2161 Appnonymous

Our appetite for apps will be our own undoing. It seems like every time you turn around some internet inventor has come up with an inane application. Inventions used to take time, thought and engineering. Now they just take a presumed solution to an imagined problem.

Take Lulu. Please. 

Lulu is a new "female friendly" dating app. Kind of like Yelp, but specifically for women in the singles scene. For fretful females who'd like a little advanced notice about the qualities of the person they're about to date. 

The underlying principle is the "anonymous review." Supposedly, allowing folks to review things anonymously allows them to be more truthful. The theory is you can have more candor if you don't fear retribution. Suspending, for reviewees, that constitutional right to face your accuser.

Although the idea may have once sounded good in theory, the reality of the anonymous internet has proven otherwise for years. Just ask the trolls in their mothers' basements.

Newspapers across the land have had to cut down incendiary comments sections by making people own up to their own identities. Trolls flaming innocents are commonplace. Young folks subjected to anonymous cyber-mob bullying have been hurt and badgered into suicide.

Go to any small-town internet forum that allows anonymous posting and you'll see the truth. Not about who is being posted against, but about the mean-spirited and vile personalities doing the posting who hide behind the cowardly cloak of secrecy.

Also, sadly, we humans are much more likely to bitch about something than compliment it. Especially when it comes to going to the trouble to write it down. 

So good luck Lulu. Your intent is pure. The dating scene is scary. But anonymous commenters are even scarier. I'd call this invention a misapplication. 

And it's a lulu.

America, ya gotta love it.