@arjafi: So what should I do? I've half a mind to just comment nothing but a link to meta.math.stackexchange.com/q/2831 every time Doug writes a meaningless comment (I actually still read what he writes to determine whether it is meaningful).
@MartinSleziak: I personally believe that if some piece of information is worth sharing, the people who have it will not mind registering to do so. If they think it is too much trouble, then its worth was actually less than the inconvenience! Also, it is logically obvious that observations of unregistered users posting useful information provides no information whatsoever about what would happen if they had to register to post. Furthermore, see the following upvoted comment:
"I found in my years of blogging at Coding Horror that the value of one person happening by with some gold nugget of absolutely the right information you need vastly outweighs the cost of ongoing moderation of anonymous posts." I'm not sure that, in my years at Stack Overflow, I've ever seen an anonymous user leave a true gold nugget. — Lightness Races in OrbitNov 19 '14 at 14:20
Exactly the same experience I have had at Math SE and Math Overflow.
@user21820 To be honest, I would not be able to say whether I saw such a "nugget" or not. When I see a good answer, I do not always go to check whether it was posted by a registered user on by a an unregistered user.
But to be clear, I am not advocating for either side. I can see that there are arguments for and there are arguments against requiring registering. I copied a part from a highly upvoted answer from main meta on the topic. (The answer is from 2014, theoretically the opinion might have changed since that.)
To give credit, I would not have found that question, if it had not been linked by Normal Human in this comment.
@MartinSleziak: Yes I understood that you were merely quoting the upvoted post. I was also just giving my (no doubt subjective) opinion. Requiring registering will of course cause a decrease in posts, but the important question is whether it will decrease the overall quality. I think not.
We will see. But first we should probably find out at least the answer to Asaf's question whether there is something new about that. So we'll have to wait to see what the mods tell us about this.
@user21820 I just deleted that entire exchange. While the first comment of Doug's and your response may have some value, I fear that leaving any would just lead to a continuation.
@arjafi: Okay. So how about the comments he scattered on my other posts that I mentioned? They are really content-less, even compared to the longer exchange.
