Show HN: Yelp for People, Reviewing Humans, chattel.me

by smalter • 15 years ago

12 22 15 years ago

smalter8• 15 years ago

hello, hn. i built a website where you can rate a human out of 5 stars and write a review of them. i remember reading an article here about who would win the war as the measure for a person's online reputation. would it be quora or stackoverflow, linkedin, twitter, etc.?

everyone here on hn recognizes, say, patio11. big burly dude, hairy chest, stalking the halls with his smoking hot cheerleader girlfriend. online reputation in the forms listed above can give a sense of how cool someone is and how nice their clothes are, but it doesn't provide much room for dissenting opinions and critique.

i built chattel.me as a reaction to high school, consensus, the level of online activity as a measure of worth, etc. on chattel.me, someone can say their piece about how great or horrible you are in spite of what the crowds have concluded. or it's like picking a restaurant via yelp -- above, say, 4 stars, a restaurant is game, but reviews can be read to determine kind apart from quality.

as far as i can tell, the internet is useful for two purposes: 1. to explore deviate sexual practices in greater detail; and 2. to rip each other the shreds anonymously. satre's famous quote is that "hell is other people", a reference to how the opinion of the other shapes the way you experience the self. i've aspired to create the "hell" on the internet.

and by hell i mean the livejournal to blogger or the myspace to facebook, where the foil to chattel.me is about.me/flavors.me, personal branding, and "beautiful design". the former are typically internet ghettos, but they're places of more raw human emotion where anything goes versus the superficiality of self-constructed narrative and advertisement. chattel.me is what some might call "hella emo".

i'm trying to speak to the nerds, rejects, losers, etc., what i was in high school and what i'm again on the high school that is the internet. nerd heros these days spend all day communicating with customers via social media, are highly popular, etc., which requires a degenerate level of engagement and polish. what happened?

fair’s fair, and i’ve added a page for myself here: http://www.chattel.me/humen/walter-chen-new-york-ny. i’ve already scoured my mental rolodex for who would merely think of me as “meh…” to no avail, and i’ve hit refresh a few times. i imagine that the site’s primary engagement mechanism will be neurosis and narcissism and it’s working fairly well on me.

i taught myself rails and did this. check it out, and give me your deepest thoughts.

jeremymims• 15 years ago

You've chosen a very unfortunate name for your project. While chattel is defined as "moveable personal property", the word has a very close association with slavery in America.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_United_States

smalter8• 15 years ago

i've done so purposefully, although probably in questionable taste. chattel.me is a play on the word chatter and the notion of persons as products. if people are products, they they deserve corresponding scrutiny and critique.

(added stuff via edit there)

JohnTitus• 15 years ago

The name made me think of cattle.

abecedarius• 15 years ago

Yep. suss.me is available -- I bought it when the .me domains first came out, thinking of something like this, but never did anything with it.

joe_the_user• 15 years ago

Yes, a dubious url indeed. But one that seems appropriate for the project at hand.

It seems we've degenerated further than even cubeduel, where there was some criterion for slandering someone. Here, it's just a general opportunity to rip into that guy you've always been after...

"i built chattel.me as a reaction to high school, consensus, the level of online activity as a measure of worth" Yeah, in high school, the folks whispering about you needed a perhaps minuscule amount of guts and connections to spread their rumors. Here, even that's gone... (you know that here, who votes you up or down is already anonymous ...)

rguzman• 15 years ago

Interesting... if you know me, please review me, HN: http://www.chattel.me/humen/rodrigo-guzman-san-francisco-ca

Smalter, some feedback:

- I was initially hesitant to share via FB/twitter. Nothing in particular about the chattel itself, rather I don't always want to throw something on my news feed without knowing exactly what it'll do and even when I do know I'm not too inclined to put stuff on my feed from 3rd party apps. It'd be good to have a different adoption vector here. When someone signs up you persuade them to try to review any of their friends already on the system.

