> Keep in mind, however, that "making it trivially obvious to the rest of the world, Google, future investors" is exactly the point of the proposal!
Which is exactly the problem-- it's important not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. There are good things and bad with attaching real world identities and that was not considered in your post. It's not a panacea and has real and (to me, at least) severe consequences.
I happen to work a great deal with gaming communities which are notoriously trollish and awful. In my experience, physical identity would help with those problems, but it's overkill. It's like the "nuclear" option, in a sense.
What we've found works best is the general act of tying the identity to something the individual does not want to lose casually. The real enemy of the net is casual trolling out of boredom or random flashes of meanness. The highest return on investment is found by eliminating that one aspect-- it doesn't require the "nuclear" option of turning us all into our public personas.
For example, we've found that physical/real-world identity is not nearly as important as the combination of:
* Tying access to something people don't want to lose, such as months of their time/effort, their reputation to people they respect, or to their wallets. Note that reputation can be based on limited identity revealing to key people, or even simply reputation amongst people they associate with under a particular identity (even if they whole group is using non-real identities-- for example, a gaming clan).
* Broken window theory (i.e. http://ta.gd/broken )-- hiding/fixing trolling as quickly as possible. This is one of the best methods we've found to keep incidents down and people behaving. If they don't see it as commonplace (as trolling is on Reddit/Digg) then they aren't going to dive in as readily.
* Having strong, respected moderators/spokespeople encouraging respect and frowning sternly (and directly) upon negative behavior. This ties into both of the above points.
My company is actually investigating using some of these techniques in a service to reduce griefing in games, but requiring physical identities in that case is a deal-breaker.
> Instead, they have far more incentive to contribute, in order to increase their reputation.
This is only true if you believe that people want to increase their reputation solely tied to their real world identity. This is a motivator for you, but it is not for me and others-- otherwise people would already be using their own names 100% of the time on things they are proud of.
Anyway, I agree with your desire to keep HN strong. I actually think HN has been doing great for the while I've been here. It has its ups and downs, but I think we have other options to improve that don't include tying Facebook Connect into every aspect of the online world.
I have to chime in just to say that there are people here who for various reasons (e.g. bootstrapping/moonlighting) would not publicly disclose who they are. I know those people would be thousands upon thousands of karma points less helpful to other hackers if they were forced to identify themselves publicly simply to provide their insight.
Look around your LinkedIn and Facebook communities. How many of those groups are thriving in the way Hacker News is with useful, helpful information? How many of you read them every single day and contribute to them in the way you do here?
I, for one, would rather pay large monthly fees before making it trivially obvious to the rest of the world, Google, future investors, etc, what I contribute here on HN.
(This isn't my primary account, so consider this post even more "anonymous" than usual.)
This is a hard problem, but I really would love an accounting service more like Mint for a business. I had dozens of accounts that Mint read and loaded fine. If you had the ability to get that sort of info and electronically handle the majority of the firm's accounting, that's the approach I'd like to see.
I don't like sending documents-- the vast majority of ours are digitally accessible now.
I honestly think a lot of their 3px, 4px, or 5px decisions are actually an exercise of finding local maxima for their current design.
If they're looking for interfaces that are truly better, they would do far more testing on innovative/educated directions and iterate each of those to see how good they can get. Instead you just make one version as business-helpful as possible, which may be much weaker than your true potential.
I like the idea of data, but there's only so much progress you can make with the same designs in the same mold, tested pixel by pixel.