One man designed an app to profit from women’s insatiable habit of gossiping about ex-boyfriends, and he’s raking it in.
Portrayed as a platform to name and shame or possibly praise men, Tea is an app intended to help women weed out the bad ones before wasting time on a date. The premise is simple. Upload a picture and the name of an ex or former date, and give them red and green flags.
This is supposed to help other women in the dating sphere know what they’re getting into. In a sense, it’s a great idea, provided it is used well. It would help many women stay safe and know when someone is well worth staying away from.
But, on the whole, it’s predominantly women just having a good gossip. It’s women only, and they can say whatever they like with little fear of the man in question seeing it. Despite being intended as a forewarning, it’s devolved into snipes.
@gochucat Why are yall letting gollum crawl into your cooters 😭😭😭
♬ original sound – gochucat
“I feel like if people were to use the app how it’s supposed to be used, this could actually save a lot of women from being hurt or harmed,” one user told NBC. “But at this point, I think it’s like a joke to everybody and just like cyberbullying.”
Made With Good Intentions
The idea behind the app is a great one. We were always told, at the advent of the internet, that strange men online were dangerous. The news was full of stories and warnings about killers and grabbers using forums to meet vulnerable people. Now, we have apps designed to encourage the meeting of random people.
So, a crowd-sourced verification app does kind of make sense. Tea app features the ability to do background checks, criminal record checks in countries where they’re publicly available, and even a reverse image search. This makes getting a quick breakdown of who you’re maybe, or maybe not, meeting much easier.
Allowing comments and notes on people will always encourage cruel and irrelevant comments. But, if it means even a few women avoid eating an abusive or dangerous date, it’s probably worth it.
However, many men are finding issues with the fact that their images are being publicly uploaded and then slandered. There have even been a few court cases linked to defamation. We shall see how long it lasts.