It doesn't matter. This is how Facebook started. It's how a lot of things started.
Young people doing (sometimes questionable) experiments.
The fact that the default response to this is "omg" and "this guy deserves to be in prison" is an indication of the dark times we're headed towards. A society unable to tolerate deviance from the norm, is a society that will fail to adapt to inevitable changes to the norm. And the norms are changing.
I am pretty pro-privacy. And yes, I find it to be fairly thoughtless, but that's no reason for coercive intimidation. The fact that this was the reaction to someone doing an experiment speaks poorly about the society it took place in, and explains why there haven't been any major breakthroughs - in consumer tech, science or the arts – from within that country.
More generally, HN's reaction is disappointing. This is a very hacker thing to do. Hackers have always been people out at the edge doing things that get them into trouble. The fact that most people on HN want to crush that rebelliousness – that hacker spirit – is sad to me.
I think there's a dark undercurrent in global culture, where people would rather live in a world where they're poor but able to control others as opposed to one where they're wealthy but unable to exert control over others.
"A society unable to tolerate deviance from the norm, is a society that will fail to adapt to inevitable changes to the norm" I feel the same way about societies that continue to fail lessons of history and repeat the same damaging (and often easily avoided) idiocy.
If this were completely uncharted territory, you might have a leg to stand on here.
But you are correct that this is exactly how Facebook started, and we know exactly how that goes, the poster is correct that this just leads to harassment at scale.
The author's response was the main problem, showing a complete lack of character or ethical concern.
There is a world of difference between being a hacker with a sense of rebelliousness and a jerk who thinks there should be zero consequences to their actions.
If we're using the Facebook example to call this unacceptable, we should really be fighting a lot harder against Facebook itself. Because it still has a reasonably positive reputation overall and it's affecting billions of people.
> If we're using the Facebook example to call this unacceptable, we should really be fighting a lot harder against Facebook itself.
I don't think many here would disagree with you.
> Because it still has a reasonably positive reputation overall and it's affecting billions of people.
I'm gonna disagree with you. Maybe it's because I live in the Bay Area so the culture is affected by the proximity of tech companies. But my family in the middle of the country mostly seem to be on the same page, so I don't know how you explain that. It may be that I'm drawn to people who care about these topics and some degree of sameness is expected within family dynamics resulting from the parents' values raising us. Whatever.
I think a good portion of society considers FB a garbage product but don't know of an alternative and just accept it for what it is. I think a smaller portion of society recognizes that they are amoral and terrible for society. How many countries have now discussed legislation to limit kids accessing social media (whether you agree or disagree)? That didn't spring out of nowhere fully formed. Years of criticism got us there.
"There is a world of difference between being a hacker with a sense of rebelliousness and a jerk who thinks there should be zero consequences to their actions."
Given the external consequences of certain actions, for all intents and purposes that "world of difference" may exist only inside their skull.
I don't think this person belongs in prison, but the internet also isn't the place it was in 2004? You do bear responsibility for what you do online, and this was irresponsible. We should encourage kids and others to experiment and make mistakes, but the kid shouldn't have put up this website and should have taken it down as a responsible member of the community
Speaking of which, the author is possibly an even bigger asshole than Zuckerberg. Oh you don't like what anonymous somebodies wrote about you under a profile you didn't even create yourself (because I did it for you)? Why suck my dick!
Go, have your fun, experiment, fuck around, push boundaries. Don't make profiles for me based on info you found, public or not, and then sign me up to receive notifications for messages on it without my permission.
Yeah, Facebook started in college, but it didn't start with scraped data and auto-generated profiles.
I suppose it would be worse without the notifications, even though they are form of spam, because then you wouldn't know what some anonymous posters are writing under a purported profile of yours.
I’m pretty sure thefacebook didn’t scrape data. It was also private.
I got into trouble in college which nearly became a police matter simply for scraping emails. I didn’t even store the data. I was just testing a tool that I had created and actually found a data bug in the college’s IT system where it gave me access to all the emails instead of access to only the group that I was supposed to be part of.
If it wasn’t for the fact that I self reported (actually I reported the bug to IT thinking I would be rewarded, lol) it would have become a police matter. Because I self reported before they reached out to me the Dean and college President let it remain a code of conduct violation.