- The overall tone is unclear: is this where friends review friends to say things like "he's cool" or this a place where professional contacts go to say "he sucks to work with". I think the latter would be more useful and that both sites could potentially exist, but you should make it more explicit.

smalter8• 15 years ago

i'm reminded of zadie smith's article awhile back about how using facebook means to interface with the mind of mark zuckerberg -- a place where a human becomes a list of likes and a relationship status. a friend of mine has strongly encouraged me to change the copy and tone of the site to something that reflects a more fun, creative side (think chatroulette meets facebook) rather than the sort of dark, "set yourself on fire" attitude related by the site currently. i think he's on to something, but i just don't know if it's me. in some sense, i think the site mirrors a personal and universal human desire to stalk and say crazy things about people. that i know for sure.

artmageddon• 15 years ago

Personally...regarding your last point, I'd rather there was not any site like that where a person can leave feedback on a person as a whole. It's like Yelp! but for people instead, and quite frankly I don't have much trust in that site. On a professional level, LinkedIn probably works as well as I'm comfortable with.

But just for the fun of it, I gave you five stars on chattel with my city reference :)

exit• 15 years ago

can someone comment on issues of libel?

why is the url path named "humEn"?

also, i'm not sure what you were thinking with the name. slavery?

smalter8• 15 years ago

the url path is humen, because that's how rails pluralizes human. the class name is "human". this is my first rails app. i didn't bother to change it out of laziness.

yeah see above. chattel has a neutral definition and it's just that chattel is personal property that's movable. throughout us history, people have been thought of as chattel, namely slaves and women. i suppose the site calls all people chattel, and in that way it's somewhat contentless and i don't think it takes a stand on the normative value of slavery and say, women's sufferage. (although i think it's fair to say, boo, slavery, yay, women.)

i'm actually a lawyer, and i'm sure that if anyone uses this site to say horrible things about some litigious person (or just really bad things about a normal person), and people actually use this site, then i will have to deal with civil litigation. i suppose there's a moral question as to creating a site in which libel is more freely available, but i'll leave that to the moralists to duke out.

shaggyfrog• 15 years ago

This site is just begging to be hit with a libel suit.

Who's going to be the first to "subscribe" $CELEBRITY?

sean12345• 15 years ago

I doubt it. By the same thinking shouldn't yelp be liable to a libel suit by businesses which it has reviews about?

tomjen3• 15 years ago

http://chattel.me/humen/barack-obama-washington-dc-dc

Wasn't me.

jwb119• 15 years ago

More accurately, it's going to set someone up to be hit in a libel suit. The site is no more liable that tumblr is when someone starts a libelous blog using their system.

smalter8• 15 years ago

there's no libel suit without libel. (i challenge you to show me the libel on chattel.me. maybe that's a bad incentive. nevertheless, what i've written holds true in spirit. 1. no one cares about this website and as a result, there's no libel on it; 2. seems that even the opportunity for anonymous speech doesn't generate the amount of vitriol one might expect (maybe there should be a "... yet" after that), perhaps redeeming this project and all of humankind with it.)

mychacho• 15 years ago

I dont know, a set of anonymous reviews of somebody does not sound like a measure of anything related to that person.

What will these reviews really tell me?

None of the reviews in the profiles that were linked here seemed to provide an quantifiable metric of any sort unlike say a set of LinkedIn recommendations or StackOverflow reputaton points.

ww520• 15 years ago

Shouldn't there be pictures of the people being rated? Would this be evolved to something like the hotornot sites a while back?

smalter8• 15 years ago

you can find links to various people's social media profiles and find pictures there. my friend is trying to get me to couch the site more as a hotornot type site where you meet someone's social media presence and tell them what you think about it.

dchads• 15 years ago

the marker of a good idea is when it seems rediculously obvious in hindsight. the basic premise of the site, a forum to say things about people that isn't controlled by the people, seems rediculously obvious and i'm dumbfounded that there is this huge gap in the internet.

Show HN: Yelp for People, Reviewing Humans, chattel.me

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