The other day a link in Neurophilosophy led me to a link in PsychCentral which led me to YouJustGetMe, which looked like a bit of fun. The idea is that people try to guess how you answered a bunch of questions about your personality, based on information you supply. My profile is here if you want to have a go.
I have some comments and criticisms about the site, some of them quite severe. I should first of all point out that once you’ve submitted your answers to the personality quiz, you can’t change them, or even view them. Question five on the FAQ gives a bit of a rationale. Now, we all know that every time one answers a personality quiz one does so a little differently, so you should realise that my answers reflect what I felt was true at the time, and may or may not reflect what I think is true now. (For example, I’m likely to change my mind frequently about whether I worry/panic a lot.)
Your profile can be made visible to everyone, to site members, or only to people who know your real name. It contains two pages – a “clues” page and a “stats” page. The “clues” page contains the information that you choose to share, and the “stats” page contains information such as who’s personality you’ve tried to guess, who’s tried to guess yours, how well you’ve scored (supposedly – see below) and so on. I feel rather strongly that I ought to be able to keep the “stats” page private while also keeping the “clues” page public, but the site doesn’t allow me to do that.
The problem with the “stats” page being public is that it reveals more information than I would choose to share. For example, if you look at mine, you’ll notice that (at the time of writing) I’ve guessed the personalities of five women and no men. This is no accident – it reflects the fact that I tend to socialise more easily with women than I do with other males – but it might lead some people to make judgements I’d rather not be faced with. I don’t think I’m unreasonable to believe that my “stats” page ought to be visible to me alone.
Another big issue with the “stats” page is that the graph is wrong. All the people I’ve guessed so far are complete strangers; none of them are friends I invited. Yet there’s a column that supposedly shows how good I am at guessing friends I invited, and empty space where there should be a column showing how good I am at guessing total strangers. Obviously the two columns are labelled the wrong way around, but how the heck can that possibly be? I’m the 11847th person to join the site and they haven’t even noticed that error??
I sent a message through their bug/feedback page pointing out the problems decribed above. Now, when I sent a feedback message to a site through an automated system, I expect to receive a message confirming that it was sent. I did not receive such a message. So I sent a second bug report complaining that sending bug reports doesn’t generate confirmation messages.
If you can tolerate the issues I’ve pointed out, the site really is a bit of fun and worth a go. And if you guess me, I might try and guess you.
