Why they want your email address…

Gawker Hacked: Seeing Past Your Nose | Jeff Nolan – Venture Chronicles:

 

 

However, did you ever wonder why media sites force you to register in order to comment? They want your email address and identity information for driving marketing and promotions as well as enabling data services businesses. They provide no real utility in exchange for getting you to hand over a piece of personal information… unless you consider their email products useful.

 

Two words — trolls and griefers.

I’m actually a little disappointed to see people still don’t understand this — and I’m not pretending that the marketing aspects don’t exist (they do), but if you don’t have some way of managing access, then at some point, the trolls and griefers WILL move in, and you have a problem because you can’t stop them. So you need some form of identification, and the most reliable (but low-friction) way of that is by email address. Part of the reason that succeeds is because the free email services have all had to deal with the spammers and trolls and griefers and are fairly effective and limiting their ability to do high volume email address creation, and you can hide behind their shoulders to a degree by using email as an identifier. For these kinds of situations you don’t need to know who a person is, but you do need to know that this person IS a specific person, so you can block further access by them.

Take a look at just about any site that doesn’t have registration, and you see a commenting/discussion area that’s useless because it’s been taken over by trolls, griefers, porn spammers and people who believe the way to win an argument is to be the last person screaming.

Bottom line, if you run a nice sports bar where people gather to talk about football or hockey, and a band of bikers drive up and wander in and start demanding beers, you have two choices; you either kick the bikers out, or you turn into a biker bar, because they’re going to cause everyone in your primary audience to stop coming and go somewhere else. And today, online, the most effective limiter for these situations is the email address. The occasional really motivated troll that’ll continually reinvent identities to come back and keep abusing your site can usually be handled as a special case, and msot of the bikers can be kept out by choosing which addresses you can block and prevent further abuse of your system. Don’t have that, and you’ve lost.

 

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