Space For All Our Stuff
The not-yet launched social rating app Peeple recently caught the attention of the Internet, and the reaction was not kind. By the admission of its founders, Peeple seeks to be “the Yelp for people,” a succinct tagline that detractors immediately seized upon. According to its creators, Peeple seeks to consolidate reviews of ordinary people. Have a pleasant exchange with someone? Give them a good review. Feel like the clerk at the checkout counter was rude? Downgrade his score. Co-founder Julia Cordray likened the potential use of the app to doing research before making purchase for a car. Fellow co-founder Nicole McCullough sees the app as a quick and easy way to determine if someone is trustworthy.
The in-development app raised concerns such as privacy, lack of accountability, and the fact that one can be added to the Peeple system without notice or permission. It did not help that at the same time this app was discovered, the Chinese were making news re: the creation of a nationwide social credit system database that would rate (and store) a citizen’s “trustworthiness.”
But there are already a number of apps and websites used every day that convey some broad sense of worth or trustworthiness. Follower counts on Instagram and Snapchat, or likes or favorites on Facebook and Twitter are in a way a rating system, pointing out to people that this is someone worth following. Uber, eBay and Amazon all have user/seller feedback programs that rate the trustworthiness of the user. Klout and similar sites rank social media influence.
Ratings, rankings and reviews are going to become more central to our lives as reputation grows in importance, particularly the role of reputation in hiring and work. In our forthcoming report, The Futures of Work, we look at the increasing role reputation will play. As we write in the report:
As more workers shift into freelance work, and online services make past performance easily searchable to potential employers, workers will need to continuously build their reputations for knowledge, skills, and trustworthiness.
At the core of many of the emerging job platforms of the freelance and gig economy are reputation and ratings systems that can effectively replace human oversight and administration with collective feedback and reviews gathered from users. These ratings systems are a critical innovation for the gig economy. They help hirers dispel the inherent uncertainty of relying on strangers to provide services in their homes or businesses. For workers in the freelance and gig economy, being able to build a reputation will be a critical skill.
As Rachel Botsman, who writes extensively on the sharing economy, states:
New trust networks and the reputation capital they generate will reinvent the way we think about wealth, markets, power, and personal identity in ways we can’t yet even imagine.
To be placed on the mailing list for a free copy of our forthcoming Futures of Work report, email us at FuturesOfWork@foresightalliance.com.
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