The chief opposition to Blizzard's decision to enforce their Real ID system on the World of Warcraft forums (in the hope that eliminating anonymity will in kind halt trolling and general bad behavior) frequently returns to liberal (not liburl) themes of “privacy” and “choice.” Which makes Blizzard's tack look communitarian in contrast, hoping that if people know each other a little better, they won't attack each other so readily. It's the more optimistic reading of the subtext (the threat of having private information made public being the less optimistic intention, both of which are probably present in Blizzard's decision), but that's all we're doing here anyway—reading into subtexts. Some haberdash series of concatenated assumptions or another is going to decide the fate of this issue eventually, so here's one: having people get to know one another by interacting in a public forum under the auspices of candidness does not produce the same heartwarming result online as it does face-to-face. Long distance digital communication is not just personal communication “stretched,” it works entirely differently. It changes people and how they interact, and companies like Blizzard need to learn this before they try to drill a round hole into a troller's blockhead (trepanation, right guys?).