[perfectstorm]

anyone remember Orkut ? One of the reasons why I quit Orkut was because they didn't care about real names. so people started using weird characters and unicodes instead of their real name. This won't be a problem when you're not friends with them but once you're friends with them and your friend changes their name to some weird characters, you don't know who you're talking to. I hated that.

I think the article is looking at an extreme scenario and calling the policy naive. This case wouldn't matter to people in the developed nations (and most developing countries as well).

[zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC]

How the fuck does stability of names require that it's from your government ID?

How about you simply allow users to put labels on their contacts to identify them for themselves? No need to introduce a police state in order to keep you unconfused.

[webwanderings]

One could have solved that problem by bringing consistency with ranking - or some other form of instituting consistency. The key is to let the person adopt whatever pseudo-name he/she wants, but have it go with a consistent and single form identity (avatar or any other form which stays consistent).

The forcing of real names has been a ridiculous idea. It solves one problem but causes many other.

[Santosh83]

A trivial way to mitigate this is to allow users to create psuedonyms, but not the ability to change them after they've been created, except to create another account. Most people won't bother.