Is Peeple a force for good?

Today, Twitter users and journalists have criticised the creators of an app called Peeple, currently in testing and set to launch in November, which will allow users to "review" other people in the way that, say, Tripadvisor allows you to review restaurants.

Critics say the app could have unwanted effects. Many women, in particular, fear that the sort of instinct which leads furious men to hurl misogyny at them on Twitter and other platforms could manifest in very ugly ways on a review app. But the app's creators say that negative reviews will be stalled online for 48 hours so that the subject can review them, and have told the BBC they will be assessed independently to ensure they meet terms and conditions which include a ban on profanity, abuse, sexual references and other damaging criteria. They point out that "You can share the positive things that you say about people or the positive things that people have said about you through our sharing features."

Will this help us build relationships more intelligently? Or is it a step too far in our ratings-driven online culture?

A village of haters

AC Grayling—Master of the New College of the Humanities

It was, one supposes, inevitable that someone would create an app for rating and ranking people, a "Yelp for human beings" (Yelp being an app for rating restaurants, shops, services and the like). In reply to an almost universally negative reaction to the idea that anyone you encounter can publicly rate you on a five-point scale, its originators say, "As innovators we want to make your life better and have the opportunity to prove how great it feels to be loved by so many in a public space," and they describe Peeple as "an online village of love and abundance for all."

Do they really think this? They are naive at best. For it will more likely prove to be an "online village" of trolls and haters, of bitchiness, of the unbridled nastiness which the internet in general and social media in particular can so horribly spew out. It is easy to imagine the hurt, depression, libel suits, revenge assaults and even suicides (Facebook has its victims already) that this unpleasant idea could prompt.

No doubt lots of people will get positive ratings from friends and colleagues; the question is not about the good such ratings will do, but the harm their opposite will do. Negative reviews of you as a person from anyone who cares to post one, including strangers, will take thick skin or robust self-confidence to endure: these commodities are in very short supply in our world.

Twitter and other media already provide "slander-as-a-service," as The Register calls it, but this ratchets up the potentialities for harm because of its simplistic ad hominem aim. Everything that can go wrong with such an idea will go wrong, that is for sure.

Improving dating

Jon Birger—Fortune contributor and freelance journalist

There is a similar app that’s gaining popularity in the US that’s called Lulu, and I think this is a force for good. In the US, there are more college-educated women than college-educated men (the gap is similar in the UK) and that creates an imbalance in the dating market—as I show in my book, Dateonomics. This has given men too much leverage. When women are in oversupply, so to speak, in the dating market, it incentivises men to “play the field” and to act badly.

But even though the roots of this behaviour probably are evolutionary, people, unlike animals, have a moral conscience, and have an ability to change our behaviour. Once everybody is made aware of the fact that men are taking advantage of an un-level playing field and acting badly, men will have to change their behaviour. I think these kinds of apps can shine a light on this conduct. The New York Times did a story on Lulu about a month ago which said that men are actually competing to get high scores on it.

I come to this as somebody who normally covers the stock market and finance, and there are all sorts of examples in behavioural finance of how, once you expose inefficient decision making, it changes behaviour. There’s a famous example on the stock market of the “January effect," where people used to sell money-losing stocks in December for tax purposes and then buy them back in January. This created a short-term buying opportunity for stocks in December, but as soon as everyone knew what was happening everyone started buying stocks in December to take advantage of the January effect, and the whole effect went away because it became exposed. I kind of feel like something similar could happen here.