Well … in not so many words, of course.

Matt Ivester, founder of JuicyCampus.com, the “gossip” site for College kids notoriously known for being an unrestrained melting pot of libelous and defamatory remarks, has made a plea for decorum and decency on the JuicyCampus blog (hosted curiously at Blogspot — surely setting up a Wordpress installation at a sub-domain of JuicyCampus isn’t all that onerous?)

While JuicyCampus’s origins may have started out as an anonymous means to discuss all manner of things, whether they be fun, breezy, erudite, or cheezy, it has quickly, and obviously (anonymized identities + college demographic), devolved into a giant bulletin board uniting colleges and Universities coast to coast in gossip and innuendo.

Furthermore, its gotten some national attention as you may probably be aware, with stories being picked up by a bunch of papers, and now, most recently through the Washington Post, as students (and families) are up in arms with the kind of inflammatory and defamatory remarks therein.

Which is why I find Mr. Ivestor’s plea’s so quaint.

In some ways, JuicyCampus is a grand experiment in “crowd-sourcing’s” worst excesses, as it allows people to contribute content — in this case gossip — without any controls or accountability.

One need only saunter over to the most discussed, or most viewed, topics of discussion, and you can find that the vast majority are around observations of who is Hot, who is Not, and ranking which girls of potentially loose moral character (a polite way of saying, as the title of one of these posts are “Who is the sluttiest girl??????“). And lest you think that the targets of such thought provoking discussions are exclusively women, you would be wrong.In a post titled “ALL URBANA BOYS RANKED”, guys *are* ranked, but not, say, numerically from #1 to #50. No, instead, they are grouped according to their different levels of hotness (because clearly there isn’t a linear relationship in this ranking), with pithy descriptions like “Top Tier” and “Party Boys”.

What’s also troubling is the second to last ranking (incredibly, not *THE* last ranking) which describes a few unfortunate gentlemen as “Child Molesters”. [I would happily link to this post, but it seems like its literally impossible as the magic of Ajax makes direct links a hard thing to find].The last ranking, which, is some how worse than being a Child Molester, is merely “Totally Useless”.

No, the only saving grace about JuicyCampus is that they’ve thankfully turned on the “no follow” portion in their Robots.txt file, so that Google won’t be able to index JuicyCampus. So those unfortunate guys who were listed as “Child Molesters” thankfully do *NOT* show up when you google their name, even when you throw the switch “site:http://www.juicycampus.com”.

I think the bottom line is that JuicyCampus will continue to thrive precisely because it is an anonymized means of being … well, mean. And I think its human nature that a small part of us loves their drama, and the cheap, if guilty pleasure, of watching human train wrecks, particularly if there is no emotional cost to you (i.e. being anonymous). To be fair, some commenters do try and argue against the bottom-denominator quality of the content on JuicyCampus, but its far from the majority.

The only way for JuicyCampus to cross the bridge from being a harbor of defamatory remarks to an island of decorum — or at least, having the thinnest, sheerest veneer of it — is if Mr. Iverson decides to radically change the site (say, via the Terms of Service), and have more moderators enforcing it (because, believe it or not, there is a clause in their, under section 7 which states that users are not “is unlawful, threatening, abusive, tortious, defamatory, obscene, libelous, or invasive of another’s privacy”).

But I suspect he won’t, and as such, it will continue being an example of what “crowdsourcing” can do when all the controls and accountability is thrown out the window.

And all the hand-wringing in the world can’t prevent that.

(As an aside, for the love of Pete, can someone make sure that Andrew Keen never hears of JuicyCampus?)