Peeple

» see forthepeeple.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

peeple was an american panic that i watched from a safe distance. in the autumn of 2015 two women in the bay area announced an app that would let anyone write a star-rated review of anyone else, coworker, ex, neighbor, without asking first. i was in ankara doing computer vision work, thirty-one years old, and this was the sort of story that reached turkey as a news item about how strange silicon valley had gotten, not as an app anyone i knew would install.

the concept was simple and awful. you could look someone up, or add them if they were not already on it, and leave a public rating on a five-star scale. the announcement framed this as building character and accountability. everyone else read it as a harassment engine with a clean logo, and a change.org petition against it passed eight thousand signatures within days.

so the founders retreated. by the time peeple opened to the public in march 2016 the star ratings were gone and negative reviews needed your consent to appear. the whole thing had been sanded down into a mutual-compliments app that was harmless and pointless, and it died the quiet way, no shutdown post, no farewell screen, just a site that stopped mattering and then stopped loading somewhere around 2018.

~ the record ~

~ the firestorm ~

the reaction to peeple is more remembered than peeple itself. for about a week in october 2015 it was the thing everyone online agreed to hate, a rare unifying villain. the founders got death threats, which is its own ugly overcorrection, and the coverage ran everywhere from the washington post to late-night monologues. the app had not even shipped yet. it was being buried on the strength of a press release.

~ what it predicted ~

the uncomfortable part is that peeple was early, not wrong about the direction. rating humans became normal in pieces, from driver scores to the quiet reputation numbers baked into every gig platform. china's social credit experiments made the dystopian version literal. peeple tried to do it all at once, out loud, with no cover story, and got torn apart for saying the quiet thing. the softer versions that said nothing are still running.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »