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Comment by patrickmay | Hacker News Reader

Allowing names to be exposed by court order doesn't solve this problem -- people will just sign up with throwaway email addresses and, possibly, use Tor.

The best solution is a combination of reviewer reputation and compatibility matching. First, very few people are going to go to the trouble of creating a bunch of valuable reviews just to build up enough karma to be able to smear a particular business.

Then, even if someone were that motivated, if Yelp weighted the reviews I see based on how closely my reviews matched the reviewer's past reviews[], standalone smears would have very little impact.

[] Yes, I know that sentence should be taken out and shot.

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>people will just sign up with throwaway email addresses and, possibly, use Tor.

But what if real name was forced, like on facebook or google? There's plenty of precedent now if a judge wanted to declare that as a minimum amount of due diligence.

I can't comment at the Chicago Tribune without telling them who I went to high school with (through facebook comments.)

How realistic is that? Neither facebook nor google require a photo id\birth certificate so real name is vaguely plausible name + we will kick you off if we find out you lied. Not exactly something that I would present to a judge as evidence.

Sometimes, Facebook does require a driver's license or Government-issued ID:

   https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6632533

It's happened several times over the past few years. That's the most recent occurrence.

>But what if real name was forced, like on facebook

Facebook doesn't force real names in practice, I know a bunch of people who have Facebook pages under non-real names and a bunch of joke ones, ones for dogs, one for a trash can. Really, Facebook doesn't seem to care to enforce these.

And yet this happened a couple of years ago: http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/salman-rus...

Facebook doesn't force real names. But they do sometimes force you to use a fake name.

If your real name is Ben Dover or Mike Hunt, or Mike Michaels-Michaelson, then you might have to use a fake name.

Knowing it came from a throw away would give the plaintiff evidence that is fake, which will pressure yelp to take it down.

I believe Yelp and other sites that offer user reviews already implement strategies like that, weighing comments according to a reputation score based on comment frequency, average rating, bad language, time of/between submissions, IPs, etc. There is an article about that somewhere.

Last I heard, Yelp blocks all Tor exits. So no, Tor won't work.

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