Okay. It was difficult for me to get past the headline. As someone who has been kicking around the the interents for years, and a complete believer in Godwin's Law (because I was on the Well and Usenet and Panix boards for years)
A Web site launched this month called Unvarnished goes so far as to make
anonymous comments its business model. It invites
"community-contributed, business-focused assessments of professional
performance" of named individuals, with commenters kept anonymous, which
means readers have no way to assess their interests or biases. The
subjects of comments can't remove them.<snip>
The Web is a great liberator, giving millions of people the ability to
offer opinions with the ease once reserved for, say, newspaper
columnists. The downside is that comment overload and anonymity create
more noise than wisdom. Since it's now clear human nature hasn't
improved with the transition to digital media, we should cheer efforts
to make it as easy for readers to decide which commenters to trust as it
has become to post the comments.[more]
