I was going to write a new post, but then I recalled that this thread existed. Since it has been almost two years since this discussion started, I’d like to reignite it again.
It is my opinion that while anonymous notes can be incredibly useful at times, they’re also rife with abuse and spam. I do not believe anonymous notes as they function right now are a net benefit to OpenStreetMap.
During my time as an OSM mapper I’ve encountered many situations where anonymous notes were used in a harmful way. Some of them include:
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I’ve seen anonymous users create hundreds of notes in a short time, often just copying information from other oftentimes unknown sources. Example
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Many anonymous notes are pure spam.
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People sometimes unknowingly share private information, not knowing notes are public.
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Sometimes people leave harmful, intentionally incorrect, or abusive notes.
One situation specifically stands out to me. A person was angry at us (the Dutch community) for mapping his driveway. He created hundreds of progressively more abusive notes. Notes insulting fellow OSM mappers, threatening to sue us, or harm us. This culminated in the anonymous person accusing a user of being a pedophile and including that person’s address in their anonymous notes. context
Example of abuse:
Of course non-anonymous notes can and are also being abused. However the signal-to-noise ratio of notes from registered users is generally much better. Plus, when someone is abusing the note system, it is of course, possible to block that account. With anonymous users it is very difficult to do such a thing. The DWG has the ability to automatically hide certain types of obvious abuse, but that system is far from foolproof.
Do people believe that the benefits of anonymous notes outweigh their downsides?
Is something like Block anonymous notes above a given threshold · Issue #5934 · openstreetmap/openstreetmap-website · GitHub a good compromise?