Anything good about anonymous comments?

This forum is anonymous anyway, the content is largely in the public domain or nothing a regular employee with experience wouldn't know. We don't discuss 2nd amendment issues (some gun/knife forums are locked) and legally we are also clean (no illegal content on here, no hint or link towards dark nets). the discussion about drugs on here are hearsay or anecdotes at best.

Why have anonymous comments?

I think if you’re a frequent poster, given enough effort there is a slight risk of being dox’d, so for posts that may be particularly revealing, that extra layer of anonymity probably helps.

I just want to comment it’s fucking hilarious when people are already anonymous on this site, choose to go anonymous again with authoring option, and then go ‘I work at x/y/z’ instead of saying x,y, or z without saying anything incriminating at all. like wrf is that? people do things like that without using their brain even when knowing the specific company can be valuable 2 layers of anonymity aren’t enough to share specific info? applies to more than just that example too tho...

I think that the idea of anonymity is to share information that would otherwise be incriminating or controversial (e.g. moelis email leak or something if it was first posted here). But no one posts anything interestingly specific really when anonymous and they usually do it to avoid attention when being critical of others.

I made similar post about monkey shit being stupid beyond a point and actually being negative and as other commenter says, anonymity is great for regular contributors but that’s about it. How about having anonymous authoring contributions for people who are senior (eg not pussy interns who get offended or angry at something and want to be rude but also anonymous) or have a certain number of bananas. AKA, unless you prove you are valuable somewhat you can’t be anonymous. and if you’re a new account, you are anonymous anyway and it doesn’t matter what you say make another account.

I don't think it is easy to dox someone on here, unless you know every little resume bit. then you'd still have to go through hundreds of similar LI profiles. Banks are huge, I have met other professionals with very similar profiles. how would you keep them apart if all you have is a WSO username?

I think there are pluses and minuses to anonymous posting. On the positive side, it allows people to express opinions they would not feel comfortable sharing under their user name. This could enhance discussions. On the negative side, and I can only speak for myself, I am less likely to engage with someone who is anonymous than someone who is using their user name. This would be a negative for the anonymous poster.

I interned at an EB in a satellite office with

It is all about credibility from the username side. It is hardly anon. Once you start seeing the same usernames (some certified) you begin to develop an ounce of credibility plus a semi interesting layer of personality. That makes for healthy discussion and unique perspectives.

The anon side just feels cheap. No “accountability” and rarely used burner accounts for the right reasons. The bad outweighs the good. Especially when people rifle off garbage, throw around monkey shit, and opine on topics with no name/history behind it.

This is why we can’t have nice things...

Agree with above poster on the point of doxxing.

However, I think the anon system can be improved. I am OK to certify myself if that helps improving credibility.

Don't agree that it is hard to figure out who someone is based on 50-100 posts, especially in more niche geographies.

When I walked into my first internship, I only had 1 peer intern starting in my group. Based on a couple of topics on WSO containing few datapoints it was extremely to deduce this person was going to be my peer. Basically learned all the places he applied to before from his post history. Told him afterwards and he didn't care much about it, but it made me way more selective on what to post under a trackable username.

Imo it is not about any person being able to identify you from your post history, but people who can connect the dots because they are already in contact with you.

Hearing a lot of folks say that anonymity is useful so that someone doesn't figure out who you are based on a pattern in your posts. Which makes sense.

If that's what people were mostly using it for, we wouldn't see so many anonymous comments. Only a tiny % of comments have identifying info but many are anonymous.

Ultimately agree with the commenter right above me who says something's gotta be done. For whatever reason, letting people hide their already-anonymous usernames has turned the site into a shit show.

hopefully they won’t get me fired

it really depends. for example, my professional community is very small...and if i were to talk about working with a specific individual who is very well known in my industry, combined with other things i've said, could pretty easily identify me to those who also work in my niche industry.

For example, if we were talking about Casino Gaming./Hotel BB bankers, and lets say i'm an MD and i disclose this...and i talked about a specific industry CEO and certain penchants of his that i've witnessed with a handful of other people who were present...i've just narrowed the circle of people i could be from 30 to a handful. Combine that with a few other identifying things...and any other person who was also present at one of these identifying sessions, or knows some of those people, would be able to dox me.

to a junior person, this might not makes sense...but for those senior people in the industry, the circle gets pretty small as you specialize.

anonymous posting allows people to disclose private information without the chance of being doxed thru their post history

Cant make titty comments on my regular account

We need anon posting. I've been found out on another profile, but they pmed me. I have also figured out 2-3 people. It's pretty easy you see someone asking about x group and you think oh I know someone there and click their profile and see them post about a certain school discussion and that's all it takes.

There's tremendous value to anon posting. No way I would reveal as much as I do about certain firms (anecdotes from friends or my own experiences) if it weren't anon. In fact, I was obv recruiting for post-mba roles and couldn't post questions about offers/near offers because the post-mba recruiting world is so small (e.g. a UMM like AmSec was hiring 1 person). I had to make throwaways for some of them/ask generic advice.

Maybe restrict anon posting a bit more, but do not eliminate

Anonymous posters are pussies

why is everyone making this so difficult. It's clearly obvious the benefits of anonymous posting especially in a post-linkedin database world where it is incredibly easy to track down an individual based on very few datapoints, subsequently get their facebook, instagram, twitter and know just about their entire internet profile.

The solution is just test out different points of banning anonymous posting against certain % MS / % SBs thresholds so that it reduces trolling. If people then keep creating new accounts post that implementation, then that is a net neutral effect anyways as they could have done that before the anonymous feature was implemented.

People who can't comprehend the value of it because they don't know how to combat troll or argumentative post that they cannot properly respond to without digging up the past poster history (i.e. OP) clearly have their own issues to sort out.

The last idea is if something has enough MS, you simply automatically hide that post and require a "+" sign to reveal it. The bigger issue on this site is how sub-comments get buried under the expand tab and lots of good info you have to forcibly click through to find. It should be a user controllable setting to be able to change the number of sub-comments that get automatically shown.