More important than anonymity in a public forum such as Usenet is pseudonymity. A strictly anonymous posting might well be ignored, and in cases should be. An alternate identity, however, can be more easily believed if it has said useful things in the past. After all, most of the people I know on the net are as good as pseudonyms to me. I've never met them, have never even had voice contact, and am unlikely to ever. This is the case for everyone. We rely on the human net of familiarity to assure us that these are real people. But a pseudonym on the net looks to us like "someone else's friend." We can't verify everyone personally, but we assume that someone has. Therefore pseudonyms will always be possible on the net. Indeed, they are already mostly with us. Eric