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posted by martyb on Wednesday April 29 2015, @01:35PM   Printer-friendly
from the APPropriate-measures dept.

Andrew Marantz has an interesting read in The New Yorker about Lulu, a mobile app already downloaded five million times that allows female users of Facebook to make positive and negative evaluations of male users on the basis of their romantic, personal, and sexual appeal. Lulu is rigidly heteronormative—only women can rate men—and women tend to use Lulu the way someone investigating a potential mate a generation ago might have sought out the town busybody.

“It’s one of these rare products that evokes only strong reactions,” says Sam Altman. “No one feels ambivalent about it.” To rate a man on Lulu, a woman selects from a battery of pre-written hashtags—some positive (#LifeOfTheParty, #DoesDishes), some negative (#Boring, #DeathBreath), and some ambiguous (#DrivesMeCrazy, #CharmedMyPantsOff, #PlaysDidgeridoo). Those responses are distilled into a harshly precise numerical score. Alexandra Chong calls her startup “a community where women can talk honestly about what matters to them.” Others have called it Yelp for men. “Of course people on Lulu talk about sex,” says Chong. “Sex is part of what women talk about.”

A man must grant his permission for a Lulu profile to be created on his behalf, and, perhaps surprisingly, most men consent, says Chong. “We try to tell men, ‘Women on Lulu are building men up, not just tearing them down.'” Many women use Lulu for caveat-emptor purposes, such as managing expectations before a date. “One guy I went out with had a lot of hashtags like #OneTrackMind," says Sarah Burns, "so I dressed conservatively, didn’t drink too much—I tried to send the message, I’m not going home with you tonight. Which I didn’t.”

 
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  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Wednesday April 29 2015, @02:42PM

    by GreatAuntAnesthesia (3275) on Wednesday April 29 2015, @02:42PM (#176627) Journal

    The whole concept has "gender-war flamebait" written all over it, but also "legal minefield". Doesn't anyone else remember when it was a given that "All girls on the internet are men"?

    How exactly do they enforce their "no guys" rule? Will they send someone round to check the contents of my underwear if I attempt to sign up? Are you supposed to validate yourself via a credit card or Facebook or something? Email in a photo of your tits? Will they accept people who identify as female but are still biologically male? Can't wait to see all the LBGT folks start picking holes in that policy.

    Basically, if a guy can get an account on this stupid site (and I doubt it's difficult, at worst you just have to persuade/pay a friendly female to sign up on your behalf) then it opens it up to all kinds of abuses. He could use the fake female account to open a profile on his real male self, flag himself #TotallyNotACreepyRapist and away he goes. In fact I predict that within weeks (if not already) the site owners will be playing fake-account whack-a-mole against communities of male-owned fake profiles all fraudulently rating one another favourably in an attempt to game the system and get laid. Who's going to accept responsibility when that all goes horribly wrong?

    Also, I can't wait to see what happens when guys start having profiles opened about them without their consent (it will happen, despite what they say). I expect words like "Defamation" and "Slander" will be used. In court.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 29 2015, @02:56PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 29 2015, @02:56PM (#176635)

    Are you supposed to validate yourself via a credit card or Facebook or something?

    From the summary, emphasis by me:

    a mobile app [...] that allows female users of Facebook to [...]

    So yes, you are obviously supposed to validate yourself via Facebook.

    • (Score: 2) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Wednesday April 29 2015, @03:19PM

      by GreatAuntAnesthesia (3275) on Wednesday April 29 2015, @03:19PM (#176644) Journal

      AH, OK, thanks.

      And of course, it's completely impossible for a man to set up a fake female facebook account.

      This is dangerous. Women will put faith in this app, they'll abdicate their own judgement to some random stranger on this app and get burned by people abusing the system. Baaaaaaad idea.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 29 2015, @03:34PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 29 2015, @03:34PM (#176654)

        > And of course, it's completely impossible for a man to set up a fake female facebook account.

        Of course not. But your black and white analysis ignores the grey which is where all the important stuff resides.

        Think of it like Amazon. Yes there are fake reviews on amazon, it is impossible for Amazon to eradicate them completely. But most fake reviews are obvious. It takes a lot of work to create multiple believable reviews. A guy on lulu who has ratings by a bunch of 'women' with low-content profiles is going to be suspicious. And all it takes is one bad review from an obvious real woman to screw up whatever plausibility there was before. And then what is he going to do? Abandon his facebook account and create a new one? That won't look suspicious.

        Online social networks mimic real world social networks for things like reputation. In real life you can't blindly trust gossip either, but that doesn't make it completely useless, it just means you have to be smart about how you use it.

        • (Score: 2) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Wednesday April 29 2015, @04:19PM

          by GreatAuntAnesthesia (3275) on Wednesday April 29 2015, @04:19PM (#176699) Journal

          > But most fake reviews are obvious.
          Are they? How can you be sure?

          > It takes a lot of work to create multiple believable reviews.
          I suspect you underestimate the amount of work a man is prepared to invest to get laid. More than they are generally prepared to invest in misleading amazon customers, certainly.

