I don't have to expect repercussion for my daily life from speaking my mind.
That rather depends on what's on your mind. Example.
That a bad example given that the user in question wasn't anonymous. His address was easily found by another person without access to law enforcement resources.
There's definitely speech that can give you problems if it can be backtracked to your identity. In Western society using Tor and not leaking personal information should be sufficient for protecting that kind of speech.
For some kind of speech you have to think more about protecting your anonymous speech by technical means such as Tor than for other kinds of speech.
The guy in the example had the problem that he didn't expect repercussion for his actions and therefore didn't do the necessary protection of his anonymity.
A long blog post explains why the author, a feminist, is not comfortable with the rationalist community despite thinking it is "super cool and interesting". It's directed specifically at Yvain, but it's probably general enough to be of some interest here.
http://apophemi.wordpress.com/2014/01/04/why-im-not-on-the-rationalist-masterlist/
I'm not sure if I can summarize this fairly but the main thrust seems to be that we are overly willing to entertain offensive/taboo/hurtful ideas and this drives off many types of people. Here's a quote:
The author perceives a link between LW type open discourse and danger to minority groups. I'm not sure whether that's true or not. Take race. Many LWers are willing to entertain ideas about the existence and possible importance of average group differences in psychological traits. So, maybe LWers are racists. But they're racists who continually obsess over optimizing their philanthropic contributions to African charities. So, maybe not racists in a dangerous way?
An overly rosy view, perhaps, and I don't want to deny the reality of the blogger's experience. Clearly, the person is intelligent and attracted to some aspects of LW discourse while turned off by other aspects.