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Comment by alfalfasprout | Hacker News Reader

More importantly, what's stopping a competitor from submitting a bunch of fake reports? The authenticity isn't inherent from the text of the report. Adding friction won't help here.

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Agreed. The text of the report is only a small part of it. We are looking at a range of other things on the back end. Also a scenario like that is a red flag to us, and it triggers further due diligence. It'will also trigger public health, who will then require people to pick up the phone, it will require a 72 hour food history so on, physical site investigation. It does not work like 50 reports come in, and an outbreak is immediately declared - far from it. That is just the start of further work. Not to say someday the system won't be gamed, but we are doing a lot of hard work to ensure it does not happen.

You throw around high report numbers, but most listed locations have one report.

I would probably like it to receive a warning about a recent report a place has while I'm there.

How about user verification, perhaps even with a verified doctor visit getting a higher trustworthiness rating?

I would consider DineSafe to be a nicer, more memorable, internationally better-faring name than iwaspoisoned.

We roll data off the site after 30 days, so you are only looking at recent history, and also not every report goes live on the site. I think the largest we had reported in this period are maybe a couple of cases citing between 20 and 40 people sick.

Thanks for the sentiment re Dinesafe. Iwaspoisoned.com is not for everyone, but it does fare well on search and being memorable.

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