          > And all it takes is one bad review from an obvious real woman to screw up whatever plausibility there was before. And then what is he going to do?
          If it's that easy to destroy a guy then expect bitter, shunned men with fake accounts to grief the system by shitting all over the profiles of genuinely popular men, damaging the system's credibility and pissing users off. You could probably work in some kind of meta-moderation and appeals process to mitigate this abuse, but I'm not sure the target demographic really wants to get that involved - they just want to tag a photo with a few remarks and move on.

          > And then what is he going to do? Abandon his facebook account and create a new one? That won't look suspicious.
          More likely he'll maintain two accounts - a "real" one with his friends and family on it, and a "playa" (ugh) account, with a bunch of male and fake-female friends on it to make it look convincing. Maybe even fake parents. If it gets bad reviews, just burn it and start again. He can recreate the network of fake friends easily enough, because it is made up of other guys like him all pulling the same scam on a reciprocal basis. Properly organised, I can see the system being quite easy to maintain.

          > it just means you have to be smart about how you use it.
          And here we run into the problem. We all know that plenty of people are all too willing to switch their brains off and blindly do what their computers tell them, like driving off a cliff by satnav. Do we just let Darwin sort 'em out?

          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 29 2015, @05:24PM

            by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 29 2015, @05:24PM (#176735)

            > And then what is he going to do? Abandon his facebook account and create a new one? That won't look suspicious.
            More likely he'll maintain two accounts - a "real" one with his friends and family on it, and a "playa" (ugh) account, with a bunch of male and fake-female friends on it to make it look convincing. Maybe even fake parents. If it gets bad reviews, just burn it and start again. He can recreate the network of fake friends easily enough, because it is made up of other guys like him all pulling the same scam on a reciprocal basis. Properly organised, I can see the system being quite easy to maintain.

            This looks like the synopsis of a movie script you are pitching. Perhaps a romantic comedy?

            • (Score: 2) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Wednesday April 29 2015, @07:07PM

              by GreatAuntAnesthesia (3275) on Wednesday April 29 2015, @07:07PM (#176782) Journal

              > Perhaps a romantic comedy?

              You joke, but I always thought Sleepless in Seattle (regarded by many people as the height of romance, apparently) should have been called "it's OK to be a stalker if you're as hot as Meg Ryan"

          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 29 2015, @05:28PM

            by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 29 2015, @05:28PM (#176740)

            And here we run into the problem. We all know that plenty of people are all too willing to switch their brains off and blindly do what their computers tell them, like driving off a cliff by satnav.

            You are so caught up in your false narrative that you don't even realize it when your own citation disproves it.

            The number of people who use satnav is in the hundreds of millions. The number of people who abrogate all judgement to their satnav and get into trouble is so small that whenever it happens it makes the news. Break yourself out of this black and white thinking where a minority of outliers cancels out the overwhelming common case. Grow.

            • (Score: 2) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Wednesday April 29 2015, @07:10PM

              by GreatAuntAnesthesia (3275) on Wednesday April 29 2015, @07:10PM (#176785) Journal

              And you're so busy cherry picking the points you want to address and guiding the argument down an ever narrower path that you fail to acknowledge all the reasons that this app is a disaster waiting to happen. You grow.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 29 2015, @03:51PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 29 2015, @03:51PM (#176674)

        I have made a fake Facebook account before. I don't know how aggressive Facebook is in deleting fake accounts, but it's better than nothing.

        Any online review system should be taken with a grain of salt. Look for "high reputation" reviewers if they exist, or look at multiple reviews. It's almost always better to have the resource than not have it.

  • (Score: 5, Touché) by ikanreed on Wednesday April 29 2015, @03:18PM

    by ikanreed (3164) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday April 29 2015, @03:18PM (#176643) Journal

    And who wants to be judged on the opinions of their exes? Just in general.

    Even honest ratings will be a measure of number of clean breaks to messy breaks, which doesn't necessarily say anything meaningful.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 29 2015, @04:05PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 29 2015, @04:05PM (#176688)

      If you're a reasonably decent human being, there's more upside than downside there.

      • (Score: 2) by ikanreed on Wednesday April 29 2015, @04:24PM

        by ikanreed (3164) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday April 29 2015, @04:24PM (#176702) Journal

        I'd love to think I'm a reasonably decent human being, but I do not want my private life publicly tracked by other people.

        Not that it matters, but I have exactly zero bad breaks in my own history; I've just seen enough people break up on bad terms to know it has little to do with who they are. Like that person who decided they hated the entire state of California because their ex moved there. It's not rational.

        • (Score: 3, Insightful) by The Archon V2.0 on Wednesday April 29 2015, @05:46PM

          by The Archon V2.0 (3887) on Wednesday April 29 2015, @05:46PM (#176750)

          > I do not want my private life publicly tracked by other people.

          Not being on Facebook seems a good start to that.

      • (Score: 2) by dyingtolive on Wednesday April 29 2015, @04:49PM

        by dyingtolive (952) on Wednesday April 29 2015, @04:49PM (#176717)

        You mean: "If the ex is a reasonably decent human being..."

        --
        Don't blame me, I voted for moose wang!
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 29 2015, @04:32PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 29 2015, @04:32PM (#176711)

    Can't wait to see all the LBGT folks start picking holes in that policy.

    Bad choice of words here.