Boredat

» see boredat.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Boredat was invisible to you unless you held an email address at a particular American university. That was the whole access model. It began in 2006 as bored@butler, open to columbia.edu addresses only, named for Butler Library, which is the building Columbia students were sitting in when they used it. Jonathan Pappas, a Columbia graduate, wrote it and then ran it by himself for the next decade.

Posting was anonymous. The relaunch in October 2009, after most of that year offline, added what the site called personalities: handles you could accumulate a reputation under while still not being attached to a real name. By 2007 there were separate boards at most of the Ivy League schools. By 2014 the busiest were Dartmouth and Carleton, with Columbia still going behind them, and any school could get a board once enough students registered with the right email domain.

Pappas announced on 1 December 2016 that the site would close indefinitely at the end of the year, because the expenses had grown past what one person could carry. It went off on 31 December 2016. There had been a Patreon, and it had not covered it.

~ the record ~

~ the library naming scheme ~

Every board took the name of its campus library. Columbia had Butler and Dartmouth had Baker. Carleton got one in 2013 because Pappas reckoned a student body of about two thousand was the right size for the format. It reads as a small joke and it was also a precise piece of product design, because the library is the one building where an entire student body sits at the same time doing something it would rather not be doing.

The archived homepage from April 2014 shows how small the operation actually was. The footer credits Boredat LLC, with a version string reading b@v9 sitting next to a personal gmail address. The links along the bottom go to a devblog and to a page selling t-shirts to cover the bills.

~ dartmouth ~

The Dartmouth board is where the anonymity did its worst work. In April 2013 it took an influx of hostile posts including rape threats and death threats aimed at named students. In 2014 somebody posted what was presented as a guide to raping a specific member of the Dartmouth class of 2017, and the student named in it later said she was raped as a result. Threats were also made against a Dartmouth alumna.

The Dartmouth board was closed in October 2015 with very little warning. Pappas said afterward that running it had become too time-consuming, and by then he was describing the whole site as a side project. He had put advertising on in 2014 to keep the servers paid for and pulled the advertising back off in 2015.

~ what took the audience ~

Yik Yak launched in 2013 and did most of the same job without the email check and without anyone needing to know the name of your library. It used the phone's location instead, so a campus board assembled itself out of whoever happened to be standing nearby. Boredat's whole architecture assumed a student would go to a website and type a school-issued address into a form, which was a reasonable assumption in 2006 and a dated one by 2014.

~ the domain now ~

boredat.com answers today with a Minecraft learning community for children. Nothing on it refers to the previous ten years, and the boards themselves were never archived in any usable way, because they were behind an email-gated login for their entire existence. What survives is a Wikipedia article and a run of student-newspaper pieces from the years the threats made news.

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