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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   20083 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 20, 2025

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It looks like the Tea app has been pulled from the Apple store. The linked article has a strong bias supporting the existance of this app, but was it a good idea to have this app?

This app is/was, if you ask someone in the blue tribe about it, a safety app to keep women safe. If you ask someone in the red tribe about the app, they will say that men were not allowed to use the app, that the app was used to spread slander about men which the men were not allowed to see, much less respond to (often times female friends of a guy being slandered would let him know what’s going on).

As a lot of readers here probably know, earlier this summer, pictures of some Tea app users were leaked online causing those pictures to be widely shared, including in a torrent file. Someone even briefly had a web app up where people could rate pictures of Tea app users. The blue tribe thought it was a violation of privacy to do that; the red tribe responded by saying that the entire purpose of the Tea app was to violate the privacy of men.

The app was only available in the US; while it was arguably legal there, they didn’t even try to make it available in Europe, where it probably would not had been legal because Europe has much stronger data privacy laws than the US.

For myself, having had a close friend who was slandered in a similar Facebook group, I can not be neutral about this app being pulled from the Apple store: It harmed a lot of men, innocent men in many cases, and the world, in my opinion, is a better place when we don’t let men be slandered this way.

So i've never quite understood how this app works. how do they verify that the users are women? And how do they stop people from just spamming bad reviews all over the place? Putting aside all the ethical and legal issues, i can't believe it ever worked at all.

how do they verify that the users are women?

You have to send in a photo of your driver's license, which made the leaks all the most awful/embarrassing/hilarious because of how atrociously ugly a lot of the users were. Here's a competitive ranking site someone made with the leaked photos: https://teaspill.games/

The bottom 50 on the leaderboards are uhhh, something

The bottom 50 on the leaderboards would of course be ugly... but 35-50 in the top 50 had a few surprising faces mixed in there...

They're easy targets for schadenfreude, but I'm still sad there wasn't a more creative use of their leaked profiles. Ranking them based on appearance? Why not roasting them in haiku? If ever a time called for being the bigger man - seriously!

It seems like it would be trivially easy to either edit your ID pic to change "F" to "M", or borrow a friend's ID for that pic.

They required women to submit photo ID. The geo-tagged ID photos was the important part of what leaked because it allowed men to see the faces and weight of the women being judgmental.

People yearn for a social credit score.

There is, obviously, legitimate demand to know about the person you're dating. These women are going about it badly. I have no doubt that the Tea app is neuroticism, immature drama dynamics, and ridiculous wokescold signaling on a good day. But they don't have a better option- even if the Tea app is probably worse than nothing.

People want elders, community figures, authorities to tell them about those they come in contact with. Our brains are built for 150 person farming villages with a median age of 12, where your grandma knows everything about the young man you're talking to, because there's like, three of them. Young women try to recreate that on their own and don't do as well as their grandmothers.

But they don't have a better option- even if the Tea app is probably worse than nothing.

The two halves of that statement are in logical contradiction, unless you're saying that "nothing" is not an option (which it obviously is).

Yeah, as per your second paragraph, I yearn for social circles to shrink enough to be more amenable to Dunbar's number so we largely don't NEED a social credit score to maintain a generally stable order.

I understand this is infeasible in the current era, but why do the technological solutions inevitably end up creating more problems than they're worth? (I already know the answer: monetization and the principal-agent problem)

Being more direct, I think most people WANT there to be an information asymmetry between themselves and the people they interact with. But they want that asymmetry to favor themselves and so they want to know all the dirty details about their counterparty while revealing only the most flattering info about themselves.

And that's just not how it really works. They create the Tea App to help women gain the upper hand, but to limit it to women they require those women to disclose valuable information about themselves, and that information is susceptible to leakage as well.

And of course there's no mechanism for assessing the truth or quality of the information that they collect anyway, so relying on the honesty of strangers (who they also know nothing about) to avoid polluting the epistemic environment. Ironically they would need some kind of reputation system to make their own reputation system trustworthy.

The current approach to the internet where most companies try to silo the user data they collect from outside discovery, with the occasional massive breach revealing everything at once, seems to be less preferable than one where most information is open and discoverable with a Google search, and thus there's a little more parity between everyone since they can all see what's out there without jumping through that many hoops.

