spottiness

One reason may be that the vast majority of young (very fertile) pretty women are not looking for dates online; simply because they have plenty of choices around them and therefore don't need to look in the virtual world. Males follow women in that category, wherever they are.

The author meant the users of the service, because it doesn't increase significantly the chances of meeting someone for a long term relationship, otherwise there would be less involuntarily single people out there (that's Greenspun's argument).

Our site "Spottiness.com" may serve you well, in particular the "Blackspot" section. We help people communicate anonymously and allow targets to respond. If your anonymity is paramount, you should be careful with your writing style and other clues.

Yours is a widespread feeling. The following is a blackspot to GoDaddy, from December last year, that tells a similar impression: http://www.spottiness.com/spots/PDJ5K3WR

Live announcement here now http://www.cmu.edu/event/sept7/

"That those who do not are inclined to do so unless heavily prompted not to is curious indeed."

What a confusing way of ending an article. It would translate into Ruby to something like this:

def ascribe_mental_acuity_to_the_dead?

  true

  unless believe_in_after_life

    false if heavily_prompted_not_to_believe_in_after_life

  end

end

You mean a lot of "positive" fake reviews, in which case people tend to fake positive opinions much more than negative ones. Definitely better than the opposite...

Amazon is a good example where "real name" reviews cause a bias towards positive reviews. I believe that most people are reluctant to write negative reviews if their real names are associated with it, even if the fairness of the review is not in question. Negative reviews always put a negative halo on the reviewers, so good reviews are overwhelmingly more common. Curiously in our site, where anonymity is a requirement, also the positive reviews dominate by far, which is indicating that there's much more good than bad in the world. Cool!

We are experimenting with reputation derived from complete anonymity since we believe that anonymity is required to maximize sincerity. In our current stage, we're manually moderating all the content generated, rejecting what looks fake based on common sense and intuition. If we ever generate traffic above a certain threshold then we have a mechanism where the content is validated by the creators themselves. Basically, the writers of opinions ("spots" for us) will have to evaluate other opinions before they can post their own, and a decision is made based on the number of coincidences among all the reviewers of a specific posting. We got the idea from previous work by CMU's Luis Von Ahn, in particular his (now Google's) ESP game.

These are examples of anonymous reviews about hotels that we have in our site:

A positive one => http://www.spottiness.com/spots/BHBZ8QJT

A negative one => http://www.spottiness.com/spots/RKTPXLJJ

Interestingly, they don't have the strong deceptive indicators...