>Spreading gossip on anyone is extremely evil.

This a naive take. A moderate amount of gossip is good for society. It's a poor man's way of weeding out sociopaths who try to control people using information asymmetry, and who themselves don't have any qualms about spreading falsehoods.

To be clear, it is those who spread unsubstantiated gossip that are the sociopaths.

Yes I agree that could be the case, and people figure out which are the falsehoods by the act of gossiping as well, which is the point I'm making (like the anonymous salary data publishing site example I mentioned in another comment).

A generic example: Jack tells Bob Alice spiked his promotion (a lie), knowing they are not on speaking terms and thinking Bob won't confront Alice. If Bob gossips to Alice about what Jack said, he is in a healthier position to make an assessment about the situation.

Don't leave the gossiping to sociopaths is what I'm saying.

Got to fight fire with fire. Only way to beat a sociopath is by being a bigger sociopath. Yet, I try to go a different way myself. I choose vulnerability over taking on sociopathic behavior. I’ll probably never become wealthy this way, but virtue is its own reward.

Well what do you fight bad laws with? That's right you guessed it...other laws. Fighting fire with fire is everywhere. Crackers vs DRM, Reverse engineering vs vendor lockin, South Park vs MAGA, you name it.

Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good by letting those with no moral code run rampant all over the place.

> This a naive take.

The site is no different from Kiwi Farms, and I'm sure they too believe that they have a just cause. Doesn't matter. Bending over backwards to justify this isn't a naivety-defying smart take, it's just plain horrid.

> A moderate amount of gossip is good for society.

From the article:

> "What clubs does he go to?" another person asked on a different post. "He’s cute."

You think this is social justice? Many jurisdictions have laws against online stalking and doxxing.

My comment was not addressing anything about Tea specifically, I was responding to the extreme generalization that was being made in that comment, which I directly quoted. We should be careful not to extremely overcorrect in response is all I'm saying. A site that that publishes salary data provided by anonymous users is also a type of "gossip site" for example.

If I dated somebody who was abusive or a cheater, I would absolutely want everyone in their future dating pool to know. There's nothing evil about that; if anything, it's more "evil" to stay silent and let innocent people get hurt.

(Wow, look at those downvotes! And I assumed this was a fairly uncontroversial statement. It's hard not to come to the conclusion that there's a sizable number of cheaters in the audience.)

The issue is that no one knows who posts the truth and who posts exaggerations or lies. People can sometimes have a personal vendetta that is rooted in emotion or even idiocy. I imagine that the app isn't exactly set up to vote on assertions with personal accounts, to allow the truth to emerge.

I will tell you a very simple way to avoid cheaters if that's your goal. Look at their interests. Do their interests involve meeting people and doing lots of social things? Or are they more of an academic type? If they're the former, odds are they will cheat on you eventually. I basically told my partner directly that it's impossible for any man to truly promise that he will never cheat, but my interests make it extremely unlikely that I will, and she was okay with this assertion.

I agree that this take should be very uncontroversial and innocuous under normal circumstances. Your other comment got flagged to death because commenting about being downvoted is against the guidelines.

Frankly I'm against downvoting people simply because I disagree with them, but I think you have to admit you haven't really addressed the problem mentioned in this thread. The whole issue here is the "a lie travels halfway around the world before the truth puts their boots on" phenomenon of the social media virality era.

It's a difficult problem to solve, but if you have a suggestion for allowing people to help others avoid abusive people without ruining innocent people's lives on the way I'm sure some people here would be curious.