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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: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Wednesday April 29 2015, @07:17PM
getting too much of their "advice" from questionable and inexperienced sources such as their peers, the Internet, pop stars
An interesting old person observation is the linear decline in usefullness and/or IQ in online advice.
In the old days in 80s BBS and usenet and very early 90s usenet you actually got good advice from the "social media" of the day. Compuserv forums had fairly intelligent participants in '83 ish timeframe. Even the dumbest BBS warez kiddies in the late 80s were actually pretty smart even if sometimes somewhat socially retarded.
Since then its been linear downward decline to almost sub-television level of intelligence such as the articles #Digeridoo social media app.
This trend must stop some day... otherwise in 20 years the internet social media of that day will primarily be used by dogs sniffing each others butts and similar level of intelligence. I mean, its gotta stop, doesn't it? Is idiocracy inevitable? So far, yes, unfortunately. But at some point the race to the bottom has to stop when houseplants can't figure out how to click "Submit" or something?