
Show HN: Yelp for People, Reviewing Humans, chattel.me - smalter
http://chattel.me
======
mychacho
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.

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

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

~~~
smalter
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.)

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rguzman
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.

~~~
artmageddon
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 :)

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ww520
Shouldn't there be pictures of the people being rated? Would this be evolved
to something like the hotornot sites a while back?

~~~
smalter
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.

------
exit
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?

~~~
smalter
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.

------
dchads
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.

------
smalter
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
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>

~~~
smalter
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)

