Peeple app for rating human beings causes uproar | Hacker News Reader

Peeple app for rating human beings causes uproar

bbc.com

33 pointstheklub31 comments

Fascinating new form of MVP, this. See how much outrage you can create before writing a line of code:

http://m.snopes.com/2015/10/01/peeple/

That "Peeple Watching Webisode" was so cringeworthy.

This is alarming, yes. You know what is more alarming? The fact that hardware and websites have conspired together along with brick~mortar retailers, and cell phones, to create an entire profile about everything I do.

Then at some point in the future someone can buy this information. Then some young HR person who has read too many pop psychology books will determine "You're not a good fit" or much, much worse.

The PR effort behind this app is amazing. I feel equally intimidated and flummoxed when I try to imagine how they achieved such marketing success. Why did anyone care about this particular app before it started the frenzy, and why does(did?) it continue to grow so much?

I wouldn't really say it's PR, it's more like it just went viral. As in, I wouldn't say the Bedroom Intruder guy or Charlie Bit My Finger had great PR. They just did something that touched a nerve and people pounced.

> I wouldn't really say it's PR, it's more like it just went viral.

When the seed for something viral is a feature story in the second most important newspaper in the country then that's called PR.

PR is cheap if you're willing to grossly violate social norms.

I find the reaction to this app idea a bit confusing and irritating. Clearly the community this app would attract would be toxic, that should be obvious to everyone at this point.

I would make sense to me if the conversation was around "Why build an app specifically to encourage the behaviour we already mostly wish didn't exist on the internet". The fact that people act this way, even with their real names attached on Facebook, makes a story. That someone is trying to focus that aspect of human behaviour and encourage it with an app makes a story. That it's a widely held opinion that this app would immediately become a toxic hellhole of garbage content and trolling makes a story.

Instead, people are pretending that this app adds something new. Twitter is already used, very frequently, to name and shame people or to rate them negatively in some way. And they don't get to "opt out" either. I can't opt out of some blog or Facebook post or mass email saying nasty things about me. There is literally nowhere on earth were this is the case. The concept of being able to opt out of anyone being allowed to mention you in a medium seems to have been invented for this story.

The same goes for the "how can we be sure a rating is justified or the rater even knows the ratee?" or any of the other concerns. They all boil down to "anything that lets you publish speech online allows you to libel/slander someone online". Everything I read about this insults my intelligence in a fairly novel way.

They really aren't doing themselves any favours here:

'Peeple co-founder Julia Cordray told the BBC: "With any new concept there is naturally fear. "When the people found out that the Earth was round instead of flat and that we revolved around the Sun instead of the Sun revolving around us, naturally people were upset and confused and they pushed back with all that they had.'

Somehow I don't think that the heliocentric model is a useful comparison to make to your idea for a website...

I understood that to be a joke, and I was amused by it. It's not intended as a literal comparison.

I'm absolutely wary of any technology that's going to enable/encourage bullying or trolling. I think there's a fine line between censorship and ensuring a safe community (especially in the wake of the Oregon shooting and corresponding reddit thread), but I see this app leading to Bad Things happening.

That said, the thing I'd like to see the discourse focusing on is not necessarily an app that encourages bullying, but bullying itself. I think the intensity of the uproar this is causing is throwing up a huge red flag - people as really scared about bullying. I think we as a community/country/world should absolutely talk about Peeple, but in talking about the symptom, I hope we can also get to talking about the root cause and what we can do to treat it.

Bullying is something that people do because it's easy -- picking fights with people who can't fight back. So this maybe be a fine distinction, but I think that anything that enables or makes bullying easier is not just a symptom, but is contributing to the root cause. In any communication tool, certain kinds of interactions are easier than others and are thus encouraged. For instance, the fact that Facebook has like button but not a dislike button is a deliberate choice that affects how easy it is to express different sentiments on Facebook. I believe it's possible to design a communication tool that encourages positive interactions and discourages negative ones.

Other good examples: George Orwell's concept of Newspeak from 1984, a language literally incapable of expressing concepts like freedom or dissent against the government. For another example, consider Journey, a multiplayer video game where the only possible interactions between players are positive or helpful.

>Journey where the only possible interactions between players are positive or helpful.

There was a GDC presentation a few years back where the lead designer Jenova Chen talked about how difficult it was to make only positive/helpful interactions possible. In playtesting even the ability to collide with another player was used against them, e.g. to push them off a cliff.

