Articles and famous profiles, sure, but this is personal. PersonRatings.com is a website where visitors can anonymously review and rate other people. Unlike the famed and apishly simple HotOrNot, it’s highly personal with names and reputations on the line as the crowd rates a target’s intelligence, sexiness, classiness, and sense of humor, among other attributes.
Self-proclaimed Yelp for people, PersonRatings is intended to be an online reputation resource working against self-promoting Facebook and LinkedIn pages. Users can upload photos of the subject of review, write a bio, pay to run a background check, or set up an alert whenever a new comment is made about the person.
Jimbo Wales,
Kevin Rose
Call it Gossip 2.0, a streamlining of the horrors of Jimbo Wales, who created Wikipedia, doesn’t currently have any friends at PersonRatings. He’s considered not very smart or sexy or funny or friendly, kind, classy or trustworthy. Adolf Hitler, who apparently lives in Georgia these days.
You can thank some anonymous commentators at Ars Technica writer
Jacqui Cheng
Technically, PersonRatings.com should be covered by the Communications Decency Act regarding computer services and user-generated content; so when the so-called wisdom of crowds gives over to digital character assassination, the site’s (probably) legally in the clear.
That doesn’t usually stop lawsuits, though, and if the site itself escapes defamation liability, some commentator somewhere some time in the future will likely stare down a subpoena.
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