Baala Shakya, Staff Photographer

Rank Yale – a new student-created site that allows the undergraduate population to vote on their peers’ popularity – was hacked by a group of friends to manipulate the rankings, putting members of their friend group in the top spots on the site.

Tam Vu ’25 came to his friend Neil Shah ’26 around a week ago, informing Shah that he had gotten bored and figured out how to hack RankYale. Vu figured out that Addison Goolsbee ’25, who created the website, didn’t privatize the password, allowing Vu and Shah “free reign over the rankings.” 

“It was so unbelievably easy to hack,” Shah told the News.

Rank Yale allowed the undergraduate population to vote on their peers’ popularity, resulting in a list of the top 100 “most popular” people in each year, as well as an overall list of the most popular people at Yale.

Goolsbee told the News that he was aware of “a pretty easily found exploit” but figured that it would take too long to fix it and that possible hacking would be “so easy to track.” 

“After the rankings closed, I wrote a script to detect people with suspicious behavior, and then went through each person manually to reset their scores if I could prove their vote history to be impossible,” Goolsbee said. “This was not a single hack, but rather several students independently finding the same exploit.”

Shah said he emailed Goolsbee after the rankings were posted, informing him that he and Vu had hacked the platform.

Shah initially believed that Goolsbee’s intention was to expose superficiality at Yale, citing that “it is obvious how much status matters to people at Yale.” He went on to discuss the theme of vanity as a shame, noting that passionate underclassmen often become trapped in the “superficial social spheres” that exist at Yale.

One of the people Vu and Shah placed on the final list was Andrea Chow, who later informed the News about the site being hacked.

“I am not particularly popular and have no desire to be. My friend hacked the website to put all his friends at the top of the rankings,” Chow said. “Mostly he thought it would be funny, but it also highlights the superficiality of a system that self-identifies as toxic and non-consensually subjects students’ faces and names to be part of a project that would rank them numerically.”

Shah hypothesized that Goolsbee changed the rankings that Shah and Vu edited. Goolsbee was ranked the No. 1 most popular by the website. Shah said that Goolsbee’s changing the rankings would have removed the brilliance of the idea to expose superficiality at Yale. The final ranking has people that were added during the hack, but Goolsbee went back and tried to correct what he suspected to be interference with the rankings. 

“The existence of the ranking platform served its purpose. So in my head, the fact that he tried to restore the ‘legitimacy’ of his rankings by removing 21 of the people I put at the top really confuses me,” Shah told the News. “I am unsure if I support his intentions anymore. From two hackers to a troll, we’re disappointed.”

Chow told the News that other people caught the “error” and have been talking about the rankings. 

They also shared they had no qualms in interfering with a system that they don’t believe should exist in the first place.

“I guess the more unique reason for building it is that I just thought it would be very interesting and also pretty funny to see how this works as a social commentary,” Goolsbee previously told the News when asked about creating the site.

Yale Computer Science Department is located at 51 Prospect St.