*We* didn't come up with the generic-ID idea as a protest against overly-snooping site registration procedures, not by a long shot.
Sometimes site owners (or their Webmasters) deleted such generic IDs, but the "cypherpunk community" just created new ones... Turned into a battle of stamina -- each Webmaster on his own, against a HORDE of anonymous 'Net surfers; how would *you* think that turned out in the end?
That's why I said a while back that creating the "iwethey/iwethey" user ID on the NYT, for example, was unneccesary: I remember back on SleazyBoard how someone (Greg?) tipped us off to "cypherpunks4/cypherpunks(4?)"; when that didn't work any more, recently, I just incremented it to find out that "cypherpunks6/cypherpunks(6?)" still works.