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Comment by nostromo | Hacker News Reader

> To solve the anonymous review problem, its time to inject real identities into recommendations.

People are usually more honest when speaking anonymously -- not the other way around. It may help with astroturfing and flaming temporarily, but competitors and trolls will always find a way around real identity online.

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I acknowledge your point about people having the courage to be more honest when speaking anonymously, however I suspect that mostly applies to public fora. If you consider limiting scope to only people you know or trust, I find comments can be much more valuable and transparent. Furthermore, humans are really good at applying personality filters to people they are familiar with... (disclosure: I work at urbantag)

Persistence is what is needed, not anonymity. I don't care if the guy that wrote the review is of the opposite political persuasion than me. I just care that the last 3 restaurants where I ate on his recommendation were good, so the 4th is probably good too.

EDIT: I am suggesting using sha1(full_name + salt) as the displayed name.

>People are usually more honest when speaking anonymously [...] It [real ID] may help with astroturfing [...]

In the EU astroturfing is unlawful/illegal (not sure which) under the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive (UCPD).

Interesting point - what if your reviews are shared between your friends? Our findings are that people can be honest in a community where they know their recommendations will mostly help their friends find great places.

i sometimes don't trust my friends' recommendations. what if my friends and I don't share the same tastes? or, maybe my friend recommended a sushi place, but it was the first time she tried sushi...

The problem with that is I don't need a digital way to manage word-of-mouth from my friends; I can handle that mentally. I need a way to find out about places my friends haven't been to.

Interesting & strong point.

We're looking to solve that problem as well -- its a darn big challenge!

Take the number of your friends. Subtract the "lurker" ratio, which most studies show to be pretty high. Now subtract the ones who have never been to the place you want to see the review of. Now subtract the ones who went there but didn't review it (because do you leave reviews of every single business you use? if so, where do you find the time to do anything else?). The mode of the result will be 0.

If your friends are homogeneous and outgoing, you might achieve the critical mass necessary to have more than just one review on a handful of local businesses.

On Yelp, I have many local places with 0 reviews period, let alone by people I know.

Broader comment: Tying identities to reviews won't do squat. If I tell you I'm Bob Thurmond, put up a photo of an older white guy, and exercise even a modicum of identity management, who's going to be able to tell otherwise?

That, and often I need recommendations when I'm not in my usual place, like when traveling. The odds that my friends would 1) use the service and 2) review a place I'm interested in are very low.

If I want a recommendation from my coffee aficionado friend... I'll just ask him.

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