The Tea app is or at least was on fire, rapidly gaining lots of users. This opens up two discussions, one on the game theory and dynamics of Tea, one on its abysmal security.
I'd want to read an interview or something of a woman who is an actual power use of Tea or the "Are we dating the same guy?" facebook groups, to get the experience and pros/cons from someone who has personally experienced it
You can find people explaining why they use "are we dating the same guy" groups on reddit. It isn't that illuminating and the reasons they state are exactly what you expect: personal safety concerns, they had a bad experience with an abusive ex, they had a bad experience with a cheating ex, etc.
Yeah. The experience of a power user who compulsively checks the groups and really understands the dynamics on a deep, holistic level is something I haven't seen though.
I wonder if a dating app (or service on existing apps) where people get recommended by exes would work. You don't have the legal risk of posting negative information, but if someone doesn't have any exes on good enough terms to recommend them that provides an implicit filter.
It's an interesting thought. My life experience would say the filter is something like "Has exes that dumped him because they just weren't feeling it and now feel some measure of pity towards him." Maybe also exes that cheated, feel some remorse, and want to leave things on better terms.
Which is definitely *a* signal. Is it a good one?
The girl that loved you and you dumped and broke her heart over serious doubts about long-term compatibility -- she probably isn't leaving a positive review. But I think that sort of thing, in moderation, can be a positive signal about a man's desirability.
Ah yea, the problem with tea was "the legal risk" to women posting private information and defamatory allegations, not the men having their privacy violated.
> But even with 4.6 million women, the chances of any given other woman being on it at all are not so high, and they then have to be an active user or have already left the note.
Naively, yes. If people with specific dating pools are more likely to sign up, however...
“By default more information should be good even if unreliable, so long as you know how to use it”.
I want to push back on this.
Let's assume that I trusted every submission on the app was "verified" (each submission is from a real woman, who really met the man in person, and is reporting her experience of her own free will)- I still would regard the whole app as uninformative. I think this is due to the social dynamics of reporting assault, and while I'm basing this on my own personal experience I don't think it's unusual.
I’ve had my fair share of nasty experiences with men. At the time, I told nobody, and if I had this app I would’ve probably given them green flags. The social and emotional calculus of reporting assault etc is just very complicated. I hope this doesn’t come off as saying “women are crazy and unreliable”- at least currently it seems mostly to be an issue of low recall rather than low precision. Maybe there is some kind of rational behavior analysis of this (e.g. is it globally optimal/safer to ignore or downplay mistreatment from high-status people if extrapolating over enough social contexts?)
I think as a society we know this- we seem able to reason coherently about the pros and cons of anonymous reporting when e.g. high-profile legal battles are fought involving rape or abuse. But I think we-- or maybe some subset of women?-- think things will be different when "it's just us girls chatting". These apps seem to trade on the mirage that I'm in a safe space, like a woman's bathroom where I should trust everything, bc everybody has your back and "sisters before misters" etc. I think most women would actively come to my defense at bus stop, or lend me a tampon in a bathroom, but in terms of reporting our experiences I've found we all keep our cards pretty close to our chest.
As a consequence, I think this app would be worse than useless, since it would basically reward people with bad intentions and enough savvy to hide them. It gives a competitive advantage to the most dangerous group. At the same time, there’s some subset of men who make women uncomfortable by accident, and they just need a little practice or whatever, and this is going to make that damn near impossible because a bunch of women will write “Idk he just gave me weird vibes? An orange flag for me”. Everyone else on the app reads that and thinks they’ve avoided Ted Bundy.
I've met a lot of women friends who were excited about this app, though, so I might be in the minority.
Apparently accusing men of having small penises is vital to women's safety. I wonder how women would feel about an app in which their pictures were shared without consent and their genitalia mocked?
I know, without looking, how the problem of "someone uploading fake gossip" will be policed.
A: Here's our app.
B: Someone could use your app to spread fake gossip. How do you deal with that?
A: THAT WILL NEVER HAPPEN.
A: *proceeds to ignore all evidence of fake gossip since it doesn't exist*
This has to be at least the 10th iteration of this problem. Candace Owens started out doing something like this a long time ago: stop cyberbullying by *becoming* the cyberbully, while threatening anyone who complained or worried. The entire Internet decided it was a bad idea: IIRC this was right around Gamergate and both sides joined forces to say it was the dumbest thing in the world.
Apparently accusing men of having small penises is vital to women's safety. I wonder how women would feel about an app in which their pictures were shared without consent and their genitalia mocked?
That distribution is _way_ too far off of a population density map to be believable even when you consider there's more incentive for small-town users to use it.
This data has been altered somehow (the most plausible explanation I've seen is that a fake user was added to every single city/town center in America)
If optimal amount of gossip is not zero, why not make tea bigger? Potential applications:
- Data engineers who put private data on public Dropbox - who are they? How do I avoid hiring them? Are there any good data engineers out there who know how to work with private data?
Just need the second order reputation score for rating the people who provide the gossip, and possibly a third order score for the people doing that rating.
why do you expect significant asymmetry in how tea vs anti-tea is treated? which way do you expect the asymmetry to go for gender agnostic data engineering gossip app?
actually, nevermind - TeaOnHer - gender swapped Tea - appeared on appstore, wasn't taken down just yet, but faces similar data breach problems as original Tea.
TeaOnDev is a much more pressing issue, but who is going to develop it? I'd certainly not trust original Tea / TeaOnHer developers.
There's a Hall of Shame? I'd be curious to know if the #1 most horrible toxic dude on the top of the leaderboard gets flooded with love letters from prospective girlfriends, Charles Mansion style.
I suspect the false claims here would be about as infrequent as false rape claims, ie, much less than the actual problem of men behaving badly (whether illegally or just boorishly). Worrying about that seems like manosphere nonsense about how oppressed we are. Theory about what could happen when we have real world data on differences between what men and women do when they perceive no consequences is rather silly. Look at who posts revenge porn, surveys where guys admit to things that are rape as long as you don't use the word rape, actual rape given the likelihood of real consequences are small.
And given that there are much worse things women have to worry about on dates than someone might say bad things about you later on Tea or other groups, I think even if you think this is asymmetrical, there's a long way to go before the risks and consequences are equivalent. By choosing to focus on that instead of the potential accountability, you're focusing on something functionally irrelevant due to frequency and real consequences, and not on the reasons women might feel such an app/group is needed. Looking at the superficial issue without the root cause is never going to fix the problem.
PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE tell me how women on tea claiming particular men have small penises improves women's safety?
And there would be orders of magntitude more qbuse on this app compared to false rape claims, because the costs of making a false rape claim are vastly higher than posting something defamatory on an app.
These women violated men's privacy and are claiming to be oppressed that their privacy got violated in retur
Ah the red pill movement. The constant crying of male victim hood. Men are afraid women will laugh at us. Women are afraid we will kill and rape them. These are not equivalent. Where's the gnashing of teeth about how awful the revenge porn sites are? Or the tens of thousands on Telegram chat sharing tips on how to rape women. Or the hundreds of men Dominique Pelicot offered his wife to that didn't turn him in. Until we as guys fix ourselves, we shouldn't be whining.
Picture the indignant Muslim who insists "what do you mean 'you people are not welcome here'", and in response gets your lecture, word for word, except now it's about the Bataclan shooting. That's pretty bad, so I don't accept your logic.
I'm sure that logic worked in your head, but like others, you forgot to account for frequency. Far more people are victims of partner violence than Islamic terrorism. You also apparently missed the difference between violence and not violence. To the best of my knowledge, there's been zero real world violence caused by people posting on Tea. Unlike say what we men do on a far too frequent basis. You would think that the probabilities matter group would think about that.
You can whine about a "lecture", but again let's compare that to the cause of said "lecture".
How does accusing men of having small penises do anything go reduce partner violence?
Because that's literally the most common thing that happened on the gossip app named tea.
Per capita most partner violence is committed by blsck men - I'm sure if apps like tea reflected this objective reality by accusing mostly black men of being dangerous and violent, you would be falling over yourself to attack it.
Hey dummy, NOBODY is defending revenge porn sites. There are few things that generate more "teeth gnashing" on the internet than revenge porn. It's flat out illegal in many places. There are no revenge porn apps in the god damned Apple app store. The new york times isn't writing distressed articles in defense of people spreading revenge porn.
You're engaging in possibly the dumbest form of whataboutism possible - appealing to something that nobody is defending.
I dont need to fix myself, because there's nothing wrong with me. Over 50%of homicides in this country are by black men - do black categorically need to "fix themselves"? Of course tou would never say such a thing in a million years.
And apps like tea are GOSSIP APPS, not women's safety apps. *That's why they're called tea*.
If you actually went onto the app, you would infact see it is
mostly GOSSIP.
Please tell how accusing men of having small penises or being boring or awkward is so vital to women's safety? Because that's literally what the majority of the app was.
Should the government have been able to violate the privacy of every Muslim in the US following 9/11? But thousands of people were killed!
You still haven't explained how shaming men for their genitalia makes women any safer.
If women are so terrified of men, its bizarre they feel comfortable engaging in such an egregious form of public shaming. If you thought someone was a threat to your "safety", wouldn't this be a terrible provocation that endangers you and the other women on this site?
It's a gossip, shaming and harassment app. It has nothing to do with safety.
You don't get to join a doxing app and then cry that you got doxed. You don't get to violate people's privacy because you're a woman. Hopefully this leak teaches psycho women not to join a psychotic harassment app like this again and they will learn to respect people's privacy.
I can think of quite a few women where I gave things a chance, by message or date, even though there were points I was unsure about. Sometimes, there were some negative feelings when I ended things, as people generally don't like being rejected. If I knew this could turn into a permanent negative review that could potentially even cascade to my work life, I would have been many times more cautious about who to start talking to. Thankfully I'm married now so I don't have to worry about it, but I think this sort of app could have damaging effects for both men and women.
As for the map, I've heard that the points are based on address boundaries and clump many years into one point, e.g. SF probably has more than one user, so you may not be able to draw conclusions from that.
There's nothing wrong with sharing peoples photos and personal information without their consent. Otherwise these women WOULD NOT HAVE JOINED AT AN APP DESIGNED PRECISELY TO DO THAT IN THE FIRST PLACE.
Anyone who supports the tea app is either dumb as hell or a viscous psycho. The potential for abuse (which was in fact happening) is orders of magntitude greater than the potential to "protect" women.
And of course, this would have a chilling effect on dating if it ever become popular enough, because men no longer just jave to worry about whether the date goes well or not, they also have to worry whether the date will lead to them being doxed and shamed and abused by a bunch of psychotic women on the internet.
Men being accused of having small penises, being bad at sex, being boring awkward or lame etc were already vastly more common than anything remotely related to safety.
And so you're dumb if you think an app like this was ever going to have a positive effect, even putting aside the egregious ethical violations it facilitated.
tl;dr; Tea is just about the diametrical opposite of "due process"
The accused gets no right to a trial by jury.
The accused gets no legal counsel.
The accused gets no right to cross-examine.
The accused gets no presumption of innocence.
The accused gets no right to face his accuser.
The charges against the accused are concealed from him.
Tea even outdoes Kafka's "The Trial" in the the _existence_ of accusations against him is concealed from the accused.
Great points in the post:
"What happens if someone lies or otherwise abuses the system? Everything is supposedly anonymous and works on negative selection. The app is very obviously ripe for abuse, all but made for attempts to sabotage or hurt people, using false or true information."
"Even if a violation is found and proof is possible, and the mod team would be willing to do something if proof was provided, if the target doesn’t know about the claims how can they respond?
Even then there don’t seem likely to be any consequences to the original poster."
"6. It’s a massive invasion of privacy, puts you at an informational disadvantage, and it could spill over into your non-dating life. The negative information could spread into the non-dating world, where the Law of Conservation of Expected Evidence very much does not apply. Careers and lives could plausibly be ruined.
a. This seems like a pretty big and obvious objection. Privacy is a big deal.
b. What is going to keep employers and HR departments off the app? "
Ideally, I want every false accusation on Tea to result in a libel judgement against the false accuser.
I agree. Things like secret trials and secret courts are classic signs you live in a dictatorship, not a democracy, and there's massive controversy every time a democratic society has one (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Foreign_Intelligence_Surveillance_Court), for a good reason. In a healthy society even the accused have rights and deserve due process, for a reason.
