Saturday, February 23, 2008

RottenNeighbor: The Worst Idea Ever?

I came across the Rotten Neighbor site today. It's a brilliantly simple concept: You sign up for a completely anonymous account (no email needed) and then post any comment you want about any person who lives anywhere on earth. Your comment is geocoded in a layer over Google Maps. There's no moderation, no evidence necessary, and no need to leave any info about yourself. In other words, it's an anonymous, untraceable, slander machine.

This isn't even like Emily's List, where you pay a little and sign up and post opinions about merchants and contractors. This is just a list where anyone can say anything about anyone else, and also point to their home on a map. What possible value could this have to others? I can't imagine this not leading to someone getting shot within 18 months.


(And no, that ahole neighbor who keeps threatening to call the cops because someone else's dog barks at 10 PM hasn't posted me on here. Hey! Maybe I should put up an anonymous note about them! This is great!)

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Somebody needs to write a script to go through their website and add "shitcock" to every single address.

Anonymous said...

The consumer site is Angie's List. Emily's List is the women's political fundraising thing. Oh like anyone gives a shit.