> So, I guess I'm most curious as to your motivations and expectations for CollegeACB when compared with the actual outcomes.
I'll address CocaKoala's (similar) question here as well. First a little backstory: I "inherited" CollegeACB from the original creators who had grown weary from the moral quandaries of running the service and lacked the time/effort to expand the business. I was a very ambitious 18 year old college Freshman (now 24, a '12 grad) and contacted the owners asking to take over the site (they kept an equity stake and I did all the work + invested my own cash). I had seen how it was used at my alma mater-- mostly for "legitimate" secrets (IE: "I have an eating disorder and just regressed. Someone who's been through this-- help!") or community-type postings (IE: "What does one wear to Psi U's 'sex party'"). For the most part, it was fairly productive and mean-spirited comments were few and far-between and were generally removed through our auto-moderation features (something like 5+ "reports" would delete it automatically). It was also wildly popular; everyone on campus knew about "The ACB" and it was seen as lighthearted procrastination tool that everyone knew not too take seriously. Vile threads were dismissed as "trolls" and people looked at the platform somewhat fondly.
I was happy to improve the technological experience, and had ideas about growing this slowly to other schools. I'll jump now to JuicyCampus below...
> You mention usurping JuicyCampus, which had its fair share of negative criticism. Was your goal to replace/compete with JuicyCampus or was this an unfortunate side effect?
JuiyCampus was always our biggest competitor. We were the upstart to their incumbent. In January 2009, a month after I took over CollegeACB, I learned that JuicyCampus was closing. Despite popular reports, it had nothing to do with the various threats of lawsuits (though there was some merit behind the anti consumer fraud suit, as they weren't deleting posts like they claimed to do in their TOS). I was able to put together a $10,000 deal within about 10 minutes of talking with Matt Ivester (JC CEO) for 2 months of their traffic. They actually gave me a 501 redirect.
It was my intention to bring the "CollegeACB model" of legitimate secrets and productive use to the "raw masses" that would use JuicyCampus merely to slander and insult their peers. Clearly, I underestimated the difficulty in changing a mindset when hundreds-of-thousands of users already have a set agenda in their minds.
We built in a robust moderation queue and I would spend several hours a day removing posts and manually replying to every removal request. Looking back, it was terribly inefficient, but still leaps better than JC (they never removed a post, to my knowledge).
So my goal was to CHANGE the behavior of JC users. I was never successful.
> What drove you to sell the site? Was your intent to turn a buck or did the content and the way the site was/is used eventually turn you off on being associated with it?
Closely connected to the above answer. I had intended to change the spirit of the site, and convert libelous gossip into productive, anonymous-facilitated honest discussion. When I deemed that to be impossible, I began contemplating selling the site.
It's worth noting that the site was very hard to monetize. Even at considerable scale from a great audience, we never made all that much money. The recent "side project" thread reveals that many people's "side projects" were earning much more than this seemingly-wildly-popular site.
Anyway, I was approached by a buyer who indicated that it was his sole intention to "clean up" the site through productive discussion encouragement. In short, he was also wildly unsuccessful, and ended up re-branding the site and then closing it completely within a matter of months.
> Hindsight is 20/20, and you mention not being proud of owning CollegeACB. How did you feel about it at the time, when the site was enormously popular?
I was initially excited by the thrill of running a popular site; being a known personality around campus; doing media appearances and generally feeling like a tech badass. But that feeling faded when I began to recognize the corrosive nature of the site. The feelings that were terribly hurt. College experiences ruined. I was legitimately shaken by the fact that numerous people pulled out of college and/or were put into dangerous psychological situations because of the things written.
I had contemplated closing the site completely and replacing it with a message to "respect your peers," but found a buyer before it came to that. It's now evidence of an "exit," and has been helpful in establishing my track record, but it's not something I usually bring up or tout unprompted.
I'm now seeking retribution, and run a "student first" service in Texts.com, a free textbook exchange and price-comparison engine.
That's really interesting; thanks for taking the time to write it all up.
Do you think that it's possible to build a site or an app that captures the good parts of CollegeACB, without devolving to the bad parts of JC? You mentioned that you had failed to convert JC, and that the guy who bought from you similarly failed, but the fact that ACB was a positive force for a time seems to indicate that on some level the model is sound. If you're starting from scratch instead of trying to change a mindset, are there things that you think would encourage positive behavior over negative?
Or is it more a case of you really have to get lucky with the community, and it's possible with small groups (up to the size of a college, maybe) but not possible with larger ones; at a certain point, the bile just outweighs the brightness?
I think that some communities simply wouldn't ever be able to use it in a productive fashion. To borrow your phrase -- I quite like it -- the bile will always outweigh the brightness. I think that this holds especially true for bigger schools with greek populations.
At smaller campuses, starting from scratch, I think that one could create positive communities. Steps I would take:
1) Stay small, keep it niche, spread through word of mouth alone
2) Start conversations around positive topics, where anonymity plays a key role in facilitating discussion ("Why do you love this school? Why do you hate this school?") etc.
