Names Should be Attached to Reviews
I’m all for product reviews, service reviews and even doctor reviews. After all, that’s why 1800blogger started this blog. We allow people to market their reviews about all services, whether good or bad.
Unfortunately, the proliferation of websites which allow people to review products anonymously without at least an email verification is a dangerous practice. In fact, all product review sites should adopt some verification protocol that makes the person who reviewed something accountable. Unfortunately, these sites are in the content business and therefore, they have removed all registration barriers in order to gather as much content as possible. This is a problem.
I know a doctor who recently had his practice ruined by an overzealous patient who was allowed to band together with a few of her friends to literally ruin this person’s practice. Should she have been allowed to write her review? Yes, but when she recruited a few of her friends to write reviews on this doctor in which the friends had never visited the doctor, I have a problem with that. This doctor has literally been ruined after 12 years of training.
Look at it this way. If you owned a restaurant, should an anonymous patron of your restaurant who had a bad meal (even the best restaurants will serve a disappointing meal, it’s the nature of food) be allowed to post 12 bad reviews about your restaurant on a restaurant review site so that these reviews will be the dominating search result on the search engines? If the answer is no, then you’ll understand my hesitation about anonymous product reviews.