The presentation should still be online for free at http://gdcvault.com very interesting from a game-designing point of view.

From the Washington Post article:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/09...

> 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.

This seems like this would strongly disincentive anyone from registering for the app in the first place.

I guess it will take about three seconds before someone realizes you can give a person five stars (making it a "positive review") and then write a horribly negative review about them.

Maybe, but on the other hand it appeals to the darker curiosity of being able to see the bad things people say about you, not just the good.

Snopes suggests it's vaporware:

Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10319096

Snopes page: http://m.snopes.com/2015/10/01/peeple/

And of course, there's the problem of "Peeple the thing" versus "Peeple the app"

Submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10318966 (no comments)

Article: http://www.wired.com/2015/10/peeple-the-thing-versus-peeple-...

It's not all quite as recent and out-of-the-blue as Snopes suggests:

  Domain Name: forthepeeple.com

  Updated Date: 2015-10-02T15:06:29Z

  Creation Date: 2014-10-30T23:09:22Z

Unfortunately I can't trace back to 2014 to determine if the original registrant was alpha@mycareerfox.com

Archive suggests there was something parked there in December 2014

https://web.archive.org/web/20141217043318/http://forthepeep...

Whoisology shows alpha@mycareerfox.com as the registrant on 2014-10-31.

And the only older record they have is someone else registering it in December 2012.

Domain History has these records: http://www.domainhistory.net/forthepeeple.com

If anyone has a domaintools account they could get a better report (apparently 31 records going back 7 years with 18 significant changes) but I don't have one anymore.

Seems safe to say it was registered by these people Oct 31 last year.

This just sounds like a bad idea overall. Even if they resolve issue with negative reviews and bullying, why would we want to rate people? This is not rating their skill at something, or even their appearance, it is rating them as a person. That goes against everything that most people stand for.

Most of the time, we strive to live in a world where every person has value. Everyone is their own unique person, and we respect who they are. Although society often fails to live up to that ideal, I cannot fathom why someone would write an app to explicitly avoid it.

Throwaway for obvious reasons.

This idea already existed. http://eng.anarchopedia.org/Gossipreport.com

The date is wrong, though. It was more like 2007/08. They had strong PR going, from sheer outrage alone. There was a segment on Dr. Phil, where he proceeded (to his credit) to tear them a new one.

They were aiming to become the TMZ, for regular people. The site was real, it existed. I never found anyone I knew on there, but apparently they had real people (in addition to the number of obviously fake profiles to get people to stay and join). Not sure why it was shut down. They were running with a skeleton crew, so I doubt it was lack of funding. Most likely it was the backlash and the realization that it would cost a fortune in legal fees (defamation of character, anyone?)

1) Anonymous reviews of real people are unworkable, they descend instantly into the familiar internet culture hell of trolling and awfulness.

2) Nobody wants to write negative reviews of other people using their own real name.

3) Nobody needs a new destination to find faux-positive fluffy reviews of people by other people. To the extent there's demand for that, existing social media does it pretty well already.

Therefore, this will fail quickly and decisively if it launches at all, joining other similar efforts such as Secret and Ello that attempted to solve problems that didn't really exist in the first place with not very well thought out solutions.

Their PR team deserves every cent they're paid. International media coverage for a startup long before it has launched is really impressive.

They managed to upset thousands of people without even writing a tiny bit of code.

I'm gonna place my bet that the entire app thing is a hoax. Perhaps, it's going to end up as some type of documentary about privacy?

IANAL, but curious - would this actually be legal?

With anonymous unsubstantiated claims, would such a service not disintegrate in a big class action ball of libel?

Seems unlikely. From a legal perspective it seems a lot like Yelp.

The advantages this app will be bringing will be very less compared to the creepy features. I don't want to sound like a cliche, but there are no second chances once you are on there. People improve and change over time. But, once you have a history of everything for everyone to see, bad stuff comes back to haunt you.

Considering credit companies and advertisers have been sprinting along this path of rating human beings for a while now, maybe Peeple (if executed well) can provide a necessary counterweight?

The icon for this app should be an image of human excrements. Because that's what people will be throwing towards each other when using this app.

Sigh. As if online bullying was not a severe enough problem already. How many suicides will this contribute to?

Useless site advertising campaign fed up my news feed.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com