There's three parts of that quote that I have a problem with. The first is the word "can". Yes, it "can", you're absolutely right - but then dropping a broken laptop off the third floor of a building "can" make it work again. That doesn't mean it's likely or an expected result, but it's certainly possible.Timothy Borrowdale wrote:A normal person plus anonymity and an audience of like-minded people can lead to an amazing transformation for the better
The second part is "like-minded people". If by "like-minded people" you mean "people who don't find verbal abuse, argumentation for the sake of argumentation and general trolling appealing" then yes, your statement might hold true. If by "like-minded people" you mean "people who play WoW" then no, it doesn't.
The third part is "anonymity". See, personally I'd argue that sites like Elitist Jerks are not anonymous. You create an ID there, and those on the site who don't contribute in a useful and productive manner are swiftly banned. Sure, they can create a new ID (or even several IDs) but their opinion will have little weight if their ID isn't known and respected. For people to care about what you have to say you have to care about your ID and refrain from posting in a way that will get you a bad reputation. Screw up and that ID is banned, permanently. Sure, people don't use their real name, but not using your real name isn't the same as being anonymous.
4chan is anonymous. There are no names there at all, and as a result a large proportion of it is complete horseshit. Again, going back to the word "can", it's certainly not unheard of for good things to come out of it, which just goes to show how vague the word "can" is.
The current WoW forums are a kind of middle-ground. They're more anonymous than Elitist Jerks, but they're not as anonymous as 4chan. You have to use an ID when you post, but you can use any ID you feel like provided you have a spare character slot. The only people who can tell who you really are are the moderators, and they wield the ban-hammer so lightly it may as well not even exist. That's close enough to anonymous as far as regular users are concerned, because while you can choose to use a single ID every time you post you certainly don't have to.
You can certainly argue that a lot of people will stop using the WoW forums when RealId is put in place, and I don't doubt that for a moment. But personally one of the reasons I don't read or post there is because it's a complete cesspool. If RealId changes that I might at least bother to read them once in a while.
