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