Why has no-one brought back a JuicyCampus clone? | Hacker News Reader

Why has no-one brought back a JuicyCampus clone?

juicycampus.blogspot.com

16 pointskeltecp1135 comments

Because it's evil.

Initially when I heard of it, I thought it was a great idea. I thought it'd turn out like friends gossipping about friends. But friends gossipping isn't google-able. It also isn't that anonymous. When you gossip in person, or with your identity on the line(versus anonymous gossipping), it significantly restricts the damage potential.

Why would you want to create a tool that is primarily used to hurt random college students? Not a rhetorical question, I'd really like to know the views on the other side.

To me, it makes no sense from any of the key angles(doing something I can be proud of; making money).

Because it's evil.

Which makes it all the more surprising that no one has brought it back.

There is a lot of evil on the internet. I am not supporting what it stood for - I am simply curious.

http://collegeacb.com/ is big at Penn State.

Here at Wesleyan, too, where the kid that runs it, Peter Frank, attends. When Juicycampus shut down he paid them to redirect their traffic to collegeacb, but it seems the deal is off now.

However, running this sort of of site is really asking for trouble. Peter gets a lot of flak for providing this outlet for anonymous spittle between students, with some people even threatening lawsuits (for example, http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1942971,00....).

I just looked up my alma mater on this website. It is so fucking sad that websites like this exist, it is just toxic. The vile and the vitriol, I mean wtf?

I am one of the (anonymous, though my phone number is unblocked) developers of http://www.dirtyphonebook.com and to me that's the closest thing to Juicy Campus. It's a better version, because it affects everybody.

The site wasn't my idea, but I came up with the toolbar and some of the cool existing features and some of the features we're working on implementing right now. We are working on implementing pictures and other cool location and search-based features very soon.

Even though the site is admittedly very sophomoric right now it's going to be one of the most useful resources for all types of personal information fairly soon. Think spokeo and wikipedia and facebook on steroids.

To those that suggest this concept is evil, DirtyPhoneBook site has exposed cheaters, abusive people that go after people with guns, child-support deadbeats, drug-dealers that sell to kids, and other scum too. There needs to be methods of punishing mean and evil people.

I was randomly punched in the face and beaten up in highschool. I've gotten fired from a job I loved before because somebody else screwed up and they had power to blame me. I think the DPB concept is incredibly underrated because it gives you a way to expose jerks with no way of tracing who said anything. The anonymity allows a lot to come out that otherwise wouldn't.

Free Speech should always triumph over censorship. For the good of society, http://www.dirtyphonebook.com is the first place that let's anybody tell the truth about anybody without any censorship.

We're working on some fabulous stuff that is going to entertain and amaze people. ;)

I recently created http://feedbark.com with pretty much the same idea as this. You use the service and submit anonymous feedback against someone's identity. That portion just never seemed to gain traction, at least amongst the small number of users I had try it out. There was a restriction that feedback had to be approved before it's shown, which I suppose slightly detracted from the "instant gratification" of submitting unsolicited feedback to someone.

Ultimately, I cut out that part of the service because in order to do it "right" (i.e. avoid slander and general hostility), the feature just doesn't have enough juice to get traction.

After searching for a bit, it looks like Unvarnished has a similar idea. It's a Yelp for people. Not sure how much traction it's getting.

Punishing bad people is great at all, but with no accountability you're going to punish a lot of nonbad people too.

There's nothing stopping people that have your phone number from posting "He raped me" or "He beat me up" just because they don't like you or because they'll get your job when you get fired. And since it's usually really hard to prove that you have never ever done X, an innocent person basically has no better way to defend oneself than a guilty person.

* Besides voting and commenting, there is a feature that allows you to verify yourself as the owner of a phone number on DPB if you want to make a verified rebuttal against a comment.

Sure, but if someone comments that I raped them, I'm going to post a verified rebuttal saying that it's an outright lie whether or not I actually raped them, which makes the rebuttal meaningless.

There's tons of accusations people could make that are completely false yet almost impossible to actually disprove.

Philosophically I am with you, but the site design seems to make it feel 'dirty' to me. I really wish it broadcast the ideals your blog post is rather than broadcasting a cockroach and dirt.

I am curious what kind of features exist to combat slander (and what features exist to keep those features in check against honest, but negative, feedback)?

* I'm not a fan of the roach either. It was a marketing decision made before I came onboard. There's some story about why our founder liked the roach and I'll try and find out about it from her tomorrow.

* The name DirtyPhoneBook was chosen for marketing reasons. It's definitely a bit attention-getting.

* Besides the ability to vote on and comment on posts you don't think are true, there's a feature that allows you to verify your number and post an authentic message as the owner of that number. But everybody has the same free speech rights to post on DPB.

What's to stop the 4Chan army from coming in there demolish some relatively harmless person's reputation?

