The idea of the Tea app is somewhat good, but had some very obvious and very serious problems from the start:
What is stopping someone from using the ID/information of a female family member, friend, or other acquaintance? No matter how many steps you go through to try to ensure safety, you can never be completely sure that someone is not acting under duress unless you can check their entire surroundings. The platform is ostensibly used to out people doing horrible things like SA and spreading STIs without telling others but simultaneously relies on those same people being honest enough to not get past the verification system.
What is stopping someone from posting completely made up slander about a man on there? He would not be able to defend himself at all nor even know that he was posted on there without someone breaking Tea's terms and there is plenty of evidence(r/entitledpeople , r/karens , r/nicegirls, and MANY others) of the lengths people will go to when confronted with a perceived slight ranging from rejecting another as a romantic partner to a very mild inconvenience. Best case scenario is women will just avoid the man, but if the accusations are especially vile or if the reader is especially sensitive to the accusation then it could easily escalate to physical violence and/or police intervention.
What about male attracted males and lesbians? Women probably would be the ones most susceptible to physical violence and societal stigma, but that doesn't mean that gay/bisexual/pansexual men should not also know about if their partner has done horrible things. It also doesn't protect lesbians at all because the whole premise is to divide by gender. Do they not deserve the same type of protection?
As stated in the video, data breaches are one of the most obvious and potentially life threatening problems. All of the information including IDs WITH ADDRESSES could potentially be directly linked to the posts, making it horribly easy for bad men to inflict retaliation if a data breach occurs. And it WOULD eventually occur just given its popularity and the digital surface area available for attack as a result.
As also stated in the video, a major issue is that the app was majorly polluted with mundane experiences which drowned out and watered down the problematic ones. A fix to this would be to give moderators the ability to flag content as extra important, but honestly given its plethora of other issues I think the app is unsalvageable from its very premise without both serious restructuring and some privacy compromises.
Ultimately the thought behind the app was fine, but it relies way too heavily on people following the rules while simultaneously highlighting problematic people who would be more likely to break the rules. The only marginally more feasible solution to fix the issues would be to switch to a criminal background check instead of a gender check although even that would be susceptible to data breaches and would allow abusive people to get in if they were not formally charged. In addition to that, to fix the verification under duress problem, they could have the user record a video that will send itself immediately after recording showing that they are alone in a room with no way of someone observing the inside then hold up one of 2 signals with their hands to say that they either:
1. Not under duress and want access to the app.
2. Under duress and are being forced to provide access to the app.
If they show the signal for under duress, the app should then say that it submitted the application, wait the average time to review an application, then show fake data that matches the display of the actual app.
gummygunk
romaincrisis
turnnoffyourmind
origamiaround
pixelskylines
stormborns
