Peeple: Like Yelp but with People

What if your value to the world could be summarized in asingle rating of one to five stars, generated by the opinions of the peoplearound you — a simple score that reflects your reputation, goodwill and generallikeability?

It's a compelling idea — and a singularly terrible one:While there's certainly an upside to being able to know immediately whethersomeone is creepy or trustworthy with the click of button, the dangers ofcontext-free judgment, translated into a dimensionless grade system, should bepatently obvious.

And yet, according to the Washington Post, entrepreneursNicole McCullogh and Julia Cordray are poised to unleash an app called Peeplethat gives anyone the ability to review anyone else, without their voluntaryparticipation or even their knowledge.

It's "Yelp, but for humans," as Post columnistCaitlin Dewey aptly puts it — a tool that promises to bring the same knee-jerkassessments, slanted critiques, shady vendettas and corrosive ranting that Yelpand other crowdsourced review platforms bring to small business, products,travel, literature, film and television and basically everything else in ourlives.

Yelping humans would seem to be the last frontier in thedigital economy's quest to invade, disrupt and reductively simplify therelationships that make up what used to be referred to as"civilization."

Older folk may recall that back in the days before theInternet, we often decided who we wanted to interact with based on personalrecommendations and mutual friendships. But the temptation to find faster andmore standardized ways of judging people has always been there.

Those temptations frequently turned into reality. The MiddleAges had heraldry, the crests and symbols worn on shields and banners toproclaim one's ancestral background and individual worth. The Victorian Era hadits social register, in which all the families and persons of prominence andgood character were documented. Postwar America saw the rise of "Who'sWho" lists. The 1970-80s gave birth to our still-feverish obsession withlists, records and statistics. And of course, our academic, professional andbusiness worlds have always featured grades, test results, ranks and audits ofour knowledge, skills and experience.

So Peeple isn't exactly a new idea — not even in the digitalspace. Back in 2008, Joe Fernandez and Binh Tran founded Klout, a service thatassesses your "social influence" on a scale of 1 to 100 (with 100being reserved for luminaries like Lady Gaga and Barack Obama). Though itoriginally tracked your activities on Twitter and other social networks tocalculate its mysterious ranking, rather than directly asking your friends andacquaintances for their opinions, it later gave members the ability to tag oneanother with areas of influence, allowing you to accrue the status of the Web'smost influential voice on meerkats or elbow macaroni or eyebrow lint.

App that lets girls anonymously rate guys

"This kind of thing has been tried many timesbefore," says serial entrepreneur James Hong, founder of the early rankingwebsite Hot or Not, which allowed people to anonymously rate self-portraitsuploaded by its members, who could then see how attractive they were to totalstrangers. "Try searching for Unvarnished" — a service thatencouraged people to provide anonymous ratings and reviews of bosses,co-workers and business relationships — "or Lulu, an app that's been doingthis with scale for a while on the dating market," by providing women witha way of sharing reviews and ratings of guys with whom they've had romanticrelationships.

All of these sites have run into similar problems.

There's the vast potential for abuse, either throughconcerted efforts at bullying or through the kind of logrolling and excessivepraise that makes even positive online evaluations suspect. And there's thefeeling of dehumanization that comes with the distillation of our identity intoa single number. Like a FICO score for life!

For all of the minor potential benefits that might come fromadvance scouting of prospective acquaintances, there's something icky ingeneral about services that turn the world into even more of a popularitycontest than it already is. Imagine being subjected to the whims of that weirdex-boyfriend you broke up with, that former colleague with anger issues, orthat high school classmate who still thinks you're in high school.

The Internet can be a social hell, full of anonymous slamsand idiotic flamewars. But you always have the option of logging off. If Peeplehas its way, the manic preschool reality of the digital world could beunleashed on meatspace. To paraphrase the wise sage Pogo, we will have met thetrolls — and they'll be us.

Source: http://edition.cnn.com/2015/10/01/opinions/yang-peeple-app/index.html

Image: http://www.nataliekim.com/images/073112_natalie_kim_superficial_2.gif

VOCABULARY:  

1. YELP  -   Yelpis an American multinational corporation headquartered in San Francisco,California. It develops, hosts and markets Yelp.com and the Yelp mobile app,which publish crowd-sourced reviews

2. Rating  - aclassification or ranking of someone or something based on a comparativeassessment of their quality, standard, or performance.

3. Dehumanization - to deprive of human qualities,personality, or spirit

4.  Sage - someone or something wise and judicious

5.   Flamewars - an argument between Internet userswho repeatedly provoke each other with personal attacks through e-mail andother forms of online communication.

DISCUSSION:

1   1. What do you think of the online rating system?(When people rate all kinds of things from products to services, publicly)

2  2. Do you agree that doing the same to people is agood idea? Why? Why not ?

3  3. How do you rate an individual?

4  4. What are the possible consequences of “Peeple”if it ever gets accessible to public?

    5. Comment on the implication of this to oursociety.