Michael Arrington: “It’s time for a centralized, well organized place for anonymous mass defamation on the Internet. Scary? Yes. But it’s coming nonetheless.”
Meh. I think Arrington and this company are overestimating the market. JuicyCampus went out of business for a reason and they had the advantage of actually targeting existing social scenes instead of isolated individuals. Here is how my campus’s juicy campus page looked over time (apologies for crudeness):
omg! we have a juicycampus page! Who is the hottest girl? (Some names) Who is the hottest guy? (Some names) Alex Soandso is a slut! Shut up Alex is awesome and you have no friends! Who are the biggest players? (Some names) Who had sex with a professor? (No names) Who is the hottest professor? (A few names) Who has the biggest penis?
… This lasted for about a week. The remaining six months until JuicyCampus shut down consisted of parodies about how awesome Steve Holt is and awkward threads obviously contrived by employees of Juicy Campus trying to get students to keep talking.
Because these things are uncensored the signal to noise ratio is just impossible to deal with. Plus for this to be effective you would have to be routinely looking up everyone you know. I guess you could have accounts that tracked everyone you knew… but are you really going to show up on a regular basis just to check? It does look like some of these gossip sites have been successful with high schools but those are far more insular and far more gossip-centered places than the rest of the world.
I’ll be very surprised if this particular company is a success, but I don’t think it’s an impossible problem and I think there is probably some sort of a business execution/insight that could make such a company a very successful startup.
The successful versions of companies in this space will look a lot more like reputational economies and alternative currencies than marketplaces for anonymous libel like JuicyCampus.
Michael Arrington: “It’s time for a centralized, well organized place for anonymous mass defamation on the Internet. Scary? Yes. But it’s coming nonetheless.”
http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/28/reputation-is-dead-its-time-to-overlook-our-indiscretions/
Meh. I think Arrington and this company are overestimating the market. JuicyCampus went out of business for a reason and they had the advantage of actually targeting existing social scenes instead of isolated individuals. Here is how my campus’s juicy campus page looked over time (apologies for crudeness):
omg! we have a juicycampus page! Who is the hottest girl? (Some names) Who is the hottest guy? (Some names) Alex Soandso is a slut! Shut up Alex is awesome and you have no friends! Who are the biggest players? (Some names) Who had sex with a professor? (No names) Who is the hottest professor? (A few names) Who has the biggest penis?
… This lasted for about a week. The remaining six months until JuicyCampus shut down consisted of parodies about how awesome Steve Holt is and awkward threads obviously contrived by employees of Juicy Campus trying to get students to keep talking.
Because these things are uncensored the signal to noise ratio is just impossible to deal with. Plus for this to be effective you would have to be routinely looking up everyone you know. I guess you could have accounts that tracked everyone you knew… but are you really going to show up on a regular basis just to check? It does look like some of these gossip sites have been successful with high schools but those are far more insular and far more gossip-centered places than the rest of the world.
I’ll be very surprised if this particular company is a success, but I don’t think it’s an impossible problem and I think there is probably some sort of a business execution/insight that could make such a company a very successful startup.
The successful versions of companies in this space will look a lot more like reputational economies and alternative currencies than marketplaces for anonymous libel like JuicyCampus.