After months of on-and-off interaction with CollegeACB—an anonymous internet gossip board—I still can’t understand one thing: Why does anyone still use it? In the beginning, ACB (like its predecessor, JuicyCampus) used to be mildly interesting, with regular posts of humorous anecdotes and morning-after confessions. But now it has completely degraded into insulting various fraternities and sororities. All I can say is “Seriously?”

Insulting random people on the Internet can be mildly interesting to watch from a third-party perspective, so long as enough fighting occurs. But now almost every post consists of “rankings” of fraternities and sororities based on various attributes: hottest girls, sluttiest girls, hottest guys, creepiest guys, etc. Of course, the poster is invariably a member of the sorority/fraternity listed as number one—either that, or one bored and disgruntled student wrote them all. Of course, every so often a gem pops up, with an interesting thread title such as “People you can’t stand” (one reply: “Fat people. Go for a walk”). But the overwhelming majority of the time, people just mudsling—not in a funny or provocative way, but in the boring, repetitive, obnoxious way (“The bros at Sig Nu rule!”).

What could account for the quick deterioration of an otherwise moderately interesting concept and Web site? Sturgeon’s Law, “90 percent of everything is crap,” might be an interesting rule of thumb. But I think my explanation runs a bit deeper: Anonymity ruined ACB. If someone decides to insult another person or group in real life, that insult has to be good, or at least worth saying—if your insult sucks, people will just make fun of you for it, regardless of whether or not they agree with you. With anonymous message boards, however, there’s no incentive to write anything decent, not even a decent rant or flame.

While anonymity allows people to speak their minds, that ability means little when nobody knows that it’s you writing that post. Along with protection from writing poorly, anonymity strips the incentive to even care—and when you can write bad posts and get away with it, why bother taking the time to write something good?

Mudslinging and wanton insults probably take more effort than we give them credit for; after all, there’s a reason “Your mama” jokes suck. Of course, without a reason to bother to make good insults, ACB is left with boring, repetitive offensiveness that resembles other anonymous discussion boards. The strongest and most novel element of ACB’s core—anonymity—ends up being its worst enemy, an enemy that likely ended up taking down Juicy Campus as well. Until someone finds an end to this cycle, I’m resigned to spend my procrastination time elsewhere—because I’m definitely not going to do any work.

No Comments Yet

You can be the first to comment!

 Print This Post

Tags: ACB, gossip, Juicy Campus

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 16th, 2009 at 12:00 am and is filed under Forum, Staff Columnists. You can follow any responses to this entry through this feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.