This made me realize: Reddit/HN wouldn't be nearly as valuable without usernames. They allow you to scan someone's posts to see if they have a history of being mean, intellectually dishonest, etc.
I think this is true for HN, less so for reddit, and that it generally depends on the nature of the site.
On HN, we have a small-ish community of people (who are often experts in a particular ___domain) and an expectation of on-topic, high-level discourse. Comment history is worth a lot here, as it's been vetted by an intelligent, serious community.
On reddit, you have a huge number of people and a very low expectation of what's acceptable to post (in general, of course--specific subreddits are often different). The relaxed atmosphere promotes users who tell jokes or pander to the large userbase, making it harder to identify users whose posts are worth actually reading through. Of course once you have identified a quality poster, it's nice to be able to go through their history. It's just that signals like karma score end up being meaningless at that scale.
Then there's 4chan, with opt-in identity. You can't inspect most users' histories, which means you have to take a submission at face value. And for serious, constructive submissions--admittedly hard to come by sometimes--this rivals the HN model for intellectually honest discussion. You're not just nodding along with well-known users, and you're also not ignoring submissions from people who may have simply slipped up in their past. But users can take a name if they choose, and there are 3rd-party archives which catalog their submissions.
Reddit actually brands itself as a "platform for online communities". Given the nature of subreddits, this does not seem like an unfair characterization.
Sure, but your identity persists across all subreddits. If someone makes an insightful comment on a programming subreddit, for instance, and has a high karma score, you may be disappointed to discover that 90% of their previous submissions consists of cat pictures, jokes, in-depth cartography discussion, and porn.
I guess reddit just feels 'diluted' to me. It facilitates a broad range of discussion and does so fairly well, but I can't think of a subreddit that is actually the best place to discuss any particular topic. It's generally my second or third stop.
Well, it could be highly relevant, but the system isn't (yet?) designed to recognize when two sibling sites have significant overlap, which does occur.
Although throwaways are generally considered acceptable, especially on Reddit. Without some means to enforce single account registration or a real name policy, the same problem exists.
Persistent usernames on Reddit create a culture of identity on the site. Throwaways with no user history that post inflammatory comments frequently tend to get called out and downvoted. That's a very different setting from something like YikYak.
It's worth noting that Reddit exists to discuss topics, hobbies etc. Yik Yak doesn't have a defined purpose to the same extent Reddit does.
This lack of definition combined with the geographically-centered design (you know your audience) makes Yik Yak far more dangerous than Reddit IMO.
There are a lot of good use cases for throwaways (suppose a former cult member wanted to share their experiences, for example). And the fact that an account is brand new is also a data point. You'll notice that Reddit/HN have produced a lot of insightful/informative comments from throwaways.
"people whose opinions the majority of voting members disagree with"
Still true, but I think it is probably easier to allow controversial or less popular opinions in a ranked system than it is to deal with harassment in an unranked system, given the propensity of the voters towards "good." The harassment seen on reddit is very different from the harassment on Yik Yak, Juicy Campus, etc. That guy they thought was responsible for the Boston Marathon bombings, for example.
Of course, Yik Yak and Juicy Campus were designed for this LCD speech.
