>>2590550Identity is simply important to people and important to any productive discussion. This is as much of a given as you being human.
There are many types of identity, and they smudge together at times.
Identity manifests in may ways on the internet. On forums you have member-since dates, usernames, signatures and post counters. On imageboards you have memes, tripcodes, avatars and flags. The difference between a traditional identity-bound forum and an imageboard is that forums prioritize individual identity while imageboards prioritize group identity, rather than enforcing no identity at all.
As a being that understands the concept of individuality, you're instinctively going to want to recognize individuals in your surroundings. You do it naturally, just as you need food or water you need to know you're interacting with other humans.
And for discussion and general productivity of a board, identity creates memory. If the participants of a discussion can remember each other, or even if just one of them can, discussion doesn't need to be born anew each time. It's possible to continue an earlier interrupted discussion without going over the basics first. In this way, identity lets discussion reach levels above the bare minimum.
Similarly, identity lets you consider other aspects but the post's contents in evaluating what someone else is saying. On a board such as /bant/, you can see a poster's flag to consider cultural and geological bias, and you can see a poster's ID to see his other posts for context. These features are inherently pro-identity.
In very very simple terms, forced anonymity is imageboard communism, the freedom to have or not have identity is free market capitalism. One rids people of their ambitions and the other enables productivity and progress unmatched by any other system.
>>2590678Nobody cared until 2007.
