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.
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?