Joshua Schachter (inventor of del.icio.us) sent me this nice addition to the literature of "Well, we didn't expect the community to do X!", this time from the euology of Kvetch.com (via the Wayback Machine -- all hail Brewster.) Kvetch was meant to be a write-only complaints board -- you could go and kvetch about whatever was on your mind. You would also see other people's kvetching served up randomly, and of course your kvetching would be added to the random pool for others to see. There was no identity, and no search. And yet a community (kvommunity?) of sorts grew up. The eulogy is short but scattered -- I quote the relevant portions here: I love that last one -- it reminds me of Old Man Murray (now archived), a brilliant gaming site whose bulletin boards were nothing but puerile filth, lovingly written. On OMM, there was no 'identity management' whatsoever -- you just signed yourself in under a particular nickname, but anyone else could post under your name, and you could post under anyone else's as well. And yet there was not only identity, it was so strong that when one poster posted under another's handle, not only could the community usually tell it was a fake, we could often guess who faked it. Our identity systems, and often our reputation systems, try to reduce identity to a question of globally unique IDs (GUIDs), but a GUID is not an identity, and an identity is not a GUID. If people could invent and defend identity on kvetch, which had not only no identity management but _no login_, then we're missing something in our current approaches to digital identity, which are often both unsubtle and overengineered. "Identity is important, even in ephemera like this."