Awful, Awful Peeple

Urge To Say Mean Things Rising

So there was a lovely example of utter and complete Start Up Fail this week in the media. First came the news in the Washington Post that a new start up (Peeple, because the concept alone wasn't creepy enough without hinting at clandestine viewing) was coming to be "Yelp for everyone", where users would get to post reviews of, well, anyone they'd meet.

After the WaPo shot the fish in the barrel for a few hundred words for privacy violations and the rights of the general public to not worry about getting their lives ruined by a problem neighbor with time on their hands, social media joined fire. Now, the founders are backpedaling to say that the reviews have to be positive and approved by the named user, so the too creepy but potentially voyeuristic and useful site is being replaced by non-stop fluffery that's unseen outside of a talk show couch.

A few points:

1) There is, of course, next to nothing shown here that you can't already do with other applications that you've already heard of; you can write a blog that says how so and so kicks puppies, start a Facebook page over how your 4th grade teacher is in need of abuse, and so on. The fact that no one uses them for this purpose, because it's beyond the pale of human decency and can't drive sustained traffic on its own, seems to have eluded everyone involved.

2) While the truth is always a defense against libel and slander, it's also generally difficult to prove, and expensive when court is involved. It's hard to imagine how a successful Peeple rollout wouldn't result in a great deal of work for the nation's lawyers, which is yet another reason to really dislike this.

3) Honestly, did we need another way to be horrible to each other?

4) Short of paying the site to not be on it, how is this a business?

No one reads the Internet for B+ opinions, and that 1 and 10 ranking rule isn't going to make for nice moments among humanity. We also, as individuals, tend to limit our marketability moments for, well, professional marketability, and to have who we are while on break or vacation or whatever impact our professional lives is always dicey... and even more so when, unlike a lapse on social media, it wasn't entirely self-inflicted, and indicative of a lapse in judgment.

I get that this is now a gig economy. But it really does not need to be a bad gig, with always-on criticism. Work-life balance, people.

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