Peeple (for iPhone): The Narcissism Angle

[Sam Vaknin author of "Malignant Self-love"]

Peeple (for iPhone)

 

• Pros

  Focuses on positivity across multiple reputation categories. Lets you prevent negative reviews from appearing on your profile. Well-produced.

• Cons

  Few ways to interact with other users. Egocentric, even by social network standards. Invasive premium features on the way. Easy to fake a profile. Stores reviews of people not yet using the app.

• Bottom Line

  Peeple isn't quite the social networking nightmare we once feared, but this reputation application is still creepy and pointless.

By Jordan Minor

If nothing else, the creators of Peeple understand that you have to take disruptive risks to stand out in the start-up culture. The controversial social network was first described as Yelp for people, allowing users to rate anyone from a scale of one to five, even if that person didn't grant their permission or sign up for the app. Fortunately, after a well-deserved (and, I suspect, preplanned) backlash, the finished iPhone app isn't quite the privacy nightmare that initial pitch implied. Peeple now encourages you to write positive professional, personal, and dating reviews, and it lets you delete any negative reviews you receive. But even with this focus on glossy positivity, Peeple still seems creepy and pointless.

Getting Started

Download Peeple for free on your iOS device and sign up with your Facebook account. I tested the app on an iPhone 5s. An Android version is also on the way. The app can't really tell if the Facebook account is real or not, which is the first hole in the concept, but it does at least require that it be somewhat active and more than six months old. It also requires SMS-based two-factor authentication.

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After you create a profile and briefly describe yourself, Peeple immediately wants to connect you to as many other people as possible. It scours your Facebook friends, mines your contact list, and shows you other users nearby. You can follow and message users if you want to get in touch with interesting people, but there's no way to meaningfully interact with people outside of the app's primary mechanic: the recommendation system.

I Choose You
While the numeric rating aspect is gone, you can still see the roots of Peeple's YelpFree at iTunes Store for people idea in its recommendation system. You can write what the app calls a recommendation of another person in three categories: professional, personal, and dating. You can also agree with recommendations others have written. The immediate fear is that someone would write something bad about you. To prevent this, you control what can be seen on your profile and delete any unsavory opinions. So the goal, if any, is to have as many quality recommendations as possible, not the lowest number of negative ones. While browsing through profiles the first things you see are a picture, a brief bio, and the number of recommendations for each user.

The desire to encourage positivity is admirable, and the interface is visually polished and easy to navigate, but the concept is still fundamentally flawed. Peeple aims to be LinkedInFree at iTunes Store recommendations, online dating, and general social networking all rolled up into one. But recommendations aren't a strong enough hook to hang the entire service from. Recommendations are a great complementary feature to the rest of LinkedIn's offerings, and reading user reputations would be very useful in a larger dating app such as OkCupid or Tinder.

Isolated in the Peeple ecosystem, however, the recommendation features feel painfully limited and egocentric, even for a social network. The optimistic outlook is that people would leave a positive review for others they believe truly deserve them. The cynical view is the only reason a user would help another is if they expected a favor in return. Regardless of your intentions, beyond making recommendations, there isn't much else left to do. You can share recommendations through other social media channels, so everyone can see how special you are.

As an aside, who would theoretically be leaving dating recommendations? Ex-lovers? Current lovers? Would-be matchmakers? The app sets users to not-single by default, presumably to avoid any awkward misunderstandings. 

Stop the World, I Want to Get Off
When you sign up for Peeple, all other users can see you and you can see all other users. If you don't like it, don't sign up. More troubling though is that people who don't opt in can still get wrapped up in the service. If you write a recommendation for someone not on the service, you can then invite said person to join. If they join, and approve the recommendation, it shows up on their profile. So recommendations for non-members are saved, waiting in the ether to glom onto a profile.

Just because a bad review can't be seen, though, doesn't mean it will never be seen. Peeple currently plans to introduce a premium feature called the Truth License. Paying for this feature would allow you to see everything written about a person, good and bad. So you can delete negative recommendations on your profiles all you want. Free users won't see them, but Peeple still stores them, along with negative recommendations for people not even on the service. That's very troubling, though it's worth noting that the Truth License hasn't launched yet. Fortunately, you can block users who harass with bad reviews, and hope that their recommendations are fully scrubbed. Still, something isn't right when the most ethically reassuring future for a social network is the one in which no one chooses to use it. It's like a nuclear weapon.

Wake Up, Sheeple
Compared to the extreme potential for cruelty in Peeple's original pitch, the finished product was bound to seem tamer by comparison. But a slick, hollow experience isn't exactly what a social network should strive to be. Just ask ElloFree at iTunes Store or PeachFree at iTunes Store. And even if Peeple does become more populated as it grows, its reliance on a positive but slight and narcissistic recommendations system along with the looming threat of creepy, invasive premium features makes me doubt Peeple will ever become fully human.