

Ask HN: Review our startup, Spottiness.com - spottiness

Hi Everyone,<p>We need your help to make Spottiness.com more useful. Its purpose is to let people say what they honestly believe, without fear of retribution. The site would have been very useful to Galileo Galilei to openly talk about the earth and the sun; to dissidents in totalitarian countries and whistle blowers. Also to those that want to appraise great work and excellence just because it's fair. Your opinion will reach its target by email, letter, or both, and will stay in the Internet for a while. We hope that, with time, the perception that exists about people and things will emerge. Every opinion (spot) is moderated.<p>A big thanks to Hacker News!<p>Ah, and for the timid in love, we have lovespots ;)
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kefs
Hi.. I don't really have any feedback on the site, but didn't you ask this
yesterday?

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2463286>

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slater
I thought I was going crazy for a second there.

~~~
spottiness
:) DejaVu

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pluies
Clickable: <http://www.spottiness.com>

No HTTPS? That's kind of a show-stopper. If I were to be a whistleblower,
you'd be damn sure I'd go to Wikileaks or other operations offering secured
channels.

Oh, and just for the sake of arguing :) Galileo wanted to challenge the
religious establishment, and used his academic credibility to do so. The idea
that the Earth is not the center of the universe had already been brought up
before him, but his tenure (and research) gave a lot more weight to his voice
than a mere anonymous opinion.

That said, kudos for starting up. How do you plan to monetize? Advertisement?

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spottiness
Monetize? We have no plans yet. Just want the site to be useful.

~~~
spottiness
Although we send paper letters through regular mail for a small fee... (that's
something)

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donofrip
How do you intend to protect against slander? Or just outright
inappropriateness? Will you be taking down these sorts of posts?

I like the idea--we definitely filter ourselves in most forums. I'm just
wondering if it is practical.

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spottiness
Great question! Spots have to comply with a set of rules. For example, they
can't contain foul language, they can't target children, they have to be
anonymous, etc. We have 3 mechanisms to verify that these conditions are met,
that will kick in depending on volume: First, moderation by a few of us.
Second, moderation by a community of trusted users. Third (and most important)
self moderation, where spot creators have to moderate other spots for their
spots to be approved. In this type of moderation, revisions by anonymous users
are compared with other revisions to determine the intention of the reviewer.

We also have thumbs up/down and spam flagging in place to help us catch spots
that go through the cracks.

The target of a spot can respond in the comments section, and the comment will
be identified as such: "Target's Comment". This gives targets of blackspots a
chance to set the record straight.

In a nutshell, we are relying on human intuition and common sense to evaluate
our content. Some slander will occur, but our goal is to keep it at a bare
minimum. We believe that humans are candid by nature, so we expect the vast
majority of spots to be true.

Moderating anonymous postings in a way that scales is a very difficult and
important problem. We are working on it.

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imechura
when I try to visit your site, my company filters you. _This category is
filtered: Illegal or Questionable._

I wonder what is on your site that makes them think this, it rarely happens.

~~~
spottiness
Maybe the word "anonymous". It's a scary word for some organizations :)

Other than that, I have no idea...

