Would anonymous forums work for scientists?

The ever-provocative Russell Beattie caught my attention with this post about reconsidering the benefits of forums that allow Anonymity: "

I’ve been obsessing lately about a new concept I noticed a couple weeks ago. I was looking something up online and found this fascinating overview on Wikipedia of the most popular web forum in the world called ‘2 Channel’ or 2ch. It’s a Japanese site which, according to this stats page, gets over 2.5 million posts a day. Wow. The most amazing thing about the site - and the thing that separates it in my mind from just about every other forum I’ve ever seen is that Anonymity isn’t just permitted, it’s encouraged. More on this in a bit.

Forums with no traffic are useless, registration requires far too much activation energy, and its really hard for a small community to bring up the traffic to make forums worthwhile.

Today I was asked to consider contributing to macresearch.org. I'm no expert on community building, but its clear that low-volume registration-only forums won't work for them, either. I wonder if a merit-driven, anonymous forum for scientists would work here? And even if you did get traffic with this approach, could a fledgling community site bear to host content that was impolite to individuals or corporations (e.g. Apple)? It might be worth giving something a try, because in my opinion, low traffic forums like these have more of a negative than positive effect on a website.

Comments

I don't think that anonymous posts would increase traffic to a technical site, because one of the incentives for posting scientific or technical information is that the comment enhances the commenters reputation. The draw for posting is that a lot of like minded people will see your name on the comment. A technical site has to be seeded with a stream of technical information to draw a lot of eyes before it will be attractive to commenters.

Self-organizing categories might help attract comments. One hurdle to overcome when you want to post some ideas is to find the right place to comment or ask a question. Maybe if you could submit anything in a single form, and then the site would put the comment in an appropriate place according a scan for keywords, that would lower one barrier.

[Kyle Hart]

I agree with Brian. You need at least some authoritative contribution to make the conversation worthy of reading.

If you look at comment polcies with blogging, there are a few options. The person or group that posts the initial entry has authority to speak on a topic and you can choose to let people respond both anonymously or not...and its easy to ignore the anonymous ones if you wish.

In the case of an early stage community site like macresearch.org, perhaps a group blog with open comments is the best place to start. An apt moderator could also recruit talent from the commenting authors, granting them rights as primary authors.

Where does this fail? You cannot duplicate the forum phenomena of a newbie asking a simple question and a thread ensuing that is of real high quality.

Joel has a lot of good advice on how to make forums work including dropping registration entirely to reduce activation energy and using the time of the original post to encourage new growth of new threads instead endless replies the most recent hot thread.

Joel's forum is here.