Peeple sites 'disappear' from web after backlash over app
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TnZa18F8QW4
submitted here:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10331184
This isn't even a new idea. There's apps to rate ex-boyfriends and such that are obviously focused on being negative. Just for example http://www.ratedexes.com/add-person/john-carreiro-251332-vic...
Then how do you explain the success of Yelp, which is basically the same thing but for businesses? Or the school system, which is already designed around rating people? Or safeorscam, which was the same thing but for drug dealers? Or LinkedIn testimonials?
Certainly there are a ton of challenges to coming up with a good implementation — business, social, epistemelogical, etc. But I think the possibility space is too large to rule out the possibility of a feasible implementation.
Businesses aren't people. You can't bully a business into suicide, for example.
> Or the school system, which is already designed around rating people?
On academic merits. And sure, there's social rating, but it's not a public Internet page saying "untrustworthy liar" that anyone can find.
> Or safeorscam, which was the same thing but for drug dealers?
See businesses.
> Or LinkedIn testimonials?
Perhaps a fair comparison, but that's not evaluating objective worth or something, it's evaluating employability and is as cordial as business tends to be.
Imagine rating your friend's dinner party the same way you'd rate a restaurant on Yelp, and you can get a sense of the difference.
And that's why I said that coming up with an implementation that accounts for these sorts of issues would obviously be challenging. These specific founders may or may not be smart enough to do it, but that doesn't say anything about the inherent possibility of doing so.
I'm not saying I have a good solution, because I don't, but I'm also not willing to bet that there is no solution out of hand. And while I fully expect that this startup won't be successful, if only because of the difficulty of the problem, I also don't think it's fair to trash talk the founders without at least taking a look at the actual mechanics of their system.
Yelp is successful as a business, but I consider its impact on businesses to be negative, because Yelp has a perverse incentive to let businesses influence Yelp reviews. Naturally, businesses complain about Yelp, even though consumers like it. For the same reason, people would complain about a rating system for people.
> Or the school system, which is already designed around rating people?
This is perhaps the most toxic and least successful part of the modern education system.
If someone had posted something ruinous for someone else's reputation, which also happened to be false, there's always libel lawsuits. Beyond that, to quote Mrs. Feynman's question to her famous husband, "what do you care what other people think?"
"Hey, I just met this great girl and she seems nice - oh, here on Peeple I see that 27 people in high school said she smells funny and one person says she murdered a baby."
With no verification or checks, what exactly is the point of this app, other than to be used to abuse people to suicide, ruin marriages, get people fired or other similar nefarious tactics? Are people really going to be all that interested in using an app to say 'hey this dude seems swell'.
What's going to prevent people from accusing random men of pedophilia, or random women of cheating on their husbands, or saying some person uses cocaine all of the time at their employer, without proof of any of these things or even a real connection to someone?
Extortion, blackmail, peer pressure and public humiliation come to mind. I don't know what the benefit of honest reviews would be for anyone, though.
This certainly seems like an idea better suited for the black market, however, since all the ways I can think of to make money at it are bound to be illegal somewhere, if not everywhere.
Extorting businesses to suppress bad ratings, probably.
> the school system
Do you really think the quality of education is "successful" or something to be proud about?
> LinkedIn testimonials
That's a source for good reviews, not mixed reviews.
and do you really assume school rating system is a correct method?
Kind of a combination of involuntary facebook account and unselective LinkedIn testimonials.
We all do this rating in real life. Sometimes people talk about their ratings of other people with each other ("yeah, I know john, he's really annoying"). You know which of your friends are good and which are not... Why not make this open knowledge?
Suppose Alice tells me that Bob is flaky and can't be relied on. I need a lot of information in order to be able to evaluate that claim.
* Maybe Alice and Bob were in a relationship a few months ago, and there was a bad breakup. Alice's experience of Bob would probably be different from my experience of Bob.
* Maybe Alice also told me bad things about Carol and Dan, so I think that Alice just has a dim view of people in general, and isn't willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.
* Maybe Alice heard everything from Eve, so I need to consider whether I trust Eve.
* Maybe Bob got chosen over Alice for a promotion at work, even though Alice has seniority. So Alice might have an axe to grind.
* Maybe Alice hangs out with Frank and Grace, who bully Bob. So Bob naturally wouldn't want to be friends with people who bully him, even though Alice isn't doing anything wrong.
When I get this information from Alice in person, I can ask questions or just listen to Alice's tone of voice to figure out the kind of things I want to know about Bob. Putting the information in text form in an application makes it much harder to evaluate Alice's claims, because it only make's Alice's opinion open knowledge.
For example, if all the people who leave bad reviews of Bob are all friends with each other, it should count as a single bad review (so as to not double-count the evidence), and if Alice left bad reviews of several of your friends, it should know that you will probably find Alice untrustworthy, because she dislikes the people you like.
Not that we can trust Peeple or any other app to get that right, but it sounds like it should be possible.
When Alice gives a bad review of Bob, I think to myself, "Why is Alice giving a bad review of Bob?" I'm putting myself in Alice's shoes. There is absolutely no hope that a computer program would be sophisticated enough to do that, not yet, not for at least a decade (translation: possibly not in my lifetime).
Computers can't even solve the "simple" problem of matching people in romantic relationships. When we throw computers at the more general problem of human interactions and trust, we should naturally expect them to completely botch it.
Unfortunately, I think you can hit some mines related to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theore... but who knows? Maybe it won't happen given that you don't want a transitive relation, you want a numeric score for each driver. (Such a score could be used to influence insurance premiums; as an anarchist, I'm generally thinking about solutions for problems like "suppose we don't have patrol cops".)
(1) People ratings are far too subjective to be considered "knowledge". We have none of the context needed to evaluate the validity of these ratings—the kind of thing you can suss out when gossiping in person.
(2) People can and do change, but these ratings would persist. It makes fresh starts and self-improvement that much more difficult.
(3) People can and do forgive, but these ratings would serve as permanent reminders of bad deeds.
(4) What problem do these ratings solve? I see many problems created, but with no real benefit.
Incidentally, you could solve (2) by "dimming" the relevance of a review as time goes on, eventually clearing it altogether. You could also have a "faster dimming speed" for younger people than for older ones, on the grounds that the young are stupid and the old are probably harder to change.
That can't be the case with personal ratings, because there's no public evaluation or context or validation of each rating.
You talk about "dimming" as if it solves a problem, but what overall problem do personal ratings solve, really? "Dimming" is a solution patched on top of a non-problem. I don't get it.
When the experiences are put in print and published, they drudge up the past and make a dynamic thing a static thing. The printed version of a bad experience won't heal and forgive as people do and the rating won't reinvent itself as people do.
Even credit history is not kept for more than seven years if I'm not mistaken. People do change.
To quote John Oliver: "Have you ever been on the Internet?" Because people are vile and and love whitchhuts. They love destroing social reputation and status, witch is you litteraly need to survive.
Also, anonymity means people are less likely to self-censor. So you get more honesty. Sometimes honesty isn't nice. If you want statements that are only ever nice things to say, you'll have to accept that many of them are lies.
On video[2]: "I wouldn't want this app to just be positive (...) we don't live in a fairtale land (...) it would be pointless if it was all positive."
[1]: https://linkedin.com/pulse/julia-cordray-ceo-peeple-creating...
[2]: https://vid.me/ukIW
Community s05e08, "App Development and Condiments" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/App_Development_and_Condiments
Edit: That is about the whole peeple outrage.