Lulu

~ the obit ~

lulu was an app for women, about men, and i was only ever eligible to be one of the men in it. that was the whole design. women signed in through facebook and wrote the reviews, and men existed only as profiles to be scored. i was on the wrong side of that wall by definition, an ankara engineer who would at most have turned up as a data point somebody else was rating.

lulu started in 2011 and found its crowd on american college campuses, where the gossip it formalized already existed. you pulled up a man by his facebook account and saw a numeric score plus a set of hashtags other women had attached, some flattering and some not. at its height it claimed around six million users, and oddly about a million of them were men, signed up mostly to see what was being said about them.

the model was always going to draw fire, and it did, from men who found their names rated without consent and from critics who asked why the reverse would never have shipped. lulu softened over time, letting men opt in and out. then badoo, the dating giant behind bumble's early plumbing, bought it in february 2016. badoo turned off the rating feature almost at once and, keeping the founder, reshaped lulu into a conventional dating app. the thing that made it lulu was the first thing the new owner removed.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the cracks ~

the controversy was never really separable from the product. an app built on rating people without their say sits on a fault line, and lulu lived on it for its whole run. defenders called it women protecting each other with information. critics called it public scoring of private people. both were describing the same feature, which is usually the sign that a product has found something real and unstable at once.

~ what survived ~

lulu is a small grave, but it marked a moment. it was one of the first apps to take the oldest social technology, talking about people who are not in the room, and give it a database and a login. the anonymous-rating idea kept resurfacing after lulu, in campus apps and workplace apps that mostly met the same resistance. lulu got there early and made its noise, then got quietly folded into a bigger company that wanted the users and not the idea.

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