3) Stamp out personal attacks as quickly as possible. Either through manual moderation, or through community-policing tools. Most likely a combination of both. Ideally hand-select proven contributors to serve as volunteer moderators. Reports of mods abusing power should be dealt with swiftly.
4) Build in filters to identify content that may be a personal attack. I believe Secret does something similar, a prompt: "is this about a person?" Honestly, one could probably built a queue of "flagged" content (manual or algorithmic) and have someone on oDesk / mechanical Turk determine whether it references a specific individual.
I think that it would be hard to grow at all quickly while staying true to these principles; and, as I've mentioned, I'm not sure there would be much room to profit. That said, if you had a productive community with those college eyeballs, you could probably use the platform as a way to promote other businesses.
Just a question out of sheer curiosity from a business perpective, how were you monetizing the site? What prompted a buyer to pay what I assume is real money for the site? Was it a 1k, 10k, 100k exit?
I monetized purely via display ads (a lot of second tier networks that would turn a blind eye to the libelous content), with fairly terrible CPM but lots of views.
I believe the purchase also monetized using paid CAPTCHAs (where the viewer has to watch a video / type a phrase), which probably did very well considering the sheer volume of posts.
I'll address CocaKoala's (similar) question here as well. First a little backstory: I "inherited" CollegeACB from the original creators who had grown weary from the moral quandaries of running the service and lacked the time/effort to expand the business. I was a very ambitious 18 year old college Freshman (now 24, a '12 grad) and contacted the owners asking to take over the site (they kept an equity stake and I did all the work + invested my own cash). I had seen how it was used at my alma mater-- mostly for "legitimate" secrets (IE: "I have an eating disorder and just regressed. Someone who's been through this-- help!") or community-type postings (IE: "What does one wear to Psi U's 'sex party'"). For the most part, it was fairly productive and mean-spirited comments were few and far-between and were generally removed through our auto-moderation features (something like 5+ "reports" would delete it automatically). It was also wildly popular; everyone on campus knew about "The ACB" and it was seen as lighthearted procrastination tool that everyone knew not too take seriously. Vile threads were dismissed as "trolls" and people looked at the platform somewhat fondly.
I was happy to improve the technological experience, and had ideas about growing this slowly to other schools. I'll jump now to JuicyCampus below...
> You mention usurping JuicyCampus, which had its fair share of negative criticism. Was your goal to replace/compete with JuicyCampus or was this an unfortunate side effect?
JuiyCampus was always our biggest competitor. We were the upstart to their incumbent. In January 2009, a month after I took over CollegeACB, I learned that JuicyCampus was closing. Despite popular reports, it had nothing to do with the various threats of lawsuits (though there was some merit behind the anti consumer fraud suit, as they weren't deleting posts like they claimed to do in their TOS). I was able to put together a $10,000 deal within about 10 minutes of talking with Matt Ivester (JC CEO) for 2 months of their traffic. They actually gave me a 501 redirect.
It was my intention to bring the "CollegeACB model" of legitimate secrets and productive use to the "raw masses" that would use JuicyCampus merely to slander and insult their peers. Clearly, I underestimated the difficulty in changing a mindset when hundreds-of-thousands of users already have a set agenda in their minds.
We built in a robust moderation queue and I would spend several hours a day removing posts and manually replying to every removal request. Looking back, it was terribly inefficient, but still leaps better than JC (they never removed a post, to my knowledge).
So my goal was to CHANGE the behavior of JC users. I was never successful.
> What drove you to sell the site? Was your intent to turn a buck or did the content and the way the site was/is used eventually turn you off on being associated with it?
Closely connected to the above answer. I had intended to change the spirit of the site, and convert libelous gossip into productive, anonymous-facilitated honest discussion. When I deemed that to be impossible, I began contemplating selling the site.
It's worth noting that the site was very hard to monetize. Even at considerable scale from a great audience, we never made all that much money. The recent "side project" thread reveals that many people's "side projects" were earning much more than this seemingly-wildly-popular site.
Anyway, I was approached by a buyer who indicated that it was his sole intention to "clean up" the site through productive discussion encouragement. In short, he was also wildly unsuccessful, and ended up re-branding the site and then closing it completely within a matter of months.
> Hindsight is 20/20, and you mention not being proud of owning CollegeACB. How did you feel about it at the time, when the site was enormously popular?
I was initially excited by the thrill of running a popular site; being a known personality around campus; doing media appearances and generally feeling like a tech badass. But that feeling faded when I began to recognize the corrosive nature of the site. The feelings that were terribly hurt. College experiences ruined. I was legitimately shaken by the fact that numerous people pulled out of college and/or were put into dangerous psychological situations because of the things written.
I had contemplated closing the site completely and replacing it with a message to "respect your peers," but found a buyer before it came to that. It's now evidence of an "exit," and has been helpful in establishing my track record, but it's not something I usually bring up or tout unprompted.
I'm now seeking retribution, and run a "student first" service in Texts.com, a free textbook exchange and price-comparison engine.