Stuff you really want to be kept private can be kept in the groupchat or one-on-one setting.

Stuff you really want to be kept private can be kept in the groupchat

That does not seem to be working so well lately.

Tell me about it.

At least in that case though you can find out who the defector is.

They do have a better option, though: dating through people known to friends, family members, and organizations they're a part of. Still far more options than at the shtetl.

The issue with that is that dating apps give access to "higher quality" men, and women prefer all the other negatives than not having that access.

This kind of thing makes me realize that I lived through the best part of the internet. Or at least the best part of one version of the internet. We're living in a dark age or a transitional age, but clearly the worst of times.

There was a time when a teenager could post on Facebook under your real name with no consequences, because there were no adults there. My high school debate team legitimately had a question as to whether posts on Facebook could, not should but could, be considered by colleges when making admissions decisions. You posted under your real government name, dirty jokes and bitching about teachers and gossip, and no one ever did a thing to you. There was a time when girls on Snapchat would just send out pictures of their tits to everyone they knew, with a quippy caption like "Merry Christmas ya filthy animals;" a tradition whose origin I never understood but the action of which I enjoyed. /r/GoneWild used to be understood to be entirely amateurs doing it purely for attention, just like the Girls Gone Wild series was understood to provide nothing but a T Shirt to the girls. And of course none of this would ever really come back to bite those girls in real life, no one was putting in any effort to connect the act to real life.

There was a time when you could just hit on girls on Facebook. If you had a few mutual friends, she'd accept your friend request and chat with you on the assumption you were cool. Just being on Facebook made you cool for a while, I was in high school the years you needed to be invited by a friend, who must at that time have been in college. It was like those stories about whaling ships landing on islands where giant sea turtles could be plucked off the beach and cooked, with no natural defenses from a lack of experience of predators.

And there was a time when it was super easy to lie on the internet. Most dating apps didn't connect to "real name" social media as a default until Tinder, and reverse image search was in its infancy, if you were in a different geographic location than where you lived or just in a sufficiently dense market there was no practical way to connect a profile under a fake name to your real life identity. Hell, for a few years girlfriends routinely fell for the "someone made a fake profile of me" line!

Now everything you do is on a tightrope. One mistake and you're doomed. Everything is public and everything is connected. You can't assume that anything you say is private unless it's encrypted, on a false name with elaborate efforts to obscure your identity behind false details, and even then you might get got if you aren't careful.

It used to be that the internet could never hurt you. Now it seems that it can only hurt you

Dan Savage used to predict that we would reach a point where such a critical mass of people had engaged in sexting that the scandal would no longer attach, because everyone had done it, so we couldn't disqualify politicians for dick pics because everyone had one. We seem to have reached that critical mass for everyone having some internet controversy, but rather than lightening the consequences we've harshened them. I would say that such a system would have no future, that it must change, but then we see things like the drinking age, where the vast majority of people drink before 21 but we just keep punishing kids for no reason. Our society is capable of punishing people at random for a long, long time.

There was a time when you could just hit on girls on Facebook. If you had a few mutual friends, she'd accept your friend request and chat with you on the assumption you were cool.

I totally forgot about this. I'm a bit younger than you and caught the tail end of this. It was pretty sweet. I was too awkward to close, but I had decent success a few times with this.

It was like those stories about whaling ships landing on islands where giant sea turtles could be plucked off the beach and cooked, with no natural defenses from a lack of experience of predators.

And there was a time when it was super easy to lie on the internet. Most dating apps didn't connect to "real name" social media as a default until Tinder, and reverse image search was in its infancy, if you were in a different geographic location than where you lived or just in a sufficiently dense market there was no practical way to connect a profile under a fake name to your real life identity. Hell, for a few years girlfriends routinely fell for the "someone made a fake profile of me" line!

Right, but this is why people started demanding that everything be public and making awful apps like Tea. The time before banking regulations used to be great for speculators but it was terrible for everyone else, which is why we now have banking regulations. "You used to be able to get away with anything" is usually going to be said in the past sense because the majority of people do not see this as a positive. It's no different from the glory days of Soho, 1960s mixed-sex accommodation, or Sodom. These things don't last because they aren't good for the majority of people.

