Four days after a wave of Internet outrage swamped her and her nascent company, Julia Cordray – CEO of forthcoming people-rating app Peeple – has decided to rethink the app's concept entirely.
In a post published to LinkedIn on Sunday, Cordray said that the app will be “100% OPT-IN” when it launches in November. She also said that users will need to approve all reviews, meaning that there will no longer be a way to leave abusive, critical or otherwise negative comments.
“We will not be shamed into submission,” Cordray told The Washington Post in an email Monday morning.
But that appears to be exactly what has happened: Cordray is revising the app to remove the two features that most upset her critics.
In its original iteration, which Cordray described to The Post last week, Peeple was intended as a “Yelp for people”: a ratings platform that would let anyone post public reviews of their acquaintances. Like Yelp, Peeple planned to use a five-point scale that would permit positive and negative comments.
Peeple also wouldn't let anyone opt out, regardless of their circumstances: If a victim of domestic abuse or stalking wanted to get off the app, Cordray told The Post last week, the victim would have to join and then flagrantly violate the app's terms of service.
But that inability to opt out, and the significant risks of abuse, provoked outrage from tens of thousands of would-be Peeple users. A petition to ban the app garnered over 7,000 signatures last week, while parodies like “Sheeple,””Meet Peeple” and “People for Peeple” slammed the venture as “the world's dumbest app.”
Cordray deleted dozens of negative comments from her Facebook page before taking the page down. Peeple's website, which is now offline, appears to have experienced a DDoS attack. Cordray says she and her family have received death threats.
All of this only shows why the Internet needs Peeple, Cordray insists – not the Peeple she pitched last week, but a new, revised platform devoted to making the world more “positive.” While Cordray would not elaborate on Peeple v. 2 in an email to The Post, her LinkedIn essay implies that this revised concept will let users leave public affirmations for friends and family who opt in – rather like LinkedIn's endorsement system.
It's not a particularly novel concept – certainly not as novel as a “Yelp for people” would be. (In an interview with Motherboard, Cordray compared that idea to the revolutionary discovery of heliocentricity.) But it also doesn't run the risk of enabling abuse or invading people's privacy.
As Cordray learned firsthand in the past week, unsolicited feedback isn't all that she originally cracked it up to be. – Washington Post