Oh sure, there are absolutely benefits to pseudonyms for the reasons stated, I just don’t think serial abusers change their behavior much either way. As long as the barrier to creating a new account is pretty low (i.e. consequences are minimal), toxic people will keep being toxic.

My issue is that moderation is a flawed concept, at least in the way Reddit/Lemmy do it. You either need strict rules (min karma, min account age, etc), all of which can be worked around, or you require very active moderation, which just attracts control freaks and power struggles.

I’m interested in distributed moderation. Everyone wants something different out of moderation, from content they agree with (echo chambers) to constructive content (challenge their opinions). And a distributed platform where content filtering happens on the client has a lot of potential for experimentation. This relies on steady accounts, but it doesn’t require me to actually know who I’m trusting, and it can happen behind the scenes (e.g. begin to trust users that moderate similarly). If done well, I think it will sidestep power hungry moderation while providing most of the benefits, with the risk that users will accidentally silo themselves. But I really like the idea in general of something between full anonymity and persistent pseudonyms.