Because it's evil.<p>Initially when I heard of it, I thought it was a great idea. I thought it'd turn out like friends gossipping about friends. But friends gossipping isn't google-able. It also isn't that anonymous. When you gossip in person, or with your identity on the line(versus anonymous gossipping), it significantly restricts the damage potential.<p>Why would you want to create a tool that is primarily used to hurt random college students? Not a rhetorical question, I'd really like to know the views on the other side.<p>To me, it makes no sense from any of the key angles(doing something I can be proud of; making money).
I am one of the (anonymous, though my phone number is unblocked) developers of <a href="http://www.dirtyphonebook.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.dirtyphonebook.com</a> and to me that's the closest thing to Juicy Campus. It's a better version, because it affects everybody.<p>The site wasn't my idea, but I came up with the toolbar and some of the cool existing features and some of the features we're working on implementing right now. We are working on implementing pictures and other cool location and search-based features very soon.<p>Even though the site is admittedly very sophomoric right now it's going to be one of the most useful resources for all types of personal information fairly soon. Think spokeo and wikipedia and facebook on steroids.<p>To those that suggest this concept is evil, DirtyPhoneBook site has exposed cheaters, abusive people that go after people with guns, child-support deadbeats, drug-dealers that sell to kids, and other scum too. There needs to be methods of punishing mean and evil people.<p>I was randomly punched in the face and beaten up in highschool. I've gotten fired from a job I loved before because somebody else screwed up and they had power to blame me. I think the DPB concept is incredibly underrated because it gives you a way to expose jerks with no way of tracing who said anything. The anonymity allows a lot to come out that otherwise wouldn't.<p>Free Speech should always triumph over censorship. For the good of society, <a href="http://www.dirtyphonebook.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.dirtyphonebook.com</a> is the first place that let's anybody tell the truth about anybody without any censorship.<p>We're working on some fabulous stuff that is going to entertain and amaze people. ;)
I wonder what a mashup of twitter/4chan/foursquare would look like. In my large lectures, it's not uncommon for more than half of the students to have laptops open and on facebook. Imagine being able to have a real time discussion in a classroom/stadium/concert hall that's completely anonymous.<p>I got bored one weekend and created a rough working version using rails, but I scrapped it because I didn't want to maintain the site much less promote it.<p>What do you all think?
1. Colleges contain a bunch of kids with rich, litigious parents.<p>2. Colleges are run by a bunch of administrators who cater to rich, litigious parents, and whose primary source of revenue is more of those parents in the coming years. They are thus rather sensitive about their brand.<p>3. In anonymous forums, people pick on those they feel unable to pick on otherwise (due to social norms, fear of retribution, etc). Rich kids often fit these criteria.<p>4. It's probably tough to find advertisers to want to have their content next to a bunch of hateful stuff.
I've made something like that but specific to our school. It was sort of an automated "Gossip Girl" system that used Twilio to send texts of various tips. It relied on secrecy though, which was impossible to preserve in the end.
"Unfortunately, even with great traffic and strong user loyalty, a business can’t survive and grow without a steady stream of revenue to support it. In these historically difficult economic times, online ad revenue has plummeted and venture capital funding has dissolved. JuicyCampus’ exponential growth outpaced our ability to muster the resources needed to survive this economic downturn, and as a result, we are closing down the site as of Feb. 5, 2009."<p>Sounds like they're in a Reddit-like dilemma...<p>Plus, they received a lot of flack for the stuff they had on there, so it's a headache waiting to happen