

Why has no-one brought back a JuicyCampus clone? - keltecp11
http://juicycampus.blogspot.com/2009/02/juicy-shutdown.html

======
zaidf
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).

~~~
w1ntermute
_Because it's evil._

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

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thefahim
<http://collegeacb.com/> is big at Penn State.

~~~
necubi
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....](http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1942971,00.html)).

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AnonPm42
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. ;)

~~~
jackowayed
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.

~~~
AnonPm42
* 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.

~~~
jackowayed
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.

------
kacy
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?

~~~
jackowayed
> _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...](http://blog.weatherby.net/2009/09/dont-blame-backnoise-atlanta-new-
media-conference.html)

------
mkjones
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.

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hugh3
What was it? There's not enough info in the linked blogpost to figure it out.

~~~
colonelxc
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.

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cmelbye
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.

------
ddemchuk
"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

