FTC's rule banning fake online reviews goes into effect

I think we ought to be focusing not on whether it was "real", but on whether it was written by somebody that the user trusts (or maybe there are n trust-hops between reviewer and user). That way users have recourse when they're misled: they can revoke trust in whichever connection exposed them to the misleading review.

Eventually the scammers will be isolated such that they're just paying each other to lie to each other, meanwhile the rest of us can be authentic with each other: we need to learn trust hygiene and bake it into our apps.

I would love a restaurant review site that could tell you “your brother’s friend from college has been here once and liked it”.

I'd definitely use that, though I'd prefer a social graph protocol which restaurant pages just sort of tap into, rather than having a dedicated site. That way we can use the same trust graph for many applications rather than having the restaurant review graph be separate from the scientific peer review graph which is separate from the trusted mechanic review graph etc...