> The fact that the default response to this is "omg" and "this guy deserves to be in prison"
Straw man fallacy. Literally nobody here has said he deserves to be in prison.
> This is a very hacker thing to do. Hackers have always been people out at the edge doing things that get them into trouble.
It saddens me that you don't recognize a difference between "thing that gets you in trouble" and "thing that harms others". Getting in trouble is not the problem here.
>I think there's a dark undercurrent in global culture, where people would rather live in a world where they're poor but able to control others as opposed to one where they're wealthy but unable to exert control over others.
I agree-ish with everything generally except this. I don't think this is a global thing at all. I think this is at best a subset of people in mostly western nations.
That said, I no fan of the author or his actions (which paint him like a real jerk). The facts don't really support the benefit of the doubt you're giving him here.
Great swathes of adult nations vote for and tolerate idiocracy writ large, whilst young people are trying something, anything, in a strange new society. I can't always agree so I stop and think more, if it's not already too late.
Devil’s Advocate: I would expect a dumb teen to not understand the history and blast radius of social media like a former teen that grew up on that trash did.
Huh? This is not a "dumb teen" smoking weed in the parking lot, this is a student at IIT Delhi, which has a sub 1% acceptance rate and is one of the most elite schools in the world, that is smart enough to make a social media app.
Absolutely agree. No care about how their platform is being used, chooses to laugh at the almost instant presence of bullying and gossip, takes no responsibility, infringes upon the institutions name, etc. Ends with ego.
The universities reaction was over the top.
The author also needs to improve their grammar. The occasional capitalisation is diabolical. Either do, or don't, and at least if you don't it's obvious you're a child.
> The author also needs to improve their grammar. The occasional capitalisation is diabolical. Either do, or dont, and at least if you dont its obvious youre a child.
* Either do, or don’t, and at least if you don’t, it’s obvious you’re a child.
Look, a piece of valid advice, and let me prefix this with I’ve been in business a long time and I run a big company.
If you want to get anywhere, it’s only going to happen by making deals with others.
For this, you need to be kind and caring. You need to negotiate with people and make everyone feel good, like they’re getting a good deal, not your response: “bitch come suck my dick” which by the way is sexual harassment.
You had one opportunity to remove the account of the guy who complained and issue an apology, and you failed. If you had just done this, your site would still be up and viral.
At any point in your negotiations with the Dean you could have offered to work with him to incorporate his feedback and reinforced how the platform was going viral and that it was going to be good for publicity because of its parallels to Facebook. You needed to identify his core concern (perhaps control) and resolve it mutually (make him an admin account or something). That’s what being a leader is about, not being an egotistic maniac.
> You had one opportunity to remove the account of the guy who complained and issue an apology
Yup. Giving users the ability to hide content on their own pages would have been a good start. (Or at least flagging it for manual review.)
That said, there are always idiots you have to ignore. Learning how to balance responsiveness is a real life skill. (As is not giving in to base instincts by insulting those potential idiots.)
ESH. The kid displays a continuous lack of self reflection. That doesn’t look great to future investors. (The worst line is “like cos I knew the police can't really tell me to do anyhting, and my parents are in the army too so intimidation obv wont work.” In the end, he got intimidated. And relying on that makes one’s value outside a local context dubious.)
That said. He’s a kid. And he showed chutzpah. Certainly nothing horrendous.
The dean and authorities come across as power-hungry numpties. Nobody should be losing their temper. They should be able to cite rules and begin disciplinary proceedings and then negotiate afterwards if they want the site taken down.
Everyone has mentioned this is ethically bankrupt, and I totally agree.
Very little mention of the fact that this project is extremely ho hum from a technical perspective and in terms of creativity.
This is maybe 2 steps up from a Hello World example app. It could have mostly been generated by Rails scaffolding script 15 years ago, not even mentioning AI could crap this out in 20 minutes. Most frameworks have build-a-twitter-clone docs that are actually more complex than this.
And the idea of people having profiles with the ability to comment on them is pretty much feature zero on every social media app ever. I remember thinking this was cutting edge stuff 20 years ago on Xanga.
Cool toy project I guess (morals aside) but not quite the proof of 200 IQ this guy seems to think it is.
