Why do Yalies not care about College ACB after the fall of Juicy Campus?

Last year, friends at Wesleyan informed us about the existence of a cleaner, but still gossip-fueled version of Juicy Campus. At this time, juice was still being spilled all over the web by mean-spirited folks, friends of victims of mean-spirited attacks and complainers. But of course, JC got shut down and students looking to smear other students had nowhere to turn, until they found College ACB.

From the site’s press release, ACB is not at all like Juicy Campus. The sites founders, from Wesleyan, made it easy to report and moderate slanderous posts, hoping to direct anonymous discussion away from posts about “Sluts” and “Dicks.” And yet, nobody seems to be using this site. Yale has seven pages of anonymous postings on College ACB to Harvard’s six, Adelphi’s 14 and Wesleyan’s 1121. And those seven pages are filled with rather cruel and uncreative comments that make Yale’s ACB life hardly indistinguishable from its Juicy life. Topics of discussion range from from “Do not date …” to “… small dick,” to “Hot or Not” threads. Does anybody care enough to moderate the commentary?

From the press release:

A relative newcomer, the ACB was originally developed by recent college graduates Andrew Mann of JHU and Aaron Larner of Wesleyan University. It is now owned and operated by Peter Frank. The site is devoted to promoting actual discussion, not provoking salacious posts or personal attacks. Its mission statement reads: “The College ACB or College Anonymous Confession Board seeks to give students a place to vent, rant, and talk to college peers in an environment free from social constraints and about subjects that might otherwise be taboo.”

Such a philosophy sets the ACB apart from Juicy Campus, a website that fostered superficial interactions, often derogatory and needlessly crude. By contrast, the ACB consistently hosts a higher level of discourse—while still making room for the occasional gossip post.

Other differences between the ACB and the now-defunct Juicy prove more than superficial. The ACB employs an innovative user-moderation button, which allows for easy yet unobtrusive regulation. Any post that might be threatening, libelous, or otherwise illegal, is immediately brought to the webmaster’s attention. In addition, the ACB provides a more personal experience for the user, as it is organized into individual college boards. And unlike other college boards, the web space is not overcrowded with ads. Lastly, it is worth noting that the ACB has embarked upon an expansion phase—several new features will be unveiled in the coming months.