It can be hard to tell the satirical from the deadly serious, especially at this time of year. April Fool's has become something of an institution on the Web, almost as institutional as the perennial grumbling about how much people hate having to spend a day trying to tell the real from the maybe-real. Google, for instance, announced that its artificial intelligence was finally out of beta. Amazon announced a “cloud computing” service that actually involved a blimp.
So when word starting going around about a new website called PersonRatings.com, there was some confusion about whether it was real, or just a finely pointed piece of satire. PersonRatings claims to do exactly what its name implies: it rates people. Not just doctors or professors or scurrilous ex-boyfriends – we already have sites for rating them – but all people. “Millions of Americans, reviewed and rated!” shouts its tagline. The Onion couldn't have written it better.
Its founder, however, has been assuring news organizations that his website is the real deal. Just punch in the name of the person you'd like to rate; if they're not in the database already, you can add their names yourself. Then you rate them on a five-star scale – from “Not At All” to “Extremely” – to indicate whether they're smart, sexy, confident, successful, friendly, funny, kind, classy, energetic and trustworthy.
The site, already filling up with profiles, is ostensibly for Americans only, but in practice, it's not that picky. Apparently, its creators skimmed public-facing sites such as MySpace to seed its database with names, adding, for good measure, a sprinkling of celebrities such as Michelle Obama, and the site's own creator, one Jeremy Stamper. We are told that once a name has been added to the database, there's no removing it.
Already, people you don't know and don't care about are being given mediocre rankings by strangers. First Lady Obama seems to be well-liked. But Stamper has been rated “Not Really” sexy and “Not At All” classy. Then again, somebody added Hitler to the database, and he's got four stars for being “energetic.”
This is like a nightmare that keeps recurring on the Internet. Once every year or so, some loathsome site like this pops up, complete with a catchy name and some Libel 2.0 premise. There is a brief moment of panic as online citizens contemplate the spectre of disgruntled ex-lovers filling their Google results with scurrilous anecdotes. And then the moment passes, and the Internet wakes up with a gasp, remembering that, for some reason, these sites never seem to stick, and all the reputation-ruining action is still safely locked away on Facebook.
The fact that reputation-ruining sites haven't gained a lot of traction – despite the best efforts of their self-promoting owners – is more interesting than the sites themselves. Even the most famous rating site, the academic-grading RateMyProfessors.com, seems to be more a distraction round the footsteps of the Ivory Tower than a force to be reckoned with.
PersonRatings will soon be consigned to obscurity too, because if we've learned one thing from the economy of reputation that we've built over the years, it's that it takes reputation to tarnish reputation. Anonymous ravings on a tacky site like this won't carry much clout, compared to what real friends might say on Facebook, or what the cognoscenti behind Wikipedia might deign to publish.
In fact, what saves this unpleasant little endeavour from being entirely forgettable is how brilliantly it works as a send-up of the Web's silliest excesses over the last few years. A lot of great things have emerged from the Web's half-lamented boom, among them a new spirit of collaboration and an appreciation of the many ingenious ways that people can organize themselves, given the right tools.
On the less-great side of the balance sheet, though, we've learned just how obnoxious people can be when put into mob situations. We learned this because there emerged a dogma that said that user feedback – comments, rankings, polls, postcards, singing telegrams, what have you – was a moral good, and would infuse a web page with not just quality, but a kind of righteousness, whatever the context.
So when somebody sets up an anonymous website whose premise boils down to, “Hey everybody! Slander party at my house! Bring your friends!” it might be time to admit that Web 2.0 went sailing over the shark some time ago.
But you knew that. Change is in the air. The economy is resetting itself, and the assumptions – financial and ideological – that underpinned the explosion of goofy websites like this are resetting themselves too. They have already given way to more clever websites, ones that use ever-improving mechanisms to filter and sort user contributions so that the best rises to the top. So have a gander at PersonRating while you still can. If we're lucky, it'll be the last of its kind.
