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