Dan Savage used to predict that we would reach a point where such a critical mass of people had engaged in sexting that the scandal would no longer attach, because everyone had done it, so we couldn't disqualify politicians for dick pics because everyone had one.

But most people haven't done it, and they think that the people sending dick pics are animals.

We seem to have reached that critical mass for everyone having some internet controversy, but rather than lightening the consequences we've harshened them.

Partly because it's not actually everyone, but also because they're different controversies. Mr. "I once shagged my dog" is not going to be any more approving of "I think Hitler made a lot of good points", and vice versa.

But most people haven't done it, and they think that the people sending dick pics are animals.

I guess this goes to your next point, but participating on theMotte is so much worse than showing hole, so everyone here is well into metaphorical dick pic territory.

We all have something embarrassing we've said online, yet we persist in being shocked when people have done embarrassing things online. The vast majority of men use porn at least monthly, I doubt that more than a small percentage of them would be happy to have that search history spread abroad.

In economics, people keep trying to collapse things down into a single monetary dimension and get annoyed when it doesn't work well. Yes, you can sort-of do this: e.g. how much money would I need to offer to get you to eat a dog turd, for example. But then you find out people agree that it's silly to spend more than 10m to save a child's life from cancer (so child's life is worth 10m max), but they wouldn't accept 20m to shoot a child (so child's life worth greater than 20m??? wat do).

So part of this is that I 100% can't see dick pics and posting on the Motte as being equivalently bad, even if they receive the same social opprobrium on net. I am reasonably proud of my Motte posting, and have positive feelings towards most others who post on the Motte; those feelings are reversed for those who send dick pics, which it would never occur to me to day. Meanwhile I am moderately ashamed of my search history and can see myself as part of the rather awkward Band of Brothers on that issue.

Secondarily, I think also just that we excessively-online degens are projecting too much onto others. I think that the majority still don't actually post much or at all online (social media stats are largely around messaging services like WhatsApp) and so genuinely aren't afraid of having their standards turned against them.

But then you find out people agree that it's silly to spend more than 10m to save a child's life from cancer (so child's life is worth 10m max), but they wouldn't accept 20m to shoot a child (so child's life worth greater than 20m??? wat do).

This is blowing my mind.

I think part of it is that shooting them is a direct action you must take, whereas the cancer absolves some of the "ethical responsibility"

I guess the immediate counter is "assume that the 10m treatment will cure them perfectly and permanently with 0% chance of remission"

I agree that 10 million is probably a bit much to spend, but I also would not accept 20 million to shoot a child.

I'm not sure how to reconcile this.

This only seems paradoxical because of the framing. You're a human with normal desires. You want to be prosperous, high status/self esteem and comfortable. You want to balance all of these things. That means you're neither willing to sacrifice your prosperity and comfort for the status/self esteem of child savior nor are you willing to take on the status and self esteem of a baby murderer even if it would secure higher prosperity and comfort. This is all perfectly rational. It is like finding it shocking that someone on a desert island would neither trade all of the water for a thousand lbs of dry food nor all of their food for a thousand gallons of clean water.

Not being a child murderer is worth >10m to you seems simple enough. Combined with the same sort of distinguishing between action and inaction that's required for basically any human to function, as otherwise you're killing a statistical african for every ~5k you spend on anything besides lifesaving charity.

We need to get a "fmab" account going and then we can be the three fmaX musketeers

It probably matters that you are receiving the 20m and could not possibly be giving the 10m. (Unless you actually have that much, in which case, apologies for assuming.)

It also probably matters that deontology is an excellent representation of how humans reason about truly heinous acts, and that to act is greatly different than to not act. Hence cowardice (short of desertion) and treason both being rewarded with a rope, excepting that in the latter case it gets tied in a loop first.

I would strongly trust those moral intuitions.

It also matters that a person who is in position to exchange 10m for one child's life is often in position to exchange that same 10m for multiple children's lives.

Right? There’s a mess of heuristics going on under the hood.

For example, many people see a strong moral difference between ‘doing X’ and ‘not preventing X’ as you say.

