Intentionally buggy commits for fame—and papers

Quite. What matters isn't that your name is real: it's that it has a reputation. Real names are if anything a kludge around the bootstrapping problem that nobody has a reputation to begin with, and at least with a real name you can in theory, I dunno, phone the person up and rant at him or something. (Or get the police involved, if it's really bad). But if your pseudonym has a reputation that's bigger than your real name's, so be it.

I mean, I've been using the same pseudonym on the net ever since I started, for about 30 years now. I'm certainly better known under that pseudonym than under my real name, and frankly (for the same reason) I probably care more about spoiling the reputation of that pseudonym than I do about my real name. In that situation, the only justification for using my real name instead is as a legal figleaf. The name with the rep is the other one.

Chosen rather than externally-granted identities are the in thing these days. If they have a good reputation, why not treat them as similar to the legal one? (I suspect that if you don't do that you're significantly reducing your chances of getting input from younger people anyway.)