I mean, just imagine if you got a letter in the mail saying you were tried "in abstentia" for embezzlement or something 3 years ago, found guilty, and the crime was added to your criminal record, and (you realize) that this is why you're unemployed & no one is willing to offer you a job. Your first thought probably isn't, "Wow, they must have done such a good job investigating me!" It's probably something more like, "Burn it all down. All of it. If they're not even going to *pretend* to give me the appearance of a fair trial..."
Or imagine if your own criminal record was sealed from you, so you had no idea what the authorities were adding to it and no way to dispute the charges. In a society of angels, this would be nothing to worry about. We don't live in a society of angels.
Hell, even something as "minor" as your credit card company doing this, refusing to let you look at any charges or dispute any of them, would be grounds for a riot. What exactly makes it okay if the cost is now reputational instead of financial?
>I mean, just imagine if you got a letter in the mail saying you were tried "in abstentia" for embezzlement or something 3 years ago, found guilty, and the crime was added to your criminal record, and (you realize) that this is why you're unemployed & no one is willing to offer you a job.
I wish there was better coordination about forgiveness. Right now it's level 2 - you can reset ratings for restaurants you visited 3 years ago (or had bad breakup with someone and gave them 1 star or something). However to do the reset you need to actively remember - opening the right app, remembering your password, going to history, resetting the ratings. Too many steps, too annoying, nobody will do it.
I wish there was a tradition where every year there is this "Mercy Sunday" or something (around Easter maybe?), when it's a custom to pardon imprisoned, unban the banned, and undo all 1 stars that did not really deserved it.
Say, once a year at Mercy Sunday apps will send you a notification like "Let's give them a second chance", and you get to a page with all ratings you gave, where you can easily reset.
I'd want to read an interview or something of a woman who is an actual power use of Tea or the "Are we dating the same guy?" facebook groups, to get the experience and pros/cons from someone who has personally experienced it
And the men whose photos and personal information was shared without their knowledge and consent? Do they get a say?
I don't think that'd be a particularly interesting read
Cool, don't cry when I make an app where guys mock the appearance of the genitalia of women they've slept with then.
As long as they aren't posting pictures, that sounds fine
You can find people explaining why they use "are we dating the same guy" groups on reddit. It isn't that illuminating and the reasons they state are exactly what you expect: personal safety concerns, they had a bad experience with an abusive ex, they had a bad experience with a cheating ex, etc.
Yeah. The experience of a power user who compulsively checks the groups and really understands the dynamics on a deep, holistic level is something I haven't seen though.
Ah yes, because apparently accusing men of having small penises is extremely important for "protecting women's safety".
Podcast episode for this post:
https://open.substack.com/pub/dwatvpodcast/p/spilling-the-tea?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true
I wonder if a dating app (or service on existing apps) where people get recommended by exes would work. You don't have the legal risk of posting negative information, but if someone doesn't have any exes on good enough terms to recommend them that provides an implicit filter.
It's an interesting thought. My life experience would say the filter is something like "Has exes that dumped him because they just weren't feeling it and now feel some measure of pity towards him." Maybe also exes that cheated, feel some remorse, and want to leave things on better terms.
Which is definitely *a* signal. Is it a good one?
The girl that loved you and you dumped and broke her heart over serious doubts about long-term compatibility -- she probably isn't leaving a positive review. But I think that sort of thing, in moderation, can be a positive signal about a man's desirability.
Ah yea, the problem with tea was "the legal risk" to women posting private information and defamatory allegations, not the men having their privacy violated.
> But even with 4.6 million women, the chances of any given other woman being on it at all are not so high, and they then have to be an active user or have already left the note.
Naively, yes. If people with specific dating pools are more likely to sign up, however...
“By default more information should be good even if unreliable, so long as you know how to use it”.
I want to push back on this.
Let's assume that I trusted every submission on the app was "verified" (each submission is from a real woman, who really met the man in person, and is reporting her experience of her own free will)- I still would regard the whole app as uninformative. I think this is due to the social dynamics of reporting assault, and while I'm basing this on my own personal experience I don't think it's unusual.
