[eitland]

You are right that it would still be pseudonymous. Some problems:

1. LinkedIn is probably easy to game to create fake accounts.

2. HN already has email addresses for many (most?) users and could easily map most of those to LinkedIn accounts one way or another.

One of the really great things about HN is that they've been trustworthy (AFAIK). Unlike a good number of other sites they haven't done all the things they could do.

3. The more you do to identify users the lower concentration of really high quality users one get it seems. As newspapers decided on Facebook comments the only one that would show up to comment were:

- those who didn't realize or didn't care about the privacy implications

- those who just had to anyway because they felt so strongly about the topic

- trolls with faked Facebook accounts

[staunch]

I don't think it's that easy to game LinkedIn accounts. Faking the account age and number of connections is non-trivial, for example.

I don't think it would limit the high quality participation, at least not by very much, and that could be mitigated. Maybe users that do not link their accounts could still comment but not vote?

There would definitely be some trade-offs but the current wholesale domination of corporations on HN is a huge trade-off in one direction as well. It seems a very high price to pay IMHO.