Then we seem to see a distinction made between ‘sacred’ and ‘profane’ values. People can relatively easily trade off profane dilemmas like ‘I could finish up my uber job for the day, or I could take another few passengers and earn enough to have a nice burger on the way back home’. But then they point-blank refuse to trade off ‘sacred’ values like not shooting children against any ‘profane’ sum of money.

And of course different people seem to have different sets of heuristics. Some people just don’t seem to see any moral difference between action and inaction, for example, and then those with and without the heuristic get baffled or angry when they try to debate each other.

Did you ever come across Jonathon Haidt’s moral foundations theory from 2010ish? His book was called “The Righteous Mind” and it goes into his research trying to identify the different moral foundations that people seem to use (harm, caring, purity, etc.) and the fact that different people seem to use different sets.

In economics there's a concept called willingness to pay and willingness to accept that comes up occasionally. It arises because people are limited by their budget, and psychology but there's no upper limit on what one can accept.

It's similar to bid and ask prices in most markets, but when certain goods come up the spread can get massive indeed.

Secondarily, I think also just that we excessively-online degens are projecting too much onto others. I think that the majority still don't actually post much or at all online (social media stats are largely around messaging services like WhatsApp) and so genuinely aren't afraid of having their standards turned against them.

Most people aren't afraid of standards being turned against them only if they haven't thought about it all that hard, or they already exist at such a tenuous level of socioeconomic acceptance that they can't get much lower on the scale anyway. But we're no longer in August, it's the Eternal September baby, and at this point everyone has done something bad online. It might be a group chat where they tell nigger or jew or Arab jokes, or one where they fantasize about killing their boss or joke about filing a fake lawsuit against him for sexual harassment. But it exists, for the vast majority of people.

So part of this is that I 100% can't see dick pics and posting on the Motte as being equivalently bad, even if they receive the same social opprobrium on net.

Understand that there are millions of people whose feelings on that are reversed. When baseball players are caught making offensive jokes they apologize, then their nudes leak they demand an apology from the world.

I apologize if you're the one guy who never says anything widely considered offensive here, but that would make you to theMotte what a guy whose "dick pic" is in an anatomy textbook would be to dick pics.

Understand that there are millions of people whose feelings on that are reversed.

I do, and intellectually I could be argued into some kind of non-aggression pact on pragmatic grounds. But you seemed to me to be expressing confusion or annoyance that people don’t instinctively feel sympathy / offer clemency for someone who has something embarrassing leak online, and this is my explanation as to why.

For the sake of clarity, I don’t feel particularly strongly about sending dick pics to people who are reasonably likely to enjoy getting them. My understanding is that there are a considerable number of recipients who don’t, however. More, I am someone who has a chip on my shoulder from following all the rules re: girls and not getting anywhere for it, and I get very irritated by the idea that the golden age of the internet involved horny lying chads strip-mining a generation of girls and ruining it for the rest of us.

These things don't last because they aren't good for the majority of people.

Bingo. The 'Golden Age of the Internet' was the golden age specifically because it was self-selecting and gatekept behind one really big fucking gate.

And every time that gate became easier to hop over, things got worse and worse.

The internet is fine. The real issue is that the majority of people are fucking retarded, and so that's what everything gets marketed to.

I'm curious what you'd peg as the "Golden Age" here, because complaints about the Internet going downhill have been evergreen since the endless September of 1994 began.

I'm not sure where I'd put the peak generally: in a few ways it's actually better than back then, if you're looking for scientific papers (open access at least exists as a concept) or niche hobby groups. The small-town "trust" feel does seem gone --- that analogy aligns with my "closing of the Western Cyber Frontier" narrative I've wanted to try putting to long-form words some time.

And every time that gate became easier to hop over, things got worse and worse.

Yes, as I said.

If you're asking for where the apex was... man, I don't know. I couldn't tell you. Probably in some nebulous, fuzzy area between 1996-2004 where things still looked optimistic and before we saw the light at the end of the tunnel was an oncoming train loaded with caustic chemicals.

I keep meaning to dig up the source but in some famous treatise on Unix (the original manual?) written I think before Endless September, there was a chapter on Usenet, which spends a long time kvetching about the constant flame wars, schisms, and dogpiling.