I’ve had my fair share of nasty experiences with men. At the time, I told nobody, and if I had this app I would’ve probably given them green flags. The social and emotional calculus of reporting assault etc is just very complicated. I hope this doesn’t come off as saying “women are crazy and unreliable”- at least currently it seems mostly to be an issue of low recall rather than low precision. Maybe there is some kind of rational behavior analysis of this (e.g. is it globally optimal/safer to ignore or downplay mistreatment from high-status people if extrapolating over enough social contexts?)
I think as a society we know this- we seem able to reason coherently about the pros and cons of anonymous reporting when e.g. high-profile legal battles are fought involving rape or abuse. But I think we-- or maybe some subset of women?-- think things will be different when "it's just us girls chatting". These apps seem to trade on the mirage that I'm in a safe space, like a woman's bathroom where I should trust everything, bc everybody has your back and "sisters before misters" etc. I think most women would actively come to my defense at bus stop, or lend me a tampon in a bathroom, but in terms of reporting our experiences I've found we all keep our cards pretty close to our chest.
As a consequence, I think this app would be worse than useless, since it would basically reward people with bad intentions and enough savvy to hide them. It gives a competitive advantage to the most dangerous group. At the same time, there’s some subset of men who make women uncomfortable by accident, and they just need a little practice or whatever, and this is going to make that damn near impossible because a bunch of women will write “Idk he just gave me weird vibes? An orange flag for me”. Everyone else on the app reads that and thinks they’ve avoided Ted Bundy.
I've met a lot of women friends who were excited about this app, though, so I might be in the minority.
Apparently accusing men of having small penises is vital to women's safety. I wonder how women would feel about an app in which their pictures were shared without consent and their genitalia mocked?
I know, without looking, how the problem of "someone uploading fake gossip" will be policed.
A: Here's our app.
B: Someone could use your app to spread fake gossip. How do you deal with that?
A: THAT WILL NEVER HAPPEN.
A: *proceeds to ignore all evidence of fake gossip since it doesn't exist*
This has to be at least the 10th iteration of this problem. Candace Owens started out doing something like this a long time ago: stop cyberbullying by *becoming* the cyberbully, while threatening anyone who complained or worried. The entire Internet decided it was a bad idea: IIRC this was right around Gamergate and both sides joined forces to say it was the dumbest thing in the world.
Eleanor Konik has a very related article on gossip. The optimal amount of gossip is certainly not zero. https://www.eleanorkonik.com/p/excellence-vs-egalitarianism-in-human
Apparently accusing men of having small penises is vital to women's safety. I wonder how women would feel about an app in which their pictures were shared without consent and their genitalia mocked?
That distribution is _way_ too far off of a population density map to be believable even when you consider there's more incentive for small-town users to use it.
This data has been altered somehow (the most plausible explanation I've seen is that a fake user was added to every single city/town center in America)
If optimal amount of gossip is not zero, why not make tea bigger? Potential applications:
- Data engineers who put private data on public Dropbox - who are they? How do I avoid hiring them? Are there any good data engineers out there who know how to work with private data?
- Symmetric solution for men to gossip on women.
Just need the second order reputation score for rating the people who provide the gossip, and possibly a third order score for the people doing that rating.
A men "gossip" (read: dox, shame, defame) about women app wouldn't last a week on either major app store and its founders would be sued into oblivion.
And its funny to talk about "private data" when this app substantially consisted of its users making private data or others public.
why do you expect significant asymmetry in how tea vs anti-tea is treated? which way do you expect the asymmetry to go for gender agnostic data engineering gossip app?
actually, nevermind - TeaOnHer - gender swapped Tea - appeared on appstore, wasn't taken down just yet, but faces similar data breach problems as original Tea.
TeaOnDev is a much more pressing issue, but who is going to develop it? I'd certainly not trust original Tea / TeaOnHer developers.
There's a Hall of Shame? I'd be curious to know if the #1 most horrible toxic dude on the top of the leaderboard gets flooded with love letters from prospective girlfriends, Charles Mansion style.
Apparently according to the women on tea, (allegedly) having a small penis is shameful and such men shouldn't try to date.
I suspect the false claims here would be about as infrequent as false rape claims, ie, much less than the actual problem of men behaving badly (whether illegally or just boorishly). Worrying about that seems like manosphere nonsense about how oppressed we are. Theory about what could happen when we have real world data on differences between what men and women do when they perceive no consequences is rather silly. Look at who posts revenge porn, surveys where guys admit to things that are rape as long as you don't use the word rape, actual rape given the likelihood of real consequences are small.
