JuicyCampus

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

~ the last words ~

in 2007 i was well past college and on the other side of the planet, finishing my own studies in turkey. juicycampus was an american undergraduate thing, tied to specific us campuses and the anonymous message-board culture of that country. it had no version of itself for me. i read about it later as a case study in what anonymity does to a crowd of nineteen-year-olds, not as anything i lived.

ivester launched juicycampus in august 2007, starting at duke and a handful of other schools and spreading to more than 500 us colleges. the pitch was simple and ugly, an anonymous board per campus where anyone could post anything about anyone. it pulled around a million unique visitors a month at its peak. the anonymity was the product, and the product was mostly rumor.

the backlash was heavy. private colleges blocked it, and tennessee state became the first public school to ban it from its network. new jersey's attorney general opened an investigation into whether it broke consumer law. ivester always said none of that killed it. what killed it was money, in february 2009 he wrote that online ad revenue had cratered and venture funding had dried up, and a site with traffic but no income could not go on. it shut on 4 february 2009.

~ the record ~

~ how it landed ~

this landed as a purely american story. anonymous campus gossip mapped onto the us college system, the fraternity-and-dorm social world, in a way that had no clean equivalent in my orbit. turkish student life ran on forums and msn, not on a per-campus anonymous board built to be nasty. i could understand it from the outside, but it was not a thing that ever reached me.

~ what really happened ~

the ironic part is that juicycampus proved a lesson everyone relearned later, anonymity plus an audience trends toward cruelty, and cruelty is hard to sell ads against. ivester himself turned around after it closed and wrote a book about digital reputation and cyberbullying, effectively arguing against the thing he had built. the format did not die though. it moved straight into formspring and later yik-yak, the same anonymous-post idea wearing new clothes.

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