Unvarnished: A Clean, Well-Lighted Place For Defamation | Hacker News Reader

Unvarnished: A Clean, Well-Lighted Place For Defamation

techcrunch.com

17 pointsn8agrin25 comments

So, I guess one strategy here would be to fill your own profile full of stories so obviously fake that they discredit anything that might be true.

Nope, then the employer will assume you must be covering something up (which is true) and not hire you "just in case".

Not if you fill thousands of other profiles with the same rubbish too. Then it's a level playing field.

Again, that sort of thing will be tough to do based on what we've built. You can't just spin up new account programattically. You have to use a verified Facebook account with a sufficient level of activity to prove humanness.

We're committed to implementing countermeasures that prevent bad content from coming onto the site. In similar fashion to how Reddit Karma and other reputation systems moderate content and kick off bad actors.

If it is the way it is now, smart people will automatically start discrediting the site. So, I don't see a need to worry excessively.

The site is actually full of awesome content of a very productive, professional nature. TechCrunch's headline was hysterical and designed to draw pageviews. Mission accomplished! The conversation on Unvarnished is more akin to what you find on HackerNews than on, say, 4chan.

I'm wondering how far you can really take it, and still be inside the boundaries of the law?

What is the limits of stalking for example? Could we follow the life of a RIAA lawyer and post photos and detailed description of his day to day life?

Private information that is not business related will be deleted from the site, and get the reviewer banned. (and not just kicked off the site. Ban his FBUID forever, such that he'll have to invest in a whole new FB identity that passes our threshold of "humanness" before he's let in again.)

So yeah, it's not a good idea to engage in behavior that violates community guidelines.

“Will you ever give users the option to take down their profile?” “No, because if we did that, everyone would take their profile down”

I find that remark quite amusing coming from the creator.

Why do you find that amusing? The cut out the second part of that sentence which was "everyone would take their profile down in the case they get a negative review."

Your desire to 100% control your image does not trump the rights of free speech that others have. For example, I can't remove any of the comments here on this site making reputation claims about me, because it would be censoring you. And it would injure the rights of others to consume that information.

Just because I have an interest in making everyone think that I am 100% A+ 99th percentile doesn't mean I can censor you.

This will most likely be illegal in France (ianal, just a feeling).

There is probably a counter business here: "destroy your unvarnished profile".

Either an expensive hand crafted one or, depending on their "spam" filters, Mechanical Turk farmed.

(I can't quite describe the whole reasons but I find this particular site wholly distasteful)

Well, this is the sort of thing that we believe persistent identity and review graph analysis will help us prevent. We are committed to ensuring that the content on the site is not spam or shilling, and that it remains a place for productive conversation about professional reputation.

This reminds me more of Get Satisfaction than Yelp - in the sense that people perhaps aren't even after publicity, but they can get listed anyway. Only now it's individuals that can have their reputation held to ransom!

Correction to your point: On Yelp, you or I can add a restaurant, doctor, dentist, whatever, to the site in order to review them.

Again, people can speak about me without my permission.

And no one's reputation is being held ransom. Individuals can claim their profiles if they like, or ignore it if they like.

Hey folks. Sorry for being so late to the conversation. It's been wild with the amount of media coverage we've been getting. I'll try to respond to comments.

I wonder if underlying users get a chance to respond to negative material. At least this site can be focal point for rebuttal. Negativity shouldn't be feared.

Yes. That is extremely important to provide balance to the conversation. While I can't infringe your right to express your opinion about me, I certainly do have a right to add my voice to the conversation. Unvarnished allows profile owners to claim their profile, respond inline to review, request more reviews from their network, and so on.

You're right on the money about 'focal point'. Right now, reputation conversations already happen, but they're sprayed all over the web. I don't know who's saying what about me on what blog or what twitter stream. Moreover, I don't know how authoritative that blogger / twitterer is, when I'm reading claims they make about someone else.

On Unvarnished, the interests of the three sides of this conversation are balanced: the profile owner, the reviewers, and the review readers. No one's interests trump, but there is a framework and rules for the discussion.

So, am I reading this right, in that someone can create a profile for you without your consent, and you can't stop it from appearing?

Correct. You can speak about me without my permission. We do it all the time offline, and we do it all the time online.

people with more friends could quickly down-vote each other's negative reviews and write scathing reviews for whoever they wish to bully

unless they explicitly bar people below a certain age, this site will wreak havoc in children's social lives

Actually not. Because we can see, in the backend, the reviewing patterns, along with a variety of other tools, it's possible to discern when folks who have likely not worked with each other are reviewing each other.

Also, the site is only for people 21+ years of age. Very good point.

My crystal ball shows that the future is cloudy, with a chance of defamation lawsuits.

Another strategy would be to write a few well-written, plausible, damning reviews of yourself. That way you weed out prospective employers who are stupid enough to believe any old garbage they read on the intertubes.

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