It gets popular. The community becomes a mess, it becomes costly to police, you have people upload an ID and the world hates you for invading their privacy, management shifts resources away since its stable-y making money regardless (given some Byzantine model that matters to ownership anyway) and then it falls victim to bit rot.

So a replacement to your goodreads replacement comes along...

Some would hate it, but if it actually improves the quality and the company has some security chops I’d see it as a selling point.

I'm defining "anonymous to the world" or "anonymous publicly", whereas you're defining it as "anonymous to everyone, even the company".

But in the scope of a book review website, and this thread about preventing spam by having ID enforced, my comment made sense as that. The company knows you, but you can have an anonymous handle to the world. I had clarified that with the line about trust.

It's good opsec to assume all private data at companies may get leaked, including links between your ID and your name.

Consider the scenario where somebody is reviewing books on dangerous subjects (politics, religion, LGBT+, etc...) and is suddenly outed to the whole world due to a data breach.

For other types of applications you’d want to have a better system, like a writing platform.

But still, there’s ways to do it. You can validate the high res copies of whatever you want to validate, then make a hash using a few key numbers, in partial. Stuff like that gets you close to ideal, even the worst case break would expose almost nothing, and you’d prevent duplicate accounts. Only risk is losing the documents during validation before they’re deleted.

An anonymous review website could similarly rate limit how quickly reviews change, so someone spamming 1,000 reviews accomplishes little.

If it worked well, I’d use it in a snap.