Personally, pseudonymity wasn't that helpful, its not that I didn't want to risk my good name or something, as much as that I just didn't want to be publicly wrong among intelligent people. Even if people didn't know that the comment was from me per se, they were still (hypothetically) disagreeing with my ideas and I would still know that the post was mine. For me it was more hyperbolic discounting than it was rational cost-benefit analysis.