Sure, maybe you can't get sued, but their life is ruined. Some accusations don't unstick.

Has 4chan ever targeted some innocent person? I don't think so, but feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.

If 4chan did use DPB, I'd think it would be to expose scientologists that control other peoples lives, animal abusers, etc

I'm still wary of vigilante justice...

Bristol Palin, Youtube porn uploading day, that guido that got killed racing his car...

Even I would argue those things were ultimately pretty harmless, but 4chan is not the final arbiter of whats right and moral.

Neither is DirtyPhoneBook the final arbiter of what's right and moral and nobody here ever claimed to be that. It's just a platform for free speech

I am not really into this idea because of the problems outlined already (innocent people being victimized, probably by those that SHOULD have dirt posted about them).

But implement a some way to search by area code. Just plugging in random numbers hoping for a match seems pointless.

* If you don't like it, that's your decision. But I don't see good people getting harmed. If you're nice to your friends why would they believe something untrue posted about you? I think bad people are the only ones who have reason to fear this. Call me naive, but that's my honest opinion.

* You can search the site and sort by phone number/area code. Not the same thing, but kind of what you want. I would push for a random button feature that works by area code but we're working on some other stuff to organize local information even better. :)

I'm not concerned about my friends reading it and thinking less of me, I am concerned about my friends posting made up stuff about me. What if a potential employer read it. Totally plausible, totally harmful.

Imagine if it happened and I had no idea about dirtyphonebook.com, I wouldn't know to protest anything. Then I am out of luck with the employer. There are many avenues of abuse.

I don't want to search by terms, I want to search by my area and scan for people I may know based on the comments. It is like 3 word changes in an SQL query to add the ability to search by area code.

* Forget DPB for a minute. Wouldn't employers be faced with discrimination suits if they tried to base hiring decisions on any random Internet post?

* After photos are implemented, I am probably going to build the feature you suggest. It wasn't a priority on day 1 to have that until we started getting a lot of content to organize.

It is pretty well known/publicized that employers view facebook/myspace/whatever profiles of potential hires and I've yet to hear of a discrimination suit based on that.

Reply to SHOwnsYou, sorry I hit the wrong reply.

What's the key qualitative difference between a facebook profile and a dirtyphonebook page?

I'm not a lawyer, but your answer probably lies in understanding this first.

My suggestions . . . VOXopolis.com. It's anonymous, interactive, private, secure, one-to-one messaging. Pretty slick. Best part is that there is no public airing of anonymous feedback which I personally believe is not how we want to interact in our society.

I wonder what a mashup of twitter/4chan/foursquare would look like. In my large lectures, it's not uncommon for more than half of the students to have laptops open and on facebook. Imagine being able to have a real time discussion in a classroom/stadium/concert hall that's completely anonymous.

I got bored one weekend and created a rough working version using rails, but I scrapped it because I didn't want to maintain the site much less promote it.

What do you all think?

You should consider posting your rough working session to the community and let them take it from there.

There are lots of folks that enjoy taking seeds and planting them -- there are lots more folks who enjoy nurturing and maintaing the result.

Isn't that what Google Buzz was supposed to be?

>Imagine being able to have a real time discussion in a classroom/stadium/concert hall that's completely anonymous.

Most programming conferences have some kind of "backchannel", such as BackNoise(.com), that is just what you describe. And the results are not always pretty: http://blog.weatherby.net/2009/09/dont-blame-backnoise-atlan...

1. Colleges contain a bunch of kids with rich, litigious parents.

2. Colleges are run by a bunch of administrators who cater to rich, litigious parents, and whose primary source of revenue is more of those parents in the coming years. They are thus rather sensitive about their brand.

3. In anonymous forums, people pick on those they feel unable to pick on otherwise (due to social norms, fear of retribution, etc). Rich kids often fit these criteria.

4. It's probably tough to find advertisers to want to have their content next to a bunch of hateful stuff.

What was it? There's not enough info in the linked blogpost to figure it out.

Apparently, an uncensored gossip site for college campuses.

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Juicy_Campus

Though I was in college throughout most of the existence of Juicy Campus, I never heard of it, though it's possible my school wasn't in their list, or it just didn't gain traction there.

I've made something like that but specific to our school. It was sort of an automated "Gossip Girl" system that used Twilio to send texts of various tips. It relied on secrecy though, which was impossible to preserve in the end.

"Unfortunately, even with great traffic and strong user loyalty, a business can’t survive and grow without a steady stream of revenue to support it. In these historically difficult economic times, online ad revenue has plummeted and venture capital funding has dissolved. JuicyCampus’ exponential growth outpaced our ability to muster the resources needed to survive this economic downturn, and as a result, we are closing down the site as of Feb. 5, 2009."

Sounds like they're in a Reddit-like dilemma...

Plus, they received a lot of flack for the stuff they had on there, so it's a headache waiting to happen

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