Peeple: a Yelp for people, or a positive revolution?

By Austin Krusen on November 9, 2015

Photo Credit: Peeple

Peeple, a mobile application developed by Nicole Mccollugh and Julia Cordray, has received much criticism since its announcement in September 2015. Originally described by Cordray to the Washington Post to be a “Yelp for people,” the new application, Peeple, seemed to be a place where users could rate and review other people. Users would rate other users one out of five stars and add a written review if they wanted to.

According to The Guardian’s Alex Hern, negative reviews would stay active for forty-eight hours before a user could contest the review to get it removed from the app. This worried many users, as the ability to rate and review others in a negative light could promote bullying within the app.  The CEO of this relatively new company, Julia Cordray, began to receive much backlash over the app’s nickname. Many people took to social media to call the app “terrifying,” “literally horrifying” and “a massive humanity fail” (Roy, 2015).  All of the social media related to the app went dark shortly after this negative outburst, making it seem that the app would never launch. According to TechCrunch, Curdray claims she had raised half a million dollars from various investors and her company’s worth was estimated near 7.6 million dollars (Loizos, 2015), so it was hard to imagine that a company with such support from investors would crawl into a hole and disappear for awhile. After receiving the massive amount of negative comments, Cordray claimed that she had “mistakenly nicknamed to the Washington Post as the “Yelp for People””. She claimed that it was never about hatred or bullying, but about spreading positivity. “People is a POSTIVE ONLY APP. We want to bring positivity and kindness to the world” (Cordray, 2015). This seems to be a quick fix based off the media’s reaction to the original nickname. If it was originally all about positivity, why wouldn’t the company highlight that in the first place? Shortly after this statement from Cordray, it information began to surface again and it seemed the app was still on schedule for release. The website for the app, forthepeople.com, now had a new slogan: “Join the positive revolution” (forthepeople.com, 2015) and appears to have dropped many of the controversial features that caused critical outrage.

In this video clip, Cordray makes a statement that contradicts her statement she had made above.

Cordray’s Original Statement

Cordray’s company had this video clip removed a few times but it keeps resurfacing. A lot of effort was made to remove the “Yelp for people” nickname that it established for the app. The app is now in beta testing and is scheduled for release at the end of November 2015. Instead of rating users one out of five, users would only be allowed to recommend others and the recommended user would then have to approve that recommendation. It does not appear the app has a way to even post a negative review on someone, making bullying impossible. Now instead of a “Yelp for people” the app seems to have a lot in common with LinkedIn. For something that was always “about positivity,” it seems like a lot of changes were made to appease the internet and press. Could the app being successful after all of the drama that has come along with its launch? Certainly. However, Peeple may need to focus on how to get any respect they previously may have had with the internet back and launch a full featured app with a low amount of bugs. Otherwise, people may lose interest fast.

 

 

 

 

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