> I don't know much about India, but if you're going to go that route, it better be as easy to make it by there as a uni drop-out as it is in the US
It's affluenza.
His dad's a Colonel in the Indian Army and a senior bureaucrat who worked on infrastructure and civilian-military airport development ($$$).
Worst case this kid lays low for a couple months, gets admitted into a private university in India thanks to daddy, and his dad will use his network to get him a job and start his career.
That said, given the way he wrote the article, the comments he made on HN, and the kinds of comments I've seen users make on iitsocial (some homophobic and sexual harassment posts targeting students who happened to be lower caste) I could see someone getting pissed enough to file an FIR on him under IPC 354 (non-bailable), 504, 505, and 509 as well as the SC/ST Act to make an example out of him.
Even if he is found not guilty, getting an FIR means you will never get a visa anywhere (because all countries ask about your criminal background) and getting a job would be extremely difficult without family support.
And becuase this would have become a big news story which would have made IITD's admin look bad (rich upper caste son of a Colonel aided and abetted in sexual harassment of OBC woman at IITD) during election season they tried to give him an offramp, which he stupidly ignored.
Edit:
Jesus, he admitted to committing defamation with full cognizance [0] (and it's already been archived [1]).
> "ok so i was just doing marketing, we were uploading rumors and gossip about people"
Yeah, he can't be saved. He can get an FIR filed against him under IPC 499 and can easily be found guilty of defamation under IPC 500 (non-bailable) on top of the other IPCs listed and the SC/ST Act.
I typically believe in granting forgiveness for the stupid mistakes people make when they're young. I certainly asked forgiveness and apologized for past behavior.
I'm on the fence about this one given the trollish behavior and lack of remorse. I halfway hope you're right and he gets his wings clipped forever. I'm also not especially sympathetic to people who attempt to knowingly capitalize on the unearned status afforded to them by family.
I don't know how you could write this and possibly think you come across as smart or mature. How you didn't get kicked out immediately is beyond me. These people did not consent to be included in your site; you had no right to air their personal lives because you think it makes you special.
If you're ever going to record an interaction with people who do not want it seen by the masses that they are breaking the law, you need to ensure that you livestream it.
Then you can tell them, "Go ahead, confiscate my phone. Proof of your illegal acts have already left the building, and the country."
lol this happened at my college (IIT delhi). He's being disengeious in the blog, the reason they made him take the site down is cos people writing some really really bad things about students, and Obv that should not be allowed at a place for higher education. Be more mature.
I meant he's being disengeious in being surprised about the dean. like this should have been obvious to him, obv if you make something like this, you will face consequences...
That, and after acting like a complete asshole, running straight to daddy the minute the shit hits the fan. And bawling like a complete pussy when he crosses into the “find out” part of FAFO.
Guy writes a website that scrapes data of people without their permission, is repeatedly warned by authority and uni personnel to stop, doesn't and then writes a piece on unfair treatment. Shucks.
I don't think he's being disingenuous. OP is transparent they started a campus gossip website inspired by The Social Network.
> I had scraped data for all students at IIT Delhi, and made a profile for all of them.
> anyone could make an anonymous account, and then comment anything on anyone's profile. Each profile also had 4 fields, where you could tag anyone, in the "has dated", "crushing on", "crushed on by" or "haters" category.
I am surprised that OP, having seen that movie and quoting lines from it during his meeting with the administration, didn't see this coming.
> also at one point i literally said the social network dialogue, " I feel like i deserve some recognition from you guys"
I meant he's being disengeious in being surprised about the dean. like this should have been obvious to him, obv if you make something like this, you will face consequences...
for real, IIT is difficult enough, last thing it needs is a "tea" situation, avoiding nonsense trends like that goes a long way towards more prosperous futures for everybody.
How is some people writing bad things about some students a valid reason to make me take my website down? like iit should honestly have been proud of me for building something cool, which over 80% of their uni is using. instead of threatening to kick me out...
"Why would a school get mad that I built a website that had stolen nude photos of the female students that I found on revenge-porn sites? They should be proud of me for building something that all the male students love and the female students view daily to make sure they aren't on it. 100% of students use it!"