Partly because it's not actually everyone, but also because they're different controversies. Mr. "I once shagged my dog" is not going to be any more approving of "I think Hitler made a lot of good points", and vice versa.

Yeah, no. Aziz Ansari didn't shag a dog, and Maya Forstater didn't praise Hitler, and I know that you know that. I know we all wish we lived back in the times when everything was sane, but let's be honest about what time it is.

Er, no, I was just making those up to point out that there are entirely different categories of scandals and people who do 'Forbidden Thing Category A' may have lots of patience for other 'A' enjoyers whilst advocating zero tolerance for 'Forbidden Thing Category B'.

When thinking about this issues, I always try to find some old time equivalent and how would it go. For instance in the past would it be legal to make an advertisement in local news that next Tuesday there will be a meeting in a local club where anybody can discuss John Smith on the photo? Then you will have 20 people attending, drinking beer and talking shit about John. Is this something that you would consider as libel and prosecute local newspaper who printed such an advert? What if the advert was just printed paper that some person threw into mailboxes of the neighborhood? Is it some sort of punishable activity?

Now I understand that there is a difference in scale between digital and paper media, but I am still quite perplexed how quickly people bow to authoritarian powers if it is related to internet. For instance privacy of correspondence is a human right under article 12 of UN declaration of human rights. But apparently email and chat communication is arbitrarily not part of it. The same here - talking shit about somebody with friends in a pub is absolutely something that is normal human experience for millennia. But suddenly talking shit on the internet is some sort of punishable evil?

There is something that rubs me the wrong way, mostly that normalizing these heavy handed approaches may quickly turn from digital world to meat world.

For instance privacy of correspondence is a human right under article 12 of UN declaration of human rights

The right to privacy of correspondence (article 12 UNHDR, article 8 ECHR, 4th amendment US Constitution) is a right against third-party snoopers including the government - not a right against the recipient forwarding the correspondence without permission. (Some countries protect confidential correspondence from unauthorised forwarding in specific, limited circumstances, but it was never the right protected by human rights codes)

Even in that sense, it has largely been lost, but I don't think that is because internet, I think it is because statists said "But muh terrorism" after 9-11 and normies didn't realise what they were giving up.

article 8 ECHR,

Seeing how badly most of EU wants to pass Chat Control, that right is deeply unpopular with the elites and soon to be abolished.

Your conversation isn't private when it's being automatically analysed for 'CSAM' by a complex technological system that's probably also soon going to do sentiment analysis and checking for disinformation.

How is text CSAM a big deal I'm never going to understand but then, I don't have to.

Such shitheads. If the wanted to protect kids, they could just mandate that children must use chat-controlled apps, and anyone else is free to use something else. But of course, it's about narrative control, not protecting children.

When thinking about this issues, I always try to find some old time equivalent and how would it go.

In the "are we dating the same guy" case the old time equivalent is that enough people know each other, and talk to each other often enough, that someone will see your Jack out at a bar across town with some girl who isn't you and if they don't tell you they'll tell someone who will tell someone who will tell you.

Or in the case of "Tom's a serial date rapist," the old time equivalent is that you heard a rumor that Tom and Susie were parking up at the lookout and no one quite knows what happened but Susie missed school the next day and they stopped talking so it must have been something bad, because Susie was wearing Tommy's class ring all the time and she stopped right away.

The way you achieve something like this today is by trying to build a dense community around yourself, have lots of friends, talk to them a lot, and date only other people from within that community who also have lots of friends they talk to a lot.

There's also the problem of enough women being dumb enough to date guys who are waving an entire Chinese National Day display of red flags, but staunchly refuse to believe guy is gong to beat the crap out of them or that it's just his crazy, jealous, obsessed ex going around bad-mouthing poor innocent guy (I remember reading an account of a court case where a guy was credibly accused and convicted of being abusive to his ex, and his current girlfriend turned up to be a character witness for him. If you're at a trial for your snuggle-bunny beating the crap out of his last girl friend, what the hell are you doing?)

So there probably is a good opening for "am I dating Mr/Ms Crazy or Mr/Ms Cheater?" website to check out "I met this guy/gal online and I have some doubts, am I over-reacting?" but we can't have nice things because this is the modern Internet. (Yeah, women are crazy violent stalkers too).

