ImgFlip is a community and anonymously-submitted memes have the potential to harm it.

I just had some contrary thoughts and realized it's sort of inherently unfair to be having this debate where anonymous contributors can't comment without revealing their identity: So here's the opposite position.

Anonymous submissions can help promote frank dialogue about sensitive issues such as mental health, race, religion, sexuality, or just promote advice seeking and giving. I could see why people might want to go anonymous.

I notice that certain sex-themed streams like "boobs" and "booty" tend to have a good portion of anonymous submissions. While seemingly superficial, even these streams in their own way help people get more comfortable being empowered and creative around their own sexuality.

So maybe a middle ground would be to continue to allow anonymous submissions but maybe have more aggressive moderation of anonymous submissions that seem to be borderline.

I went ahead and marked this submission “anonymous” for effect, the first time I’ve ever done so.

I read that ImgFlip is considering doing away with anonymous submissions, and I just wanted to say I support this.

Those of us who aren’t going by our real names here (the vast, vast majority) are technically “anonymous” as is. But I don’t think it’s too much for ImgFlip to insist on the bare minimum of accountability that a username tied to an email address provides, even if that isn’t necessarily a whole lot.

Ending anonymous submits still wouldn’t do much to stop the cycle of trolls who for mysterious reasons create and self-delete their accounts just about on the daily. But if any trolls out there are currently submitting anonymously on a regular basis, forcing them to commit to a profile and username would at least make it easier for other memers to suss them out.

Then memers can give brand-new accounts with little or no profile history as much credibility as they think warranted.