It's incredible to me that you don't feel any responsibility for a platform that you created. What happens on the platform is shaped directly by the choices you make as its creator - to be anonymous or identifiable, what the topics of discussion are, whether moderation happens.
By allowing anonymous commentary, scraping every student's data and seeding the conversation around "rumors", you created an environment that is perfect for targeted harassment. You created the platform and maintained it; what happens on that platform is absolutely your responsibility.
I highly recommend that you take this opportunity to do some introspection and consider why so many people were upset.
Were there lots of people upset? Or was it a small number of people with power who were upset? Like, I'm not at all surprised by how this played out, but it's not clear that anyone was upset beyond some people who don't take well to criticism.
Say hypothetically 1000 people were having great fun using it to cyberbully 10 people. It’s impossible to say that it’s no big deal because 99% of users loved it, unless you know exactly how much the 1% hated it.
If the thing directly impacts them then yes, it should get to ruin things for the rest. If you don't understand why that is desirable then somebody should make a website describing which NSFW websites you like to frequent to spook your future investors.
it's like a trolly problem where the main line is "status quo" but you can optionally pull a lever labelled "students who like anonymous internet rumoring get more of it and also some students are victimized"
I honestly think the "targeted harrasment" thing is completely overblown. i mean that was just a very very very small part of the site. like okay, maybe 3 people are getting hurt (which btw, they could js report and id take the post down), but over four thousand kids were also enjoying using the site right? like people would come up to me everywhere and say how much fun they're having etc.
Surprise surprise: the arrogant selfish child doesn't have empathy for anyone else.
If four thousand kids were all laughing at a rumor that you had a small dick, and every girl you were interested in laughed you out the door for the rest of your college career, would you really be like "it's ok, 4k people are having fun"?
I guarantee OP would be the guy calling the site operator and threatening to jump him.
My idea and the implementation was honestly much different from these. It was a pretty cool abd unique implementation i think, where you’re commenting on actual person profiles instead of random gossip… hence the virality
So I've been online for over 30 years now and literally every community I've been a part of with over 1000 members eventually has someone build basically this exact same thing. It's about as original and unique as starting a t-shirt business or a discount card for students.
As for your claims that people like it because lots of people were using it, you are being ignorant. People in the community refresh on sites like this/flock to them because of fear. They are afraid of what people are saying about themselves and their friends.
I guarantee if you actually polled users you'd find the vast vast majority of them would wish the site didn't exist. Usage != Support.
It's not like people do not make this kind of websites because it's challenging technically (it's trivial) or because they did not think of it. They don't because it's shitty idea.
You might have gotten positive acknowledgement of the technical work if you were like, 13. By your age (which I assume is greater than 16 or 17) you're expected to understand things like "not enabling anonymous attackers to harass the shit out of literally anyone at your entire school with impunity".
If this is your viewpoint, that people should be proud of you for creating a platform for gossip and bullying, where it has real deleterious and negative effects on people's lives, then im going to say it - you are a legitimately selfish person who lacks empathy.
Seed funders are likely notice these personality traits and refuse to invest, because someone with those qualities is an investment risk for multiple reasons. For example, in this story you've infringed a brand name, scraped and used personal data without permissions - likely also breaking terms of use, created accounts portraying real people without their permission, established a system to defame (the relationship component), created unwanted spam (emailing university emails automatically) and failed to have in place appropriate moderation. Why would investors put their money against such a risky proposition?
To me, OP seems like someone who's deliberately trying to become the villain because he's seen the social network movie too much and is fantasizing that he'll gain the same wealth and fame as Zuckerberg by being the villain. Except here, he started crying when the consequences of being the villain caught up to him.
OP needs to realize that we are no longer in 2005 when the Facebook was founded. Nor is he in the US. He's in India which has much different laws and culture. And case law and our understanding of the harms of cyber bullying and harassment has drastically evolved since 2005.
OP should also realize that this is at IIT in India. There's already a huge suicide problem amongst students in India due to competition. Adding cyber harassment to that isn't the best idea.
1. IT Act 2000 — Section 66C / 66D (Identity Fraud / Impersonation)
You student data and sent emails appearing to come from or relate to official IIT systems. The email notification system especially is sketchy. sending emails to official addresses using student identity data without consent borders on unauthorized use of identity/credentials.
