Like it or not, college is full of embarrassing moments and never-ending reminders about the people involved, whether you fully remember the story or not.
It comes as no surprise then, that websites to disclose these stories quickly sprung, like Collegeacb, Juicy Campus and the procrastinator’s dream: textsfromlastnight. As students and somewhat mildly-creepy people, we love hearing, and reading, about what other people do. "It's funny to go on and see if people are doing the same stupid stuff that you're doing," admits UMASS Amherst student Katherine Solem.
But is there a downside to sharing your crazy stories and learning about others’? Of course: Names get thrown around, rumors spread and that future employer down the line just “Googled” your name…awesome.
Well, just as savvy Internet entrepreneurs caught on to our guilty-pleasures, they’ve (luckily) caught on to the relief that anonymity can bring when added to stories about fellow students. Bootydrop.com, which launched August 8, is one of these websites and the name tells it all.
Kevin Lance and Matt Weaver, students at UMD an Indiana University respectively, started the site in hopes of finding a medium between sites like collegeacb and textsfromlastnight, where students could share funny stories safely, as they shared with CM.
So far, the site has gotten more than 40,000 hits from multiple universities across the country. Kevin and Matt look at every story before it is posted to ensure privacy and actually, don’t even have access themselves, to the registered user’s name. “When you register, you are automatically assigned a number so that there is no backtracking,” they said. This is the key to the site's success.
While there is a character limit, the stories are a lot longer than a TFLN and Overheard At…Registered users can also rank the stories, “Booty fail” and “Bootylicious,” and the more you post, the higher you get on the Bootydrop hierarchy: from amateur to dropper, to pro to master. The guys are also hoping to expand the site to extend to more universities and are working on creating Android and iPhone apps.
The stories, as you can imagine, are actually really funny, from a story about a hookup in the bathroom in “Little 5 Shenanigans” to bringing girls home while drunk and passing out, in “Lil 5 and Tequila,” two stories that the founders admitted as personal favorites.
Ultimately, college students aren’t going to stop looking for fun websites that share some of the embarrassment that comes with being in college, but eliminating the repercussions of such websites, is a reason why TFLN and now, Bootydrop.com are especially clever. The founders say it quite honestly and simply, “We just want to have a clean website for people to share stories and have a laugh.”
