Julia Cordray, the CEO of Peeple, an upcoming app that has been heavily criticized, is making major changes to her highly anticipated and much detested app. The news comes four days after Cordray was swamped by public outrage for Peeple, which was going to allow users to rate other people who could not decline to be rated.
According to Cordray, the app will now be voluntary, meaning that people can only be rated if they allow it. Additionally, all reviews will need to be approved by the person that gets rated.
By making these changes, Cordray is hoping that critics will be less outraged by the app.
The original intention was to make Peeple a “Yelp for People”. It would be a ratings platform that would function much like Yelp. People would use Peeple to publically rate other people on a five-point scale and leave reviews about said people.
The app was not going to hold back. People would have been able to freely leave positive or negative statements about their reviewees at their choosing, and there was virtually nothing the person being reviewed could do about it.
There was no option to opt out of Peeple, meaning that anyone who received a review could not request to be removed from the app. This caused people much frustration over privacy concerns. Many people were particularly worried about instances of abuse or stalking taking place.
Naturally, the public was outraged. More than 7,000 people signed a petition to ban Peeple.
Parodies were also commonplace, as phony apps like “Sheeple”, “Meet Peeple” and “People for Peeple” criticized the app for being the “dumbest in the world”.
Cordray, who apparently couldn’t handle the criticism, deleted a massive amount of negative Facebook comments, eventually deleting her Facebook altogether.
Meanwhile, the Peeple website was supposedly hacked by people not happy with the upcoming app.
Cordray even reports receiving death threats against her and her family.
Cordray wants to move forward with the “new Peeple”, which is designed to make the world a more positive place. She states that the revised app will be utilized as a public endorsement program, much like the website for business professionals LinkedIn.
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