Two and a half years after senior Brian Finkelstein showed the Tufts community the power of rumors with the launching of his website Brian's Rumors Daily, he abruptly decided to end his venture and shut down the site early yesterday morning.
Surfers who attempted to visit the page yesterday were surprised to find it had been replaced by a fan page for Rembrant Brown, of the television show Sliders. There was no immediate controversy that prompted Finkelstein to close the site, he said. However, he said that the increase in sentiments of intolerance and decrease in quality of content on the site's anonymous forum were large disappointments.
The rumors page published both confirmed and unconfirmed campus news, and broke a number of stories during its short tenure. Its last "rumor," which reported that Guster had confirmed that it would play in Spring Fling this April, appeared four days before the Daily's story did.
In a hidden farewell column to readers, Finkelstein said the page began as "a silly idea" of creating an underground news service. But the site's readership grew and changed at a rate that neither he nor the page could handle.
"This year, the web page simply became too popular for its own good," he said.
While many students have heard of Finkelstein and his website, many more have not. In a Daily poll released last April, 16 percent of respondents said that they visit the site. According to the site's counter service, Extreme Tracking, an average of 4,461 unique visitors went to the page each week over the past five months. The highest daily visitor total was on Dec. 13, 2000, when 1,283 unique visitors viewed the page.
Among the site's regular readers were a number of Tufts' elected student representatives, and those students more involved in campus organizations have traditionally been avid readers.
"It was one of the things that made our school different, and I thought it fit in very well here," Tufts Community Union (TCU) Senate President David Moon said. "[Closing the site] changes the political landscape a lot, because the page served as a sort of check and balance for a lot of student activities. And it was a great way for us to tap student opinion on certain issues."
While the site's anonymous forum did provide an outlet for student opinion, Finkelstein noted that it became a center for personal attacks, racist comments, and vicious squabbles at points during this year and last. As slurs, bigoted one-liners, and character attacks became commonplace, Finkelstein began to clamp down on some of the freedom of expression he had allowed, and subsequently began to receive criticism for doing so.
Finkelstein displayed recurrent animosity towards the University fraternity system throughout his farewell column, and suggested that problems created by the Greek community influenced his decision to shut down the site.
"The torrent of homophobic and racist comments grew exponentially along with the number of posts where frat boys attacked other frat boys," Finkelstein said. "I personally saw a link between the apparent increase in frat usage of the page and the decline in general quality of the page."
The rumors page has facilitated several campus controversies since its inception in 1998, and often received criticism for allowing viewers to post inflammatory remarks anonymously. Former TCU Senator Ralan Hill once challenged a fellow senator, Larry Harris, to a forum debate on a topic of his choosing.
When Arthur Sulzberger, publisher of The New York Times, spoke on campus last year, he was questioned about anonymous online forums, such as Brian's Rumors Daily and the Drudge Report. Sulzberger responded that he did not put any faith into anonymity in general, but saw no reason that such sites should be eliminated.
"People are theoretically giving their opinion, so I don't see any damage in them," he said.
