Unwarranted hysteria me thinks
It’s fascinating how when we know a portion of a story or situation we can’t help ourselves from making up stories to fill in the blanks. The unfortunate part is it seems the parts we make up to fill in the gaps are almost universally negative.
I live in Vancouver and happened to catch a local radio interview with Julia Cordray, who is from our neighbouring province. As an earlier poster suggested, she could easily be accused of naiveté, but her description of how their app works makes the vast majority of the negative backlash seem like needless hysteria. In short she stated in the interview:
+ In social media you can say anything about anyone with little or no recourse and that “isn’t good enough” (not an unreasonable claim)
+ They wanted to make something that would help people raise their profiles to the next level, "because we deserve that". (oookay)
+ With their app nothing is anonymous, so all authorship of all reviews is public (transparency seems good)
+ With being compared to "Yelp for Humans": there are 14 million reviews on Yelp, and event though they are all anonymous 79% of them are positive. Meaning people are inherently good (nod to the naiveté thing, statistic unverified)
+ To sign up to their app to make a post/rating you use your Facebook account which must indicate you are 21 years old; a text will be sent to your cell phone for further authentication; and, your Facebook profile must be older than 6 months.
+ You can only post positive reviews about a person if they aren’t already signed up, and the receiver of the review has to “claim their profile” before the review about them will go live.
+ When a negative review (3 out of 5 or less) is posted it goes to the reviewed person first and there is a 48-hour period for you to work out "turning a negative into a positive" (more of that naiveté thing)
I am not a Facebook user, and so will never be a user of this app. Nor do I think I would be even if I was, but my honest impression from hearing the concept presented is that their intentions are honestly good. If someone puts themselves out there by either creating their own profile or claiming theirs after someone reviews them, then I think they are accepting the risk of whatever might come their way. The fact that no one can post a negative review about someone that hasn’t accepted that risk seems like a reasonable precaution to me.
She also manages to nicely diss Justin Bieber & Donald Trump in her interview, so you have to like that too...
Radio interview is here if you want to confirm the above:
https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=http://api.soundcloud.com/playlists/47687698
Stream: New "Yelp For People" Isn't As Bad As It Seems - Oct 1
Biting the hand that feeds IT