2. IT Act 2000 — Section 43 (Unauthorized Access / Data Theft)
Scraping student data from IIT Delhi’s internal systems without authorization is almost certainly a violation here. Section 43 covers unauthorized access to computer systems and extraction of data.
3. Information Technology (Reasonable Security Practices) Rules, 2011
You collected and published sensitive personal data (romantic relationships, social associations) without consent, no privacy policy, no opt-out. This is a clear violation of the SPDI Rules under the IT Act.
4. Indian Penal Code Section 499/500 — Defamation
The platform explicitly hosted rumors, gossip, and accusations (dating history, “haters”). Anonymous posts that damage reputation = defamation. As the platform operator and publisher, you have exposure. Unlike Twitter or Reddit, you’re not a passive host. You designed the romantic/social tagging features.
5. IPC Section 354D — Stalking
The “crushing on / crushed on by” fields combined with the email notification system is very problematic. Enabling someone to anonymously tag another person and then notify them about it could constitute facilitation of stalking.
you are still being disingenuous. We live in a society, the college as a whole is a society of various people. Your site was hurting some people's sentiments and that's enough reason to take it down. I can admit it was maybe cool, but try to do cool things which do good to people, not harm.
and be a little more humble.
I suspect if he changed the name to not include the college name, while people would be angry, there wouldn't be a real reason to take it down. The sending emails to the college system is also iffy.
The most constructive feedback I can come up with you is to think of other people's feelings before doing anything, and don't do anything at scale until you've proved that you can do this. Failing that, learn how to fight. You are too skinny to be this selfish.
Joke is more about the fact that quite a lot of 30 under 30 end up serving prison time - mostly because they think they are smarter than everyone and that they can BS and get away with such things like one from TFA.
> satpura hostel kids), yall are some bitches. so be a good bitch and come suck my dick instead of crying to the police and the dean
Wow. Not at all sympathetic to this attitude.
> At this point I was genuinely feeling really fucking cool, cos I was just thinking this would be a really cool story to tell investors when I have a startup. The site was just booming.
I hate what the world has become with adulation of startup culture and influencer chasing. It brings out the worst in people.
With the writing being at the level that it is, I struggle to take the claim "I was telling him, sir, give me one actual rule im breaking and i'll take the site down" Seriously. OP obviously didn't clearly understand why people were having a negative reaction to the site; I expect they might not recognize rules or laws even if they were cited.
I mean, this guy seems absolutely clueless. Anyone with even the slightest social awareness would know this site is going to result in hurting people and people are going to really dislike him for making it... and further his own conduct is super immature (wtf is [0])... He basically made a harassment service, complete with allowing anonymous posting? Definite "FAFO" moment. I don't feel a shred of sympathy for his situation.
When you build social technology, you have a responsibility to put some serious thought into what the social effects are of what you're producing. Every feature will have social and psychological implications for the people using the service. If you don't care about that, you especially shouldn't even be trying to make social-related software.
I find it hard to blame the young ambitious teenager and much easier to blame the grown-ass adults in supervisory roles who apparently can't cite a single violation by name and later violently steal a kid's phone.
The kid might have some things to learn, sure, but the adult behavior is what I would call "super immature".
I’m actually pretty tired of young ambitious assholes who build themselves off of other people’s misery, and I choose to not celebrate it. That said, the university overreacted.
honestly, i do not get the hurting people thing.
like ok, i do get it, but i just feel like people should be more thick skinned in general, people have said a lot of stuff about me too... but i just dont care.
and like ok, if you do care, just report the post, i would have taken it down. why do you need to call the police and tell the dean to kick me out? that's just very malicious. and i mean i kind of get why people were writing bad stuff about people like these
Hurting with words via live speech is one thing. A website amplifies it and makes it permanent.
When people say stuff, only other people around them hear, and even then it can be denied. When people write things online, what they write is public for everyone to read, and it's permanent, forever screenshotted and reposted.
The irony is this blog post is a massive self-own. Without a doubt, for the rest of your life some percentage of people you interact with will google you and read this post and close a door you wanted to go thru in your face. But at least it was your own choice, and it’s based on truth. For everyone who got slandered on your site it wasn’t their choice, and it may not even be true.