And given that there are much worse things women have to worry about on dates than someone might say bad things about you later on Tea or other groups, I think even if you think this is asymmetrical, there's a long way to go before the risks and consequences are equivalent. By choosing to focus on that instead of the potential accountability, you're focusing on something functionally irrelevant due to frequency and real consequences, and not on the reasons women might feel such an app/group is needed. Looking at the superficial issue without the root cause is never going to fix the problem.
PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE tell me how women on tea claiming particular men have small penises improves women's safety?
And there would be orders of magntitude more qbuse on this app compared to false rape claims, because the costs of making a false rape claim are vastly higher than posting something defamatory on an app.
These women violated men's privacy and are claiming to be oppressed that their privacy got violated in retur
Ah the red pill movement. The constant crying of male victim hood. Men are afraid women will laugh at us. Women are afraid we will kill and rape them. These are not equivalent. Where's the gnashing of teeth about how awful the revenge porn sites are? Or the tens of thousands on Telegram chat sharing tips on how to rape women. Or the hundreds of men Dominique Pelicot offered his wife to that didn't turn him in. Until we as guys fix ourselves, we shouldn't be whining.
Picture the indignant Muslim who insists "what do you mean 'you people are not welcome here'", and in response gets your lecture, word for word, except now it's about the Bataclan shooting. That's pretty bad, so I don't accept your logic.
I'm sure that logic worked in your head, but like others, you forgot to account for frequency. Far more people are victims of partner violence than Islamic terrorism. You also apparently missed the difference between violence and not violence. To the best of my knowledge, there's been zero real world violence caused by people posting on Tea. Unlike say what we men do on a far too frequent basis. You would think that the probabilities matter group would think about that.
You can whine about a "lecture", but again let's compare that to the cause of said "lecture".
How does accusing men of having small penises do anything go reduce partner violence?
Because that's literally the most common thing that happened on the gossip app named tea.
Per capita most partner violence is committed by blsck men - I'm sure if apps like tea reflected this objective reality by accusing mostly black men of being dangerous and violent, you would be falling over yourself to attack it.
Hey dummy, NOBODY is defending revenge porn sites. There are few things that generate more "teeth gnashing" on the internet than revenge porn. It's flat out illegal in many places. There are no revenge porn apps in the god damned Apple app store. The new york times isn't writing distressed articles in defense of people spreading revenge porn.
You're engaging in possibly the dumbest form of whataboutism possible - appealing to something that nobody is defending.
I dont need to fix myself, because there's nothing wrong with me. Over 50%of homicides in this country are by black men - do black categorically need to "fix themselves"? Of course tou would never say such a thing in a million years.
And apps like tea are GOSSIP APPS, not women's safety apps. *That's why they're called tea*.
If you actually went onto the app, you would infact see it is
mostly GOSSIP.
Please tell how accusing men of having small penises or being boring or awkward is so vital to women's safety? Because that's literally what the majority of the app was.
Should the government have been able to violate the privacy of every Muslim in the US following 9/11? But thousands of people were killed!
You still haven't explained how shaming men for their genitalia makes women any safer.
If women are so terrified of men, its bizarre they feel comfortable engaging in such an egregious form of public shaming. If you thought someone was a threat to your "safety", wouldn't this be a terrible provocation that endangers you and the other women on this site?
It's a gossip, shaming and harassment app. It has nothing to do with safety.
You don't get to join a doxing app and then cry that you got doxed. You don't get to violate people's privacy because you're a woman. Hopefully this leak teaches psycho women not to join a psychotic harassment app like this again and they will learn to respect people's privacy.
I can think of quite a few women where I gave things a chance, by message or date, even though there were points I was unsure about. Sometimes, there were some negative feelings when I ended things, as people generally don't like being rejected. If I knew this could turn into a permanent negative review that could potentially even cascade to my work life, I would have been many times more cautious about who to start talking to. Thankfully I'm married now so I don't have to worry about it, but I think this sort of app could have damaging effects for both men and women.
As for the map, I've heard that the points are based on address boundaries and clump many years into one point, e.g. SF probably has more than one user, so you may not be able to draw conclusions from that.