If you're at a trial for your snuggle-bunny beating the crap out of his last girl friend, what the hell are you doing?)

Presumably, believing that she's lying or crazy.

I feel like I usually see "he's perfect and would never do that to me" +/- "except for that one/fortieth time" in the early stages with later stages being even more awful than that.

having had a close friend who was slandered in a similar Facebook group

"Are We Dating the Same Guy?"?

On one hand, it seems trivially fine that private spaces where only a subset of people are allowed should exist, and while I'm sympathetic to the privacy argument, it could have been resolved with a (somewhat purposedly) cumbersome and opaque process that would be able to split between genuine interest in maintaining privacy and mere curiosity.

But the west as a whole has decided that men-only clubs are not ok, so I don't see a principled argument that would make

The first ever girls-only space

okay.

they didn’t even try to make it available in Europe

Currently available in the German Google Play store, along with at least half a dozen copycats. Most of the latter are aimed at men, one is unisex.

Are you sure? It shows up as unavailable in Switzerland.

/images/17613563751171446.webp

Yes. Just checked again and was able to install and open it. Won't test any further because I don't want to register.

And your Play Store country is Germany? (You can check this under Settings > General > Account & Device > Country & Profiles.)

Is it possible to actually use it in Europe, though?

If European law was ever actually enforced, the entire continent would grind to a halt.

They enjoy selectively enforcing it to fine American tech companies billions. I consider that obvious parasitism. They can't compete with American tech, but they can siphon off value and assert that they are the regulatory leader of something they are incapable of making themselves. They're already proudly stating they will be the global regulatory leader for AI also. I'm sure the American and Chinese researchers are thrilled.

Much as I dislike our regulatory frenzy, if those companies truely felt parasitised they could just not enter this market. With certain regulations, if the companies follow them, theres arguably some sense in which non-EU customers are being parasitised, but if they pay its literally just a tarrif.

"Can't compete with American tech like Facebook".

Russia has Facebook. It's not difficult tech. Europeans, being a conquered and occupied population didn't have the balls to be like China and Russia and bar foreign social networks.

Sure, you can rather trivially copy American social media and phone apps. I've been to China a number of times and they did just that. American apps are banned. Equivalent Chinese apps are available for download if you have a Chinese mainland phone number and bank account.

There are European search engines. They collectively enjoy single digit percentage of European searches while American search engines take the other nearly 100%. Someday there will be commonly used American AI and EU regulators leeching a bit of value from them in the form of fines. There will be some combination of none or deeply unpopular European AI that approximately no one would voluntarily use as an alternative to American tech.

Chinese had the right approach. There's nothing to gain by allowing someone else to run social networks with the participation of your citizens. Europeans allowed it because they act like thralls of Americans, and that's because that's what they are.

They'd have to really commit to it. It takes one click to turn on a VPN with an exit node in the US. There'd have to be a Great European Firewall.

If the EU passes a law regulating all their leading models, but there isn't a leading model there to hear it, did they pass a law?

The linked article specifically states that the app is still available in Google Play, implying that it was available there from the beginning, presumably in the EU as well. I think this is relevant to the context. And just to add to your post, the article also makes it rather clear that the app facilitated the sharing of the personal data of biological men and also boys below 18 without their permission and without repercussions. On a different note, I'm sort of curious what mechanism the app used to block MtF transsexuals from use.

The Tea app is/was only available in the US (quote: “the US-based Tea Dating Advice app, which is only available in America”). While still available on Android, removing it from the Apple store greatly reduces its spread because of network effects.

Gossip can be good - it allows people to avoid bad actors, and creates incentives for bad actors to improve. It can also be used maliciously.

Empirically, the ability to share gossip efficiently about businesses using sites like Yelp is net positive for humanity. There is a broad consensus in professional workplaces that the ability of employers and employees to share gossip about each other is net-positive for the same reasons, and that the requirement to do so with plausible deniability to avoid being sued is annoying.

Assuming the existence of something like modern dating, my gut feeling is that the same is true when women share gossip efficiently about men they date - both around safety issues (modern dating allows for a lot of dangerous wrongdoing which is de facto impossible for either the law or local elites* to adjudicate, so gossip is the only way for women to protect themselves) and quality issues (people I know who spent time in highly promiscuous social circles agree that the women in those circles spread gossip about men's bedroom performance, and the people who were happy in such social circles thought that the results were net-positive for Yelp-like reasons).

