Unvarnished: A Clean, Well-Lighted Place For Defamation

Why do you find that amusing? The cut out the second part of that sentence which was "everyone would take their profile down in the case they get a negative review."

Your desire to 100% control your image does not trump the rights of free speech that others have. For example, I can't remove any of the comments here on this site making reputation claims about me, because it would be censoring you. And it would injure the rights of others to consume that information.

Just because I have an interest in making everyone think that I am 100% A+ 99th percentile doesn't mean I can censor you.

Yes. That is extremely important to provide balance to the conversation. While I can't infringe your right to express your opinion about me, I certainly do have a right to add my voice to the conversation. Unvarnished allows profile owners to claim their profile, respond inline to review, request more reviews from their network, and so on.

You're right on the money about 'focal point'. Right now, reputation conversations already happen, but they're sprayed all over the web. I don't know who's saying what about me on what blog or what twitter stream. Moreover, I don't know how authoritative that blogger / twitterer is, when I'm reading claims they make about someone else.

On Unvarnished, the interests of the three sides of this conversation are balanced: the profile owner, the reviewers, and the review readers. No one's interests trump, but there is a framework and rules for the discussion.

Well, this is the sort of thing that we believe persistent identity and review graph analysis will help us prevent. We are committed to ensuring that the content on the site is not spam or shilling, and that it remains a place for productive conversation about professional reputation.