On: Please don't use hnreputation

[pbhj]

You could simply name all respondents by their response position in the thread, first is person1 (hope that's not too limiting!):

person1:yay person2:people here like intelligent comments person3:go to digg if you want to yay all the time person1:yay

And have an option to reveal names and/or show them on the mouseover link for personX.