Some great comments here. Allow me to blather a bit.

"By only voicing your dissent anonymously you are reinforcing the frame of the censor"
- by discouraging anonymity you reinforce the power of the censor, not just directly, but also indirectly by causing people to mindlessly self-censor and never realize they might actually believe the forbidden stance if they entertained it.


"So what to make of the fact that the world's first decentralized, peer-to-peer content protocol is filled with anonymous handles? The optimistic view is it's just a remnant of centralized media where someone really could throttle your reach or de-platform you for wrong-think, and anonymity were more necessary."
- Bitcoin is pseudonymous. Nostr is less so. I think humans have a flaw, and that is that we have a hard time loving people in the real world that we know think differently than us. Sometimes we kill them. Sometimes we simply don't hire them. That's why we have laws to protect freedom of speech. Laws that don't prevent people from being hired by a private company because of wrong think. A lawsuit is so much more messy than just being a nym and not having to deal with it at all. Anonymity tempers those weakness.


"creativity-killing self-censorship resulting therefrom"
- yeah once the net effect on creativity is 50/50 maybe we start discouraging nym use. For now, it doesn't even close. Anecdotally, a while ago I said something to a friend that could easily have gotten me cancelled in the recent environment. For 24 hours I stressed over whether he would go to the presses. I watch as my mind convinced myself I didn't mean it. No wait, i did! I couldn't have.. In the end I had no idea whether the gears of social pressure and possible exile had changed my mind, or whether I had actually discovered my error.

What data could we use to inform whether we should be discouraging or encouraging nym use?