I don’t know if you will read this, but if you do maybe I can suggest a rule of thumb for posting things under your name publicly.
You should assume that people don’t know you, and they will not give you the benefit of the doubt. So it is in your best interest to make your public image as unimpeachable as possible.
If the person looking at your blog post is a potential employer, they will not spend a long time weighing pros and cons of your employment. They will pass you over and tell you nothing.
They wouldn't need to report it if you hadn't put their names there without permission. Further, you signed them up to be notified of comments without their permission.
Doesn't matter what people wrote about them, the simple fact is that you did that to them with their data. That you can't grasp the concept of crossing private boundaries like that is disturbing. Stop laughing about this and start looking inward.
Preliminary comment on tone and behavior in writing: Everything about the story, from the described details about what allegedly happened to the way those details are communicated, is infantile. That makes it very hard to treat the author as a reliable narrator about specific details.
Anyway...
> anyone could make an anonymous account, and then comment anything on anyone's profile
Jesus christ. You built a platform specifically designed for targeted abuse. I know that you're still young, but one day when you're older I hope you come to realize that a platform for spreadings rumors about others is not an ok thing to want to build. You don't have the moral high-ground here. The only thing you accomplished was being a creep.
This whole blog post shows an extreme level of immaturity that I really do hope you grow out of. Literally every line is absolute cringe.
> this is that story. its really really fucking crazy.
The craziest thing to me about this story is that everything in the story makes you look bad and yet you chose to post it anyway.
You either:
A) never realized that you were building a harassment platform despite being told this multiple times, which demonstrates a complete lack of awareness
or
B) thought it would be a good idea to build a harassment platform, which demonstrates a complete lack of empathy
I'm surprised at how few comments there are about just how creepy this is. Going to a university is not implied consent for random people to throw up searchable websites with your name and face, let alone allowing random, anonymous other people to attach anything they want to it in a comment section.
I get it he was copying The Social Network, but just because it's been done before doesn't make it better now.
I'd rather live in a world where a student's website hosts an anonymous mean comment about me than live in the authoritarian nightmare of how the school officials, guards and police acted in this behavior.
Tea is still available on the app store, which is a far more targeted harassment and slander app, than this one that was clearly more of a 4chan style "for the lulz" that no one would take seriously.
> I'd rather live in a world where a student's website hosts an anonymous mean comment about me than live in the authoritarian nightmare of ...
False dichotomy fallacy. Also fallacy of emotive language. That is a deflection, not a rebuttal.
> Tea is still available on the app store
Whataboutism. Fallacy of relative privation. That is a deflection, not a rebuttal.
Since we're talking about worlds we'd like to live in, I'd like to live in a world where people believe that it's bad to think harassment platforms are ok/cool/fun.
Tea being available is relevant! Your list of fallacies is less useful than the comment you replied to, despite its flaws.
Also using emotive language isn't a fallacy, get out of here with that. Using the phrase "authoritarian nightmare" does not replace logic with emotion like an actual fallacy would.
The manner in which the school got the website taken down was via an authoritarian nightmare, so it's not exactly a false dichotomy in this case. If not for the authoritarian nightmare the site might still be up.
Though it's admittedly possible they could have eventually gotten the website taken down through less thuggish means.
The false dichotomy is that the two scenarios are presented as the only two options when they aren't the only two options. The use of "authoritarian nightmare" is the emotive language.
My intention was not to build a “targeted abuse” platform and thats not what was built either. “Abuse”, if you can call it that, was just a small part of the site. The main point was to make the social life more happening, which it did… people got to discuss things, confess to people, hangout and make posts with their friends
For the “immature and infantile” part, i disagree with you on it. I do not believe someones style of speaking should have an effect on your interpretation of their words. Youre just doing yourself a disservice
It doesn't matter what your intention was, the point was that that was what it did. You didn't think hard enough about how people would use it given the (lack of) constraints and moderation you designed it with and you didn't take responsibility / accountability for what you had facilitated.
