I think I agree with you that the downsides and inherent unfairness of the genetic attractiveness lottery outweigh the upsides of attaching a name to a face. It's an empirical question then whether this works for users.
Functionally the website would be a wasteland of white sameness without portraits, no way around that I think.
I'm not entirely convinced this service solves the linkedin pitfall of mingling jumphoppers racking up impressive paper stats and polluting the signal.
Move the photo on the profile to the bottom of it, and make it optional.
> You can’t really stop people from finding your face online if it’s on social media
Hey, some of us worked pretty hard for this to not be true, so at the very least the photo should be optional. I’m blessed with a common first and last name and outside of my HN username I am pretty un-Googlable. Someone very motivated could probably find an old photo of me or two but it’s not universally true that everyone’s photo is a simple search away.
But it becomes an added hassle for those people, thus making it UX hostile for stalkers. Who is actually going to Google each and every other name on somebody else's collaborator list? Some determined stalkers I guess, but they are not going to be deterred anyways.
On the point of faces not being found, as a counterexample, some of my former MDs did not put pics in their LinkedIn. Yet people in the industry knew them by name, even if they weren't rockstar investors or something. Having heard someone's name from other sources such as word of mouth or from newspaper articles is a much better signal than using names to recognize them.
Most people reviewing CVs don't need to see the real names. It'd be great to have a CV service that could render the CV either with or with out them.
Also, maybe I'm the only one, but I'm starting to experience a bit of 'mindfulness' fatigue. Seems like it's mindlessly being added to everything regardless of whether it makes any sense or not, so I dislike 'Mindful professional profiles' as a subhead.
What does this mean?
mask the photo and the name. use regional locale detection and user choice to make fake names for everyone, use GAN to create fake profile pictures.
Presumably you're talking about locale detection of the hiring company/reviewer rather than locale detection of the CV submitter.
I really like the idea, although practically it's probably not a good one in small companies where people are likely to actually work with the person whose CV they're reviewing.
I would say stick to placeholders that are obviously placeholders in order to avoid confusion. And obviously there are some people who do need to see the real names, so give them a clear deanonymise step.