Lulu, The App That Lets Women Anonymously Rate Men, Will Now Let Guys Check Their Scores
Lulu, a girls-only app that lets women rate men anonymously, is launching a product for guys. — Cofounded by Alexandra Chong in 2011, Lulu lets women discuss a guy's sense of humor, appearance …
Context & Ripple Effects
Lulu arrived in the mainstream press in November 2013, when a New York Times profile of the app framed it as a novelty way for women to vet Facebook friends — coverage that drew immediate pushback from critics like Jason Kincaid, whose response argued the Times sidestepped the consent and privacy controversies around anonymous ratings of real, named men. Alexandra Chong's app has been growing inside that tension ever since: its value rests entirely on women speaking candidly among themselves.
Today's move — confirmed across pickups by Complex, New York Magazine, VentureBeat and others — cuts directly into that tension. By building a product that lets men check their own scores, Lulu is deliberately ending the one-sidedness that defined it since its 2011 founding, presumably trading some of the girls-only intimacy for engagement from the rated half of its user base.
First-order effects
- Men on Lulu gain visibility into ratings that were previously written about them without their knowledge, changing what it means to be reviewed on the platform from something done to you to something you can monitor.
- The girls-only community that made Lulu distinctive loses its structural guarantee of privacy — every review is now written knowing the subject may read it.
Second-order effects
- Women's willingness to rate candidly is likely to fall as anonymity meets accountability, putting the quality and volume of Lulu's core content — the asset advertisers and acquirers would care about — at risk.
- Any competitor building on the same one-sided-review model now faces the same forced choice: open up to the rated side or absorb the criticism Lulu took through 2013.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, apps built on unconsented reputation data about private individuals will keep being pushed toward opt-in mechanics or two-sided design — an early skirmish in what becomes a recurring debate over whether people can be 'reviewed' like restaurants, and who owns the scorecard.
The trend: Consumer apps built on one-way reputation data are being pushed to open their scoring to the people scored, as the ethics of rating individuals without consent become impossible to defer.