I'm specifically referring to the user NetConstructor.com (although this may apply to others as well).
They (he? she? it?) seem to be making a decent contribution, but judging by their username and about text on their profile, it is clear that their intention is to increase awareness of their business (even if that is secondary to their participation).
Thoughts?
I'm not seeing the problem with user names being whatever the user chooses? The focus of the site is in the information, not the users. I started with Stack Overflow to do a bit of self promotion. If I was forced to change my name to something else, I probably wouldn't have bothered. If this user wants their name — whatever name they chose — to be visible, they have to provide good content; otherwise, no one will see it anyway.
The end result is that the user has more incentive to provide good content. Who is losing out here?
I believe there is no policy about this on the regular Stack Overflow sites, because it isn't really a problem there. Your username links to your user profile, and you were always free to link to your own site there. The commenters there who tried it say they found it had a negligible impact on site traffic.
Is NetConstructor.com answering as one person, or is the whole company using this account? I personally prefer person-bound user accounts, so if Maria is doing all the posting, maybe she could change her username to Maria from NetConstructor. That makes it clear NetConstructor is a company and not just a personal site.
@tnorthcutt - I saw that too and am glad you brought it up. I'd like to set a policy that people use real names if they are going to be active. The problem for me is that if "NetConstructor" has 5 people working there, who are we dealing with? And whose picture should we expect? I don't want an account shared by multiple people; it makes it too hard to manage.
BTW, I think we should hold people to a higher bar if they are frequent users here. If they post one question and never come back, no problem. But NetConstructorhas posted 10 questions already so he (or she) is very active which means to me we need to bring him into the community and that means knowing who he (or she) is would be beneficial to me and honestly to them.
I just read this by Clay Shirkey that says what I wanted to say but he says it so much better (sorry for the length):
1.) If you were going to build a piece of social software to support large and long-lived groups, what would you design for? The first thing you would design for is handles the user can invest in.
Now, I say "handles," because I don't want to say "identity," because identity has suddenly become one of those ideas where, when you pull on the little thread you want, this big bag of stuff comes along with it. Identity is such a hot-button issue now, but for the lightweight stuff required for social software, its really just a handle that matters.
It's pretty widely understood that anonymity doesn't work well in group settings, because "who said what when" is the minimum requirement for having a conversation. What's less well understood is that weak pseudonymity doesn't work well, either. Because I need to associate who's saying something to me now with previous conversations.
The world's best reputation management system is right here, in the brain. And actually, it's right here, in the back, in the emotional part of the brain. Almost all the work being done on reputation systems today is either trivial or useless or both, because reputations aren't linearizable, and they're not portable.
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Reputation is not necessarily portable from one situation to another, and it's not easily expressed.
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If you want a good reputation system, just let me remember who you are. And if you do me a favor, I'll remember it. And I won't store it in the front of my brain, I'll store it here, in the back. I'll just get a good feeling next time I get email from you; I won't even remember why. And if you do me a disservice and I get email from you, my temples will start to throb, and I won't even remember why. If you give users a way of remembering one another, reputation will happen, and that requires nothing more than simple and somewhat persistent handles.
Users have to be able to identify themselves and there has to be a penalty for switching handles. The penalty for switching doesn't have to be total. But if I change my handle on the system, I have to lose some kind of reputation or some kind of context. This keeps the system functioning.
