Over at Only a Game today, a discussion of three kinds of anonymity – alone, unknown, and unguarded – that compares the original online worlds of MUDs to Twitter and Facebook. Here’s an extract:

The MUD was the direct precursor to Facebook and Twitter, which descend from earlier copies of the chatroom concept, such as AOL’s offering, which lacked the fictional world but kept the name. Yet abuse in MUDs was comparatively rare, and rapidly resolved by Wizards whenever it occurred. Anonymity may still have fostered abuse, but the systems were in place in MUDs both to guard against it, and to discourage it from happening in the first place. The most effective deterrent against online abuse is community – and the MUDs fostered this far more than the latest digital public spaces.

You can read the entirety of Lessons from the MUD over at Only a Game.