Something that I have found irritating about the posts by non-persistent identities is that it isn't possible to support a meaningful discussion as previous statements can always be repudiated, or maybe even weren't made by the particular poster. I compared this to sound bites.

And Tim do I know how you hate sound bites. Look at it this way: no identity is persistent, signed or not. All just varying degrees. Maybe all we *ever* had was sound bites, but the closer proximities and smaller networks of the past made them seem more dynamic than they really were.