If you’re interested in reading more on the history of these methods of controlling trolls, I also suggest having a look at this MetaFilter discussion on the topic.

It looks like at least one of these methods originated on the Citadel BBS system in the mid-1980s. Amazing, really.

http://philip.greenspun.com/panda/case-studies.html (scroll down to find case 4: apparently they didn’t have internal anchors in the 90s ;-)

Until a moment ago I would have said that using Facebook comments – and so removing some anonymity – is a great way to stop hateful comments.

But some of these comments prove me wrong! I forgot about the people who are *proud* of their extreme views. I guess that’s less about trolling and more about what kind of free speech you’re willing to allow on your platform.

It’s interesting to think about how you can enforce non-anonymity, in increasing measures.. the geo IP definitely works, but you could in theory require people to give away more and more details about themselves, or to prove somehow that it’s true (e.g. this is a recent photo of me here’s a newspaper) or to have to use a facebook login that has over 20 friends, etc. You could require that they make a verified email publicly available, or to disclose where they work. Not sure if there are any legal constraints to this but I don’t see why not. Amazing to think about the huffington post needing 25 f-t staff to comb through 35,000 comments a day.. no reason why they couldn’t be involved with enforcing and validating the anonymity-disclosure too.

Clive Thompson discussed some other methods to reduce their impact, but I find his solutions not as elegant as this.

Your idea of removing anonymity also goes to the heart of one solution suggested in the New York Times a while ago: per­sis­tent pseu­do­nymity.

However I do prefer your idea of removing the anonymity of trolls, rather than keeping an identity persistent across the Internet. I can imaging using IP geolocation in some way here, for example by making the displayed name change from “Anonytroll” to “Troll in the UK” to “Troll in Greater London” to “Troll in North London” to, finally, “Troll in Camden, London”.

Nice…