Princeton Procrastination

Last year, the view from the back of a crowded lecture hall was fairly predictable: a few computer screens opened to Microsoft Word blinking pitifully in a sea of Facebook newsfeeds and photo albums.

Recently, however, that signature blue border has lost some of its ubiquity. In its place has cropped up a host of Princeton-specific sites, which are providing alternative procrastination destinations for bored and uninspired students.

Princeton FML, one of the most successful of these sites, allows students to anonymously post short, (generally) funny anecdotes from their lives. Modeled after the original website fmylife.com, Princeton FML is a venue for students to cathartically share moments when they couldn't help but laugh a little, shake their heads and say, "Fuck my life."

"Princeton FML gives students the opportunity to laugh at their hardships, and it's always nice to know that you're not alone," Florence Hsiao '13 said.

Harvard and Yale both had their own FML sites before Princeton, and the Princeton FML moderator - who wishes to remain anonymous, though we can reveal that it is a he and that he is a junior - said he decided to launch the site "partially out of school pride and partially because I felt we'd be better complainers than they would be." Once the moderator proved to the founder of the umbrella College FML network that he had a sense of humor, Princeton FML was born.

Within the College FML network, which includes over 35 colleges, Princeton FML by far has the most visits, unique visitors, posts and comments. On an average school day, the site gets roughly 45 new FML posts and 2,000 page views. Certain heavy-work days have even more traffic; Dean's Date had over 70 FMLs and nearly 3,500 views.

"If you come to Princeton FML looking to procrastinate, you are so in luck," the moderator said.

Another Princeton procrastination site advertises its function with its very title: Bored at Firestone. The Bored at [insert college library name here] sites provide users with an empty box with simple instructions: "post your thoughts ... but keep it anonymous..." Jonathan Pappas, a 2006 Columbia graduate, created the original site Bored at Butler (a Columbia library) his senior year after realizing there were some things he would like to say without having his identity forever attached to them.

"I was thinking it'd be great to post whatever's on your mind without worrying what people think about you - to just get it out there," he said.

The complete anonymity and lack of structure on the site leads often to casual conversations between whoever happens to be on the site at a given time. While some of these discussions may be casual "just wanting to talk" conversations, others are more sexually inclined, and some posts deal with even deeper issues.

"I've seen a lot of people look to ‘Bored at' for serious advice, asking questions you can't just typically ask somebody," Pappas said.

Some students, however, do not find the site so useful.

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"I've used Bored at Firestone like once," Eric Rehe '13 said. "It has a lot of potential, but not a lot of people use it."

While users of Princeton FML and Bored at Firestone may empathize with their fellow posters, there's no way for them to actually identify each other. GoodCrush Princeton takes a different approach: It is all about bringing people together.

Founded in 2007 by former USG president Josh Weinstein '09, GoodCrush Princeton is "a risk-free way to express romantic interest in someone," according to Weinstein.

The site provides two services - the first is the missed-connections page, which consists of anonymous postings similar to those on citywide Craigslist sites. A typical GoodCrush Princeton missed connection reads, "Whitman Dining Hall: I smiled at you when we were both getting water - you were wearing purple jeans."

The other part of GoodCrush Princeton is the CrushFinder, which was started as a USG initiative around Valentine's Day in 2007 when Weinstein was USG vice president. CrushFinder allows the user to enter five free "crushes," who are then notified by e-mail that they have a crush waiting. If those crushes happen to list the original crusher as a crush, the two students are notified and can discover each other's names. The five crushes each have a freeze period of one month. After that time, users can update their crushes and pick new prospects. The site also has a "Crush Top 10" feature that shows the top most-crushed people on the site.

In its first 24 hours of existence, CrushFinder had 1,400 users, and today, GoodCrush Princeton consistently gets between 1,400 and 1,600 visitors per day, with up to around 2,500 on Valentine's Day. In addition to Princeton, GoodCrush is active at more than 20 schools, and there is even a GoodCrush for people who work at Google.

Many users, however, often read the posts for mere entertainment value, rather than looking for posts that are actually about themselves.

"I would never personally use GoodCrush, though, because I find it hard to take seriously," Hsiao said.

Despite such skepticism, Weinstein said he has heard of friends finding mutual crushes via CrushFinder.

"Sometimes matches are made and sometimes they aren't made, but the beauty of the site is that there's really no risk either way," Weinstein said.

While Princeton FML, GoodCrush Princeton and Bored at Firestone all rely on double anonymity (an unnamed author and subject), for those who do actually want to attach their names to their comments, the Facebook group Overheard at Princeton allows users to post about funny conversations or remarks they have heard around campus. Antonio Villaraigosa '12 started the group, which currently has almost 1,500 members. Villaraigosa said he had been submitting funny overheard conversations to the "Verbatim" feature in The Nassau Weekly but they were not getting published.

