I stumbled upon this today and thought it deserved what might be called my first real editorial, a kind of comment that’s lighter on the sarcasm than usual because I think it’s something that needs to be talked about. What I found is that there is another college gossip site getting national media attention called “Juicy Campus.” I actually found this listed as the number one story on CNN.com. Freaking CNN, seriously.

The premise of Juicy Campus (the site takes forever to load) is simple . It’s a forum (at seven colleges so far) that allows users to anonymously post gossip about campus. Sounds easy enough, and somewhat similar to this site actually. When you examine the actual content of the site, however,  I must say that it’s something I never want this site to become. This quick excerpt from Newsweek explains:

JuicyCampus.com is a rapidly growing gossip site that solicits content with the promise of anonymity. But what began as fun and games...has turned ugly and, in many cases, flatly defamatory. The posts have devolved from innocuous tales of secret crushes to racist tirades and lurid finger-pointing about drug use and sex, often with the alleged culprit identified by first and last name.

Here at Michigan OTR we have our fun. I like bashing campus groups left and right and Lord knows the occasional juicy gossip is my lifeblood. One thing that I haven’t done however is single people out, and it’s a trend I’m noticing increasing in the comments on some posts. Some of the time I let this happen when notable figures in houses are called out as “tools” or something else relatively harmless. Half the time, I hear that a lot of these people like the attention so I only delete these comments at specific request. Sometimes, however, it does go too far, such as the recent contingent of people hell bent on exposing the identity of the alleged Terrelle Pryor girl. I’m trying to curb stuff like this so we don’t turn into a site like Juicy Campus. Look at a list of recent forum topics there:

* most overrated person at duke
* Whos Hot Whos Not
* hottest freshman girl
* cutest slutty sorority girl?
* Best BlowJ
* HOTTEST ASIAN SORORITY CHICK
* Dumbest Duke Student?
* GUYS WITH STDS!

This may seem funny at first, but what if your name was on here? And once names are posted, there’s no way of deleting them and a Google search may turn up some baaaad stuff the rest of your life. Seriously, click on some of these and spend a few minutes reading them. I can’t even quote most of them here. Shit’s beyond ****ed up.

Anyways, I’m glad to see that you all are (mostly) above stuff like this. If we start doing this, it’s really going to have the potential to **** people’s lives up. I know I’m dabbling in hypocrisy here as I make my livelihood gossip blogging, but if you read that site, you can see how different we are here. After I leave I’m going to make sure this site doesn’t become that. I know better than anyone the power to be able to bash people from the cover of anonymity, but it's power that has to be used responsibly. To me, calling out an organization is one thing, singling out a person is another.

And I’m still happy to say that despite all their national press, their most popular post, “Who is the sluttiest girl?????” at 23,324 views is still considerably less than our most popular, “The List” with 29,309 views. Suck on that you Juicy Campus Sodomites!

Links:
http://www.juicycampus.com/
http://www.concurringopinions.com/archives/2007/12/juicy_campus_th.html
http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/02/18/juicy.website.ap/index.html?iref=mpstoryview