On the other hand, I would assume that the type of woman who uses an app like Tea is strongly negatively selected for being the sort of person whose opinion about men should be ignored, especially by women who actually like dating men. I am 90% certain that the gossip spread on Tea specifically is net-negative.

It all seems to come round to the fact that people marriageable people who want to get married do so, leaving a dating pool which is much lower-trust than the surrounding society. I don't see how you have a modern dating pool which isn't lousy with bad actors, including both the kind you need gossip to protect yourself from and the kind who spread malicious gossip.

I would oppose banning Tea on privacy grounds. In general, I think that laws and social norms are far too protective of the privacy of non-sensitive data (like photos of Tea users) and, almost as a corollary, under-protective of actually sensitive data, and other things being equal I wouldn't punish or shame people for sharing the photos. OTOH I have some sympathy for the idea that people who signal-boost hacked data absent a strong public interest are bad people because they create an incentive for hackers.

* Including things like the trust and safety team on a dating app, or a party host deciding who to drop from an invite list.

The party host is usually a peer of the people (and women) who attend. Why do you think s/he cant adjudicate this?

The data wasn't "hacked" so much as "left on a public facing website". Not so much as a password protecting it. They left their dirty laundry in the street and 4chan had a giggle looking at it.

Don't be so sure, boomer attorneys have tried to claim hitting right click inspect element was hacking/ unauthorized access of a computer system/data

the ability to share gossip efficiently about businesses using sites like Yelp is net positive for humanity

Maybe not Yelp specifically. They've been accused of effectively extorting small businesses, by asking them to pay for advertisements, and manipulating their reviews if they decline. The business owners sued and lost in the 9th Circuit, but (albeit from my brief skimming) the ruling doesn't deny review manipulation is happening, just says it's not illegal.

Businesses themselves manipulate reviews (for example, offering gift cards to customers for good reviews, also reporting bad reviews for inaccuracies), and unmanipulated reviews aren't reliable either because people are biased. Despite that, I still think (at least on forums where people are skeptical) that reviews are better indicators of quality than nothing. I also can't think of any regulation to prevent these kinds of sites from manipulating reviews without massive downsides, since review manipulation done right is practically impossible to prove. A more likely solution is that eventually most people stop trusting sites without transparent moderation, and stop trusting reviews without evidence or proof they are made by a real, credible person.

However, the idea that review sites are blackmailing small businesses for good reviews, and/or promoting big businesses more because they can pay more; especially because this could be contributing to why small businesses get less customers now than before (although overt advertising is probably a bigger factor); means that these sites may not be a net positive.

the ability to share gossip efficiently about businesses using sites like Yelp is net positive for humanity

Interesting you bring up Yelp. Another posted has already addressed that someone’s personal life is a very different kettle of fish than a business which is open to the public.

But, besides that, there are some key differences between Yelp and the Tea app:

  • Yelp makes its reviews public. The Tea app kept its “reviews” of men private, only allowing women to use the app.
  • Yelp allows business owners to respond to negative reviews. The Tea app does not allow men on the app at all, much less let them share their side of the story when someone gives them a “negative review”.
  • Yelp will disable posting about a business and remove reviews should a given business go viral on social media. The Tea app has no such protections.

If Tea stayed around, it would eventually monetize by allowing men to pay to take down negative reviews, just like Yelp.

modern dating allows for a lot of dangerous wrongdoing which is de facto impossible for either the law or local elites* to adjudicate

under-protective of actually sensitive data

Can you please clarify what you mean here please?

Empirically, the ability to share gossip efficiently about businesses using sites like Yelp is net positive for humanity. There is a broad consensus in professional workplaces that the ability of employers and employees to share gossip about each other is net-positive for the same reasons, and that the requirement to do so with plausible deniability to avoid being sued is annoying.

There's a crucial difference though. Personal matters are personal matters, whereas business is business. Human individuals aren't shops or companies.

Human individuals aren't shops or companies.

This is applicable to many issues.

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