There's nothing wrong with sharing peoples photos and personal information without their consent. Otherwise these women WOULD NOT HAVE JOINED AT AN APP DESIGNED PRECISELY TO DO THAT IN THE FIRST PLACE.
Anyone who supports the tea app is either dumb as hell or a viscous psycho. The potential for abuse (which was in fact happening) is orders of magntitude greater than the potential to "protect" women.
And of course, this would have a chilling effect on dating if it ever become popular enough, because men no longer just jave to worry about whether the date goes well or not, they also have to worry whether the date will lead to them being doxed and shamed and abused by a bunch of psychotic women on the internet.
Men being accused of having small penises, being bad at sex, being boring awkward or lame etc were already vastly more common than anything remotely related to safety.
And so you're dumb if you think an app like this was ever going to have a positive effect, even putting aside the egregious ethical violations it facilitated.
Great post!
tl;dr; Tea is just about the diametrical opposite of "due process"
The accused gets no right to a trial by jury.
The accused gets no legal counsel.
The accused gets no right to cross-examine.
The accused gets no presumption of innocence.
The accused gets no right to face his accuser.
The charges against the accused are concealed from him.
Tea even outdoes Kafka's "The Trial" in the the _existence_ of accusations against him is concealed from the accused.
Great points in the post:
"What happens if someone lies or otherwise abuses the system? Everything is supposedly anonymous and works on negative selection. The app is very obviously ripe for abuse, all but made for attempts to sabotage or hurt people, using false or true information."
"Even if a violation is found and proof is possible, and the mod team would be willing to do something if proof was provided, if the target doesn’t know about the claims how can they respond?
Even then there don’t seem likely to be any consequences to the original poster."
"6. It’s a massive invasion of privacy, puts you at an informational disadvantage, and it could spill over into your non-dating life. The negative information could spread into the non-dating world, where the Law of Conservation of Expected Evidence very much does not apply. Careers and lives could plausibly be ruined.
a. This seems like a pretty big and obvious objection. Privacy is a big deal.
b. What is going to keep employers and HR departments off the app? "
Ideally, I want every false accusation on Tea to result in a libel judgement against the false accuser.
I agree. Things like secret trials and secret courts are classic signs you live in a dictatorship, not a democracy, and there's massive controversy every time a democratic society has one (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Foreign_Intelligence_Surveillance_Court), for a good reason. In a healthy society even the accused have rights and deserve due process, for a reason.
I mean, just imagine if you got a letter in the mail saying you were tried "in abstentia" for embezzlement or something 3 years ago, found guilty, and the crime was added to your criminal record, and (you realize) that this is why you're unemployed & no one is willing to offer you a job. Your first thought probably isn't, "Wow, they must have done such a good job investigating me!" It's probably something more like, "Burn it all down. All of it. If they're not even going to *pretend* to give me the appearance of a fair trial..."
Or imagine if your own criminal record was sealed from you, so you had no idea what the authorities were adding to it and no way to dispute the charges. In a society of angels, this would be nothing to worry about. We don't live in a society of angels.
Hell, even something as "minor" as your credit card company doing this, refusing to let you look at any charges or dispute any of them, would be grounds for a riot. What exactly makes it okay if the cost is now reputational instead of financial?
Many Thanks!
>I mean, just imagine if you got a letter in the mail saying you were tried "in abstentia" for embezzlement or something 3 years ago, found guilty, and the crime was added to your criminal record, and (you realize) that this is why you're unemployed & no one is willing to offer you a job.
Great analogy!
I wish there was better coordination about forgiveness. Right now it's level 2 - you can reset ratings for restaurants you visited 3 years ago (or had bad breakup with someone and gave them 1 star or something). However to do the reset you need to actively remember - opening the right app, remembering your password, going to history, resetting the ratings. Too many steps, too annoying, nobody will do it.
I wish there was a tradition where every year there is this "Mercy Sunday" or something (around Easter maybe?), when it's a custom to pardon imprisoned, unban the banned, and undo all 1 stars that did not really deserved it.
Say, once a year at Mercy Sunday apps will send you a notification like "Let's give them a second chance", and you get to a page with all ratings you gave, where you can easily reset.