Anonymity on the internet has always been a double-edged sword: it enables communications that might not otherwise be possible, but at the same time provides cover for nefarious and anti-social behavior. Last week a highly regarded web software consultant and blogger, Kathy Sierra, was subject to a cruel campaign of threats and degrading images, and the culture of anonymity was once again under attack.

It is certainly very obvious to anyone who participates in online discussions that anonymity facilitates a much harsher conversational style, emboldening people to say things they would not say if their name were associated with the comments. At the same time, the idea of the screen name is a venerable one in the online world, and truly verifying identities is pretty hard, and thus hardly any sites have a policy against anonymous comments. (Often you have to be a registered user of a site to comment, which means the site owners may know your name, but that's not the same as requiring it to be used.)

Howard Kurtz, the media critic at The Washington Post, suggested recently that requiring names was the answer to problem of abusive comments, which the Post – one of the few major papers in which comments don't have to be approved by an editor before posting – has been wrestling with lately. On one level I agree that requiring names has merit; any conversation is more meaningful when you know who is doing the conversing. But I'm not sure it would address the abuse issue.

Indeed, one of the issues we have at NewWest.Net has to do with commenters who are not anonymous, and who are not even abusive, but are simply so shrill and prolix in their rhetorical style that they drive everyone crazy. Not everyone wants a verbal swordfight when they join an online conversation, and it can be very off-putting to be instantly attacked at great length as soon as one disagrees with a certain point of view.

And, anonymity aside, how exactly do you define abuse? The nasty posts about Kathy Sierra were very obviously abusive, and perhaps even criminal, but in most cases it's not so clear-cut. At New West, we generally err on the side of not taking down comments unless they are brazenly abusive in some way and in clear violation of our terms of service. But some people say we should be taking a harder line.

My hope is that as the internet continues to grow and mature as a medium, some aspects of online culture will mature along with it. It's easy to forget that even today the people who tend to spend a lot of time online and be heavily engaged in web culture tend to be young, tech-savvy males. That also happens to be the demographic most disposed towards an aggressive kind of conversational style.

It's interesting on one level that bloggers have often made great hay criticising journalistic practices such as anonymous sources and calling for transparency in the media, but at the same time so much online writing offers no transparency at all. Many blog names were not intended to conceal with writer, but sometimes they do have that effect – another legacy of the computer culture’s long tradition of pseudonyms. If we're going to have productive electronic conversations in the future, we are eventually going to have to get over all of that.

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Jonathan Weber is the founder and editor in chief of NewWest.Net, a regional news service focused on the Rocky Mountain West in the United States. He was previously the co-founder and editor in chief of the Industry Standard