got popular), etc and almost everyone told me that either a) the anonymity would be irrelevant to them or b) they'd prefer to not be anonymous so they could "enjoy" their karma.


I think the problem might be that reddit is already as anonymous as someone wants it to be, so that alone isn't a feature.

Where it's a cool idea is when the anonymity is used to nullify influence of prominent users for a community that has that as a problem. You'd need a sufficiently interesting topic with that need, though.


Oh, definitely, I'm just throwing that out there as a data point of the experiment in a subreddit with thousands of subscribers.


Link to said subreddit?


Heh, should have included that :)

http://www.reddit.com/r/hidden/




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