To generate a hypothesis about the effects of anonymity on user participation in online communities, comments on Youtube were analysed for effects of the change from allowing pseudonyms to Google+ with its real name policy. Small differences were detected, leading to the hypothesis that the option to remain anonymous leads to a less active environment for getting feedback, with less polite and less rude comments on the expense of neutral ones.
There is also a lot of literature describing factors influencing participation. Anonymity is there seldom a main focus, but it gets mentioned. An example for that is a main thread in the literature: The being used by as described in @cite_5 . The theory sees two types of connection between the members of a community - Identity and Bond - influenced by different factors, , and for Identity and , and for Bond. Some of them can be linked to anonymity, SIDE theory does that explicitly with , as described in the introduction.
@cite_5
2159508072 2130164714 1979663951 2149084727
Online communities depend upon the commitment and voluntary participation of their members. Community design — site navigation, community structure and features, and organizational policies — is critical in this regard. Community design affects how people can interact, the information they receive about one another and the community, and how they can participate in community activities. We argue that the constraints and opportunities inherent in online community design influence how people become attached to the community and whether they are willing to expend effort on its behalf. We examine two theories of group attachment and link these theories with design decisions for online communities. Common identity theory makes predictions about the causes and consequences of people's attachment to the group as a whole. Common bond theory makes predictions about the causes and consequences of people's attachment to individual group members. We review causes of common identity and common bond, and show how they ... Online communities of different types have become an important part of the daily internet life of many people within the last couple of years. Both research and business have shown interest in studying the possibilities and risks related to these relatively new phenomena. Frequently discussed aspects that are tightly bound to online communities are their implications and effects on privacy issues. Available literature has shown that users generally disclose very much (private) information on such communities, and different factors influencing this behaviour were identified and studied. However, the influence and predictive power of personality traits on information disclosure in online communities has not yet been the subject of analysis. In this paper we report the results of an online survey investigating the relations between personality traits (based on the Fife-Factor Model), usage patterns and information disclosure of participants in different types of online communities. In this paper, we analyze a natural experiment regarding anonymity options and participation in a large, successful online community of practice (CoP) for U.S. soldiers. We study the impacts of changes of anonymity options on comment quality for productive discussion and professionalism. Four levels of personal attribution or anonymity of comments are significantly correlated with comment quality under some, but not all, circumstances. Eliminating anonymity options produced significantly fewer antisocial comments and fewer comments overall, although it did not affect overall peripheral participation as measured by logins and page views. Online identity or reputation appears to be more of a factor than external culpability in shaping user behaviors. Attitudes of participants and the evolution of norms over time are presented, and implications for the design of online learning communities are discussed. The authors consider processes on social networks that can potentially involve three factors: homophily, or the formation of social ties due to matching individual traits; social contagion, also known as social influence; and the causal effect of an individual’s covariates on his or her behavior or other measurable responses. The authors show that generically, all of these are confounded with each other. Distinguishing them from one another requires strong assumptions on the parametrization of the social process or on the adequacy of the covariates used (or both). In particular the authors demonstrate, with simple examples, that asymmetries in regression coefficients cannot identify causal effects and that very simple models of imitation (a form of social contagion) can produce substantial correlations between an individual’s enduring traits and his or her choices, even when there is no intrinsic affinity between them. The authors also suggest some possible constructive responses to these results.