Everyone you know will be able to rate you on the terrifying ‘Yelp for people’ | Hacker News Reader

Everyone you know will be able to rate you on the terrifying ‘Yelp for people’

washingtonpost.com

> If you haven’t registered for the site, and thus can’t contest those negative ratings, your profile only shows positive reviews.

So, that's a pretty good incentive not to register.

For some reason this reminds me of the debacle [0][1] where some site was accepting "tips" from users who wanted to support any GitHub project of their choosing. They did it without explicit opt-in of the project owners (Armin Ronacher in this case).

Quote [2]:

> But nevertheless i think tip4commit should be opt-in instead,

> because i consider the current tactic to be a very intrusive form of growth-hacking.

[0] https://github.com/tip4commit/tip4commit/issues/127

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8542969

[2] https://github.com/tip4commit/tip4commit/issues/127#issuecom...

First post from me: rate Nicole McCullough and Julia Cordray 1 star.

So instead of signing up for every imaginable libel suit by posting uncontested "negative" reviews, they're going to hold back a little, and just monetize my name and likeness without my permission.

They clearly have a crack legal team.

If the company/server is located in a place outside your preferred jurisdiction, then they can do anything they want, I guess :/

On the bright side: you can still post reviews about yourself. Or create hundreds of identities for yourself, and rate them so differently that nobody could ever tell which one is the real you.

this is fine if you have f-u money, but for everyone else it sucks

Your online presence is becoming your new, indelible permanent record. Anything incriminating, so long as it’s archived on a major search engine or social network, can and will come back to hurt you. The rich, such as Rap Genius co-founder Mahbod Moghadam who was fired from the annotation service after posting comments about Elliot Rogers, don’t have to worry so much about the consequences of reckless online behavior because they at least retain their equity in the said company, so being fired is just like a permanent vacation. Now the 9-5er who gets fired only has unemployment to fall back on. Much worse. But those online comments will also hurt your future job prospects, leaving you with no recourse but to request they be removed (fat chance) or pay inordinate amounts of money to a reputation firm to bury the results. If you’re really smart and talented your skills may be so valuable and rare that employers may overlook your past transgressions. So we see with the abnegation of privacy and anonymity, like most changes of the post-2008 economy, primarily impact those who are the most vulnerable, and there’s nothing anyone can or will do about it. The only solution is be careful what you post on Facebook, Twitter or elsewhere, and if someone slanders you, there isn’t much you can do that won’t cost a lot of money and time.

This is a horrible, horrible idea. I mean, people are already using platforms like Facebook to bully people, not caring it's done in public and under their real name. Now there's a platform optimised ror that mode of interaction. I hope the founders are simply cynically using the shock value to make a quick buck and don't actually think it's a good idea.

Apparently Peeple founders are not fond of being reviewed themselves:

https://twitter.com/sharonodea/status/649575258123579392

Edited to fix typo

From the article:

"To add someone to the database who has not been reviewed before, you must have that person’s cell phone number."

I don't actually own a cell phone, for personal reasons. But that's looking like an even better choice...

"Positive ratings post immediately; negative ratings are queued in a private inbox for 48 hours in case of disputes. If you haven’t registered for the site, and thus can’t contest those negative ratings, your profile only shows positive reviews."

So you can opt out by not having a cell phone number, the rest of us can opt out only of having "negative ratings" posted. For better or worse, aren't they disincentivizing their potential users from registering accounts with this policy? (I suppose they know their potential users better than I would.)

That seemed odd. Why jump through a hoop just the first time?

I remember in elementary school the popular kids passed around a survey in which they ranked every student in our grade based on some nebulous combination of attractiveness, coolness, etc.

This will probably not be that much different.

this kind of apps resurfaces every few years... first one that springs to mind is Honestly (formerly known as Unvarnished). it also sparked a huge public backlash when it appeared in 2010, but went nowhere. where these kind of services fall apart is basically numbers: how many people do you know well enough (and care for/hate enough) to write a review for? 5? 6? And how many people would care in what you wrote? 10? 15? Unlike a restaurant, which is frequented by thousands of customers each of which is a possible reviewer, people don't generate enough "traffic" for the system to work (not to mention the overall negative social sentiment, as evident from the backlash - the public reacted just the same 5 years ago).

pity really, as I think some kind of a "reputation" system would really benefit people in general, both for professional and personal reasons. If quantified it might even replace money in the future (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whuffie). I am certain that one day the whole concept of a "stranger" will be obsolete - we shall know everything we need to know about somebody upon meeting them (which is probably going to be the reason we are meeting them in the first place). Of course there will still be jerks but they'll just no longer be able to hide it from unsuspecting others.

For the same reason as why you shouldn't have a service that locates where sex offenders/ex inmates, this service shouldn't exist. So many things can go wrong with something like this...

I was raising four daughters in a nice suburban neighborhood. They were starting to ride bicycles up and down the street. Knowing which house the sex offender lived in (only 3 houses away) let us steer which areas they could ride in (didn't tell them why), and led us to say that they couldn't go out riding alone. I thought that was definitely important information.

Yeah, you can be worried about the consequences to the sex offender. There's a valid argument there. But I'm worried about the potential consequences to my daughters.

And the situations aren't comparable at all. I get to be a sex offender by doing something. I get on the wrong side of this new site by annoying just one person.

You can get to be a "sex offender" by annoying just one person, too.

This is one of the gags in the movie Amazon Women on the Moon. [1987!]

Guy (played by Steve Guttenberg) goes on a blind date, and the woman (played by Rosanna Arquette) asks him for ID and then performs some sort of database search which reveals his dating history in detail (such as that he had sex with some woman and never called her after that). She refuses to continue with the date, and the skit finishes with him calling some woman that he had dated before. First thing that woman does now is ask him for ID ...

Not so funny any more, I suppose!

> “People do so much research when they buy a car or make those kinds of decisions,” said Julia Cordray, one of the app’s founders. “Why not do the same kind of research on other aspects of your life?”

So, what kind of decisions is this supposed to help me make? Whether to be friends with someone? Isn't getting to know them "doing the research" for that?

Apparently the tech bubble is going to burst very soon. What a ridiculous and horrible idea.

It's interesting this was built by women, since they will obviously be the biggest victims here. I wonder how many reviews will be "nice tits", "great ass", "gives good head", etc

They should of just called it Yelp for hot chicks

"Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies! Rivers and seas boiling!

Forty years of darkness! Earthquakes, volcanoes...

The dead rising from the grave!

Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together... mass hysteria!"

So they can detect sarcastic positive reviews?

>[your name] it’s there unless you violate the site’s terms of service.

Well thats a new take on T&C.

What, no face recognition? Well, they have to launch with a MVP.

This will be handy for raids

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