Peeple, The App That Lets You Rate People, Has Reconsidered Its Awful Premise

Before it even gave prospective users a chance, the website for people-rating app Peeple disappeared from the web and returned... promising positivity.

I was about to write an article discussing how we’re all flawed, superficial and narcissistic. I was beginning a grand tangent about how we’ve become a society that judged personality based on Instagram followers; how the importance of someone’s thoughts are deemed by number of Facebook likes; how the wrong hashtag can doom a tweet. But, then my topic upended itself and I had a realisation. It all started with Peeple (Yes, Peeple. Not People)

Peeple is an app that had been hailed “Yelp for people”. The app had been promoted as revolutionary and was set to redefine how we viewed relationships. Users would be able to give each other ratings and feedback, whilst the ratee watched on as their world was nit-picked. Negative reviews would exist for 48 hours; to remove any, you would need to contest them. Basically, the app began to sound like the sophisticated, technological equivalent of the Mean Girls’ Burn Book.

However, due to backlash in the weeks leading up to its release, the app’s website temporarily vanished (taking my rant about how terrible we’ve all become with it). Instead, we can still have hope for humanity. We can have hope in ourselves to crawl out of our vacuous holes of social media because we realised that judging one another behind a screen was cowardly and downright disgraceful. It seems its creators feel the same, according to a LinkedIn post by its Julia Cordray, the CEO of Peeple's development company.

When Peeple launches on October 12, she says, “You will NOT be on our platform without your explicit permission. There is no 48 hour waiting period to remove negative comments. There is no way to even make negative comments. Simply stated, if you don’t explicitly say 'approve recommendation', it will not be visible on our platform.”

According to the Australian Covert Bullying Prevalence Study, one in four Year 4 to Year 9 Australian students report being bullied every few weeks (more often during the last term at school). Social media and the internet are major vehicles for this abuse, with 84 per cent of students bullied online also bullied offline. An app such as Peeple – in its original form - would have been a harasser’s heaven.

The fact that peers are present as onlookers in 87 per cent of bullying interactions is a hard statistic to swallow. The idea that we may have celebrated an app that was powered by judgement and negative commentary is just as difficult. Here’s hoping, come October 12, Peeple truly is “for the people.”

Cassie Ngurah is one of Student Edge’s student contributors. Learn more about our contributors program.