[mnicole]

It's tough; people are always going to want to base your judgment against your own work, but you don't need to be a designer to 'get' design, just as anyone can call themselves a designer to begin with.

If I'm an influential designer and my identity is known to the critics, it will have an effect on their responses. Likewise, if someone with a lot of followers critiques me, it will weigh heavier than the rest of the feedback simply because people equate of # followers with quality/experience/etc (even though that isn't always the case). I think for this reason, anonymity is at least important in the early stages so as not to skew results. Maybe give a week or two window to shuffle some people through, or wait until it hits a certain comment threshold, and then let the poster determine if they want the thread to go public or stay private.

I'm personally more apt to give better advice if I know my comments aren't going to be ignored right-off-the-bat based on my age, gender or job history, to be honest.

As far as incentive to keep coming to the site and giving legitimately good feedback, give them credit that they could display on their site, like a StackOverflow badge, provided that Swrm has a reputation like StackExchange and not one like Klout, where people will actually be proud of it because it means something.

What are your perspectives on keeping people from being anon?

[azilnik]

That's a really nice perspective, and probably not one I would come up with intuitively. If I understand you correctly and may paraphrase, keeping it anonymous will prevent skewed perceptions on weight of opinion based on "clout", and rather keep it relatively anonymous and base clout on positive contribution, with the addition of opportunity to show off positive contribution elsewhere?

[mnicole]

Nailed it.

[azilnik]

Haha awesome. We're reviewing all this great feedback trying to determine our best next move. It's a fun time!

Feel free to keep using the site, and please be in touch. Would love to hear more feedback or advice, as well as take a look at what you're working on.