In communities with social hierarchies, fear of judgment can discourage communication. While anonymity may alleviate some social pressure, fully anonymous spaces enable toxic behavior and hide the social context that motivates people to participate and helps them tailor their communication. We explore a design space of meronymous communication, where people can reveal carefully chosen aspects of their identity and also leverage trusted endorsers to gain credibility. We implemented these ideas in a system for scholars to meronymously seek and receive paper recommendations on Twitter and Mastodon. A formative study with 20 scholars confirmed that scholars see benefits to participating but are deterred due to social anxiety. From a month-long public deployment, we found that with meronymity, junior scholars could comfortably ask ``newbie'' questions and get responses from senior scholars who they normally found intimidating. Responses were also tailored to the aspects about themselves that junior scholars chose to reveal.

翻译：在存在社会等级制度的社群中，对评判的恐惧可能阻碍沟通交流。虽然匿名性可以缓解部分社会压力，但完全匿名的空间会助长不良行为，并隐藏促使人们参与互动、帮助其调整沟通方式的社会背景信息。我们探索了匿名沟通的设计空间——在该空间中，人们可以展示精心选择的身份特征，并借助可信背书人提升可信度。我们基于这些理念开发了一套系统，供学者在Twitter和Mastodon平台上以匿名方式请求和获取论文推荐。针对20位学者的形成性研究证实，学者虽认识到参与互动的益处，却因社交焦虑而望而却步。通过为期一个月的公开部署实验发现：在匿名机制下，初级学者能够从容提出“新手”问题，并收到通常令他们望而生畏的高级学者的回复；同时，回复内容也会根据初级学者所选择展示的身份特征进行个性化调整。