[philipkglass]

I have seen little correlation between absence-of-extremism here on HN and how much information people provide about their identities. You can see that brand new throwaway accounts are more likely than others to post extreme rants, but I don't see much difference between year-old accounts that are totally anonymous and year-old accounts that link to personal web sites, GitHub profiles, LinkedIn profiles, etc.

Our local newspaper used to allow people to comment on stories with a Facebook account. People who were using real names and had publicly posted enough information that you'd be able to quickly locate where they lived frequently went on extreme rants.

The newspaper eventually just got rid of Facebook-powered comments, but I see the same behavior (terrible comments under real names, easily linked to employers/homes/schools) on the neighborhood's Nextdoor discussions.