  In communities with social hierarchies, fear of judgment can discourage
communication. While anonymity may alleviate some social pressure, fully
anonymous spaces enable toxic behavior and hide the social context that
motivates people to participate and helps them tailor their communication. We
explore a design space of meronymous communication, where people can reveal
carefully chosen aspects of their identity and also leverage trusted endorsers
to gain credibility. We implemented these ideas in a system for scholars to
meronymously seek and receive paper recommendations on Twitter and Mastodon. A
formative study with 20 scholars confirmed that scholars see benefits to
participating but are deterred due to social anxiety. From a month-long public
deployment, we found that with meronymity, junior scholars could comfortably
ask ``newbie'' questions and get responses from senior scholars who they
normally found intimidating. Responses were also tailored to the aspects about
themselves that junior scholars chose to reveal.
