For anyone who thought anonymous reviews on Yelp didn’t have enough potential for abuse comes the Internet’s creepiest new idea: Unvarnished. Now in beta testing at getunvarnished.com, the site allows users to rate co-workers, managers and subordinates in an anonymous forum that has virtually no controls on fairness, accuracy or accountability.

For instance, one company’s employee could log into Unvarnished and write of a co-worker, “Has no ability to finish projects—incompetent,” and this review would shadow that employee for the rest of his career, easily accessible to future employers who can then not hire said person based on information that has no proven veracity, and may be written for any number of malicious reasons unrelated to anyone’s actual performance. Mad at your boss for not giving you that raise? Just don’t like the way a certain employee looks at you? Unvarnished could be your revenge.

The gimmick is that in order to defend yourself, Unvarnished wants you to come to the site, take ownership of the fact that the person being slandered is you, and defend yourself with a response. In a cringeworthy moment that revealed creator Peter Kazanjy knows exactly how terrible and wrongheaded this idea is, he was asked by TechCrunch’s Evelyn Rusli if there are any circumstances under which a user could take down their own profile. “No,” he replied, “because if we did that, everyone would take their profile down.”

Exactly, and therein lies the insidious truth about this site: there is basically no upside. Yelp, which works under a similar system, has thrived on the fact that users want to be seen as “in the know” about the best places to eat or otherwise do business; thus, they have an incentive to share their experiences fairly honestly and praise spots they love. Even so, the abuses on Yelp are legendary. Fake reviews both positive and negative, planted by companies or their rivals, are widespread. Personal vendettas are commonplace. Try to find a business owner who doesn’t have a complaint about the site.

Now that same concept is being shoehorned into a forum where there is no real reason for users to write anything positive, unless they are personal friends. Meanwhile, the possibility for malicious abuse is exponentially higher even than a Yelp. It would seem then, that both positive write-ups and negative write-ups would have to be considered so potentially biased so as to be worthless.

Of course, the new site has all kinds of workplace watchers and cultural critics up in arms, though many of them seem to have taken a “wait and see” attitude. Rusli does not, as when she tries to give the site the benefit of a doubt:

Let’s look at the few, real safeguards on Unvarnished: if a user has a dummy Facebook account (recently opened, no friends) and writes a negative review that post is automatically blocked. In addition, the community votes on how helpful a review is and positive ratings improve the trustworthy rank of the reviewer— a modest incentive to be fair. The truly vile and illegal trash– like false allegations of homicide– will be flagged and immediately removed. But let’s remember: there’s a wide spectrum between downright illegal and ambiguously negative. You could raise serious doubts about a person’s ethics and competency without proof and — let’s be honest here— without even believing your fabrications.

Other sites, as she points out, have tried a similar idea—jerk.com has “jerks” and “saints,” but has so much trouble attracting interest it’s resorted to paying money for user interaction. On the other hand, glassdoor.com seems to be doing okay with a higher-minded and more even-handed approach to feedback on the workplace. It’ll be interesting to see how users respond to this new opportunity to libel online.

In her “Molly Rants” column, CNET’s Molly Wood sums it up well:

To me, the biggest barrier remains the fact that the reviews, however closely monitored, are presented to the public as being anonymous--sure, there's a real person back there who's slightly more accountable than your average troll. But they can still speak without fear of being identified. And anonymous commenting is actually one of the things about the Web we like the least. That's not a forum that should have the potential to affect people's livelihoods.