CollegeACB.com, a gossip Web site started last year, has begun filling the void left by Juicy Campus, which was shut down last month.
Former Wesleyan University undergraduate student Aaron Larner and former Johns Hopkins University undergraduate student Andrew Mann started College ACB, or Anonymous Confession Board, in January 2008. Both said they had no clear purpose in mind at the time.
“It was mostly a just an interesting hobby or project to do together,” Mann said. “There weren’t any explicit goals at the time. We had no grandiose ideas about what we were doing.”
The site was modeled after Wesleyan ACB, a similar gossip Web site that was designed specifically for Wesleyan University.
“That was the inspiration for our idea and we made it generic,” Mann said. “We quickly realized that it was not practical to have a unique URL for every school so we created an umbrella site that covered them all.”
As College ACB started to gain more traction, the founders began thinking of their project as an opportunity for college students to voice their opinions without fear of censorship.
“When we got more involved later on, I thought of the Web site as something more important than it initially was,” Mann said. “It provides a place for students to freely discuss controversial topics.”
Mann said he believes College ACB is different from Juicy Campus in several ways.
“Juicy Campus had this idea that you should encourage gossiping and trashing other people,” Mann said. “I thought of College ACB as a different communication forum where issues of race and sex could be talked about openly.”
He cited an incident at John Hopkins when a student posted an invitation to a fraternity party on Facebook. The invite was deemed “racially insensitive,” which led several student groups to protest, finally resulting in the student’s suspension. He noted that College ACB gave those students an outlet to discuss the racially sensitive issue, without revealing their identities.
Mann, however, eventually became overwhelmed with managing the Web site and decided to pass the right of ownership to Peter Frank, a current freshman at Wesleyan University.
“There were a lot of issues to deal with such as deciding whether a post merited deleting and responding to reports on controversial posts,” Mann said. “In addition, there was a lot of manual labor involved in responding to e-mails and managing the site.”
Frank said he hopes to build on Mann’s and Larner’s success.
“We have up to half a million hits a day,” Frank said. “As each day passes, people embrace it more and more.”
Frank added that he believes College ACB has helped fill the gap left by Juicy Campus, which was closed because of insufficient funding.
“An equal number of people say that our site isn’t up to the standard of Juicy Campus and there are an equal number of people saying this is fine,” Frank said. “We are the biggest of the sites that are trying to fill that void.”
Frank also hopes that the site will continue to allow students to discuss issues without fear of retribution.
“We believe in free speech,” Frank said. “We don’t allow people to post graphic comments just to be graphic, but at the same time, we don’t try to moderate too much to allow the site to be a healthy forum for discussion.”
Although College ACB has gained some attention on the Internet, at least one University student said she is not familiar with the site.
“I’ve never heard of it,” first-year Nursing student Hye-Ri Winkler said. “The only [networking] site I use is Facebook.”
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