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Anonymity increases the variance of behaviors that people will demonstrate online.

When you use your real identity, your actions carry risk with them, so you tend to bring your actions towards the population mean. If you choose to dress in an outlandish way in New York, you might wear a pink sweater and orange jeans. At Burning Man, where your real identity has been shed temporarily, you may wear a toga or nothing at all.

The dirty look you give someone in "real life" might become an unspeakably rude comment in an anonymous forum. But the funny dance you invented to go along with a Daft Punk song might be something you choose to share with the whole world under the veil of anonymity.

When something changes the variance of a human behavior without changing the mean, you'll never be able to come to agreement on whether it's "good" or "bad" -- it's just different.