"I thought we need a place where we can post these things on our own. So I created the group, mainly as a personal procrastination tool, but it ended up becoming a procrastination tool for everyone, which is great," Villaraigosa said.

Once he and his roommate invited all their Facebook friends to join the group, membership stayed around 200 for a while. But, as Villaraigosa said, "Once the word gets out, it's out" - during a 72-hour period right before winter break, the group's membership jumped from 200 to over 1,000. Villaraigosa said he believes this sharp increase was due to word of mouth and may have occurred because the group reached the critical mass where it had seeped into a variety of campus social groups.

"It's a real advantage having this group based on Facebook, because it gets the word out by itself because of the stalker newsfeed," Villaraigosa said. "People see their friends joining, and they want to join too."

Fallon Atta-Mensah '11 said she noticed the recent growth of Overheard at Princeton.

"Overheard is pretty young right now, and at first, it was just the same people writing the quotes," she said. "But now so many people write on it. It's so funny! Every time I see a new quote I can picture Princeton people saying it perfectly."

Villaraigosa said he regularly checks the group page to see if there are any funny new posts and to moderate any inappropriate posts that identify individuals by name. He said he rarely needs to delete posts, however. The rule on the site instructs users, "Please do not be too specific as to name the person or people involved," asking them to keep descriptions to phrases like Cottage bro, Junior Theta or Butler frosh.

"When your name is out there, you definitely think twice about what you say. You can laugh at someone, but you don't need to make fun of someone specifically," Villaraigosa said.

This issue of anonymity has been heavily discussed at Princeton in recent years. In 2008, Connor Diemand-Yauman, who was then president of the Class of 2010, and Associate Dean of Undergraduate Students Thomas Dunne spearheaded the "Own What You Think" campaign, which was sparked by controversies over JuicyCampus, the college gossip site that was shut down in February 2009. More recently, in December 2009, racist online comments to an article in The Daily Princetonian spurred students to start another campaign to raise awareness of ignorance on campus.

"You should be able to read a forum ... and still feel comfortable, still feel accepted," Jonathan Ford Jr. '12, president of the Black Men's Awareness Group, told the ‘Prince' in December. Ford helped organize a T-shirt campaign against the racist comments.

The creators of these Princeton-specific procrastination sites certainly have thought about these sensitive issues. Though he was not a supporter of the "Own What You Think" campaign, the Princeton FML moderator said he believes the anonymity of the site is potentially dangerous, "which is why everything has to be moderated."

Weinstein agreed, saying, "unmoderated anonymity can be malicious ... We saw with JuicyCampus that it can pose a lot of problems, especially within what I call insulated social networks, or, in this case, a small college campus." He said that while JuicyCampus displayed the negative possibilities of anonymity, outlets like GoodCrush hope to take advantage of anonymity's positive attributes.

Bored at Firestone's Pappas dealt with the threat of anonymity firsthand when he was required to shut down the site in December 2009 after a number of slanderous and racist comments were posted.

"The site is absolutely not for hate speech or racism," he said. "We're trying to create a space where you can freely express your thoughts and have the community democratically moderate the content on its own."

The site is back up and running, this time with new safeguards in place that allow users to temporarily ban other users if their post receives enough "dislikes."

According to Pappas, despite the occasional damaging effects of anonymity on the Internet, "it seems like the benefits far outweigh the dangers." The anonymity of "Bored at" sites, as well as of GoodCrush and Princeton FML, provides a safe outlet for the community voice, whatever that may be at any given time.

Pappas said he has seen very different voices emerge at the nine college "Bored at" sites he runs. Princeton's Bored at Firestone, for example, currently features a prominent voice from gay males.

"If you think about it, it's a place for people to post things without having their identity attached to it, so, naturally, any type of repressed group would feel they are able to use it as an outlet," Pappas said. "It's going to be what it is - it seems the gay population at Princeton has found a use for the site."

It's precisely these sites' ability to cater to a wide range of students and be used for a variety of purposes which may allow them to stand a chance against old stalwarts like Facebook and Youtube. The sites work because "they're personalized," Villaraigosa said. "Everyone wants to read posts about places and people they know and situations they're familiar with."

In this age of endless distraction, these sites may just be a sampling of what is to come. I can only guess at what's coming: Princeton Pandora? Princeton Sporcle? Too much choice can be overwhelming, especially when it seems like every new thing is the next big thing. For the indecisive among us, maybe the easiest thing to do is just listen to the parental voices in our heads, close our laptops and get cracking on that precept reading that never quite got finished, though that's certainly easier said than done.

Cerena Chen contributed reporting.