Your response to this seems to be: "People need to be more thick-skinned, I would take it down if they asked & it's unfair that they escalated to the dean." as if that somehow invalidates the criticism you're receiving. It doesn't. The fact that you don't really own up to that shows a lack of emotional maturity which makes it hard for people to feel sympathy for you. Until you actually understand why people had problems with what you made, you won't get a lot of sympathy for how you were treated either.
It's like those videos where some clueless racist spouting off garbage on the subway eventually gets punched by someone else. Yes, the assault is definitely "more" wrong. But you won't find a lot of people feeling sorry for the racist.
Why is your intention relevant here? Sure: in the US if you kill somebody accidentally then you'll be convicted of manslaughter instead of murder. In your situation, intention is relevant to whether the school decides to throw you out or just discipline you in some way.
But intention is irrelevant when understanding what harms the site will cause. Plenty of sites have been created for noble purposes, and achieved great things, and yet still ended up driving some users to suicide. "Oops, I didn't expect that to happen" might make someone punish you less, but it's not going to change what was built or what effects it had on people.
I mean, at that age I did some stupid shit too and thought it was cool. I'd even get defensive and double down when someone challenged me by saying I had fucked up and hurt people. Hopefully you're still just in that defensive stage and you'll be able to see things more clearly when you get some distance from it.
Hint: if this continued to be popular, there is no way you could control it. (Never mind that you clearly had little interest in controlling it thus far; you've basically stated that your opinions on what is serious vs trivial harassment are all that matter, and when you could get around to deleting things is soon enough.) You would be directly responsible for trashing the school's social environment and harming a lot of people -- many of whom aren't male and/or whose daddy and mommy are not in the military. You don't get to decide who is and isn't vulnerable.
Please learn something about human nature and what people do when given the power over people they feel rejected by or superior to. Especially when the attacks are anonymous.
I love how OP directly borrowed the plot of The Social Network by scraping the campus directory for a student rating system. And somehow it's playing out in the exact same way.
> I had scraped data for all students at IIT Delhi, and made a profile for all of them.
> anyone could make an anonymous account, and then comment anything on anyone's profile. Each profile also had 4 fields, where you could tag anyone, in the "has dated", "crushing on", "crushed on by" or "haters" category.
> he told me, take the site down or you WILL face DISCO, so again I was like sure, I dont mind it (I was just gettting reminded of Social Network lmao)
> also at one point i literally said the social network dialogue, " I feel like i deserve some recognition from you guys"
He should probably drop out, seek funding from Thiel and start his company. He could call it something like "visagebank" or similar. Then in a few decades he can join the select club of dickheads ruling the world.
1. Is the student information that you scraped publicly available on the Internet or was it necessary to login in order to view the student information now displayed on your website?
2. Did you take down the profile or comments related to S (the “college gangster”) in response to them asking you to?
One can hope that time will lead to more maturity than was shown in launching a site like this or acting that way when pressed.
Yes, the admin didn't handle it well, but the writing style and general tone of this post/incident is incredibly off-putting. All while talking about future "investors" and how many great ideas he has. You created a clone of hot-or-not (or whatever Zuck called his site) and you think you're the next coming? Get real. There was nothing innovative here at all, it might be one thing if it was innovative while being scummy but it's just scummy and a tired copy.
I agree that the tone is off-putting and immature, but attacking the author and the site doesn't change the fact that it gained traction and many students seemed to enjoy it (if we can believe the claims). There's clearly a demand for this type of site, so any technical or novelty merits are irrelevant.
What the author did wrong was mishandling the negative response. If he had been open to the feedback and worked on a plan to address the concerns, the site might have stayed up. Hopefully this is a learning opportunity, as he clearly needs it.
I mean it's not at all related to hot-or-not?
I feel like this site idea, and the implementation was really innovative honestly.
and also, "you think you're the next coming? Get real"
lol just witness history
Hahaha, I get 'The Social Network' vibes from this story. You should read his other posts also. Let's just say the guy has more than enough confidence.
I really felt like i was living in the movie too.
also for the posts, haha thanks for reading. i feel like they'll be pretty cool for people to look back on when im really succesful
Reading this wasn't easy, but let's appreciate the authenticity.
This post doesn't reflect well on you, you were disrespectful to every person in the story. You really need to grow up, and you could've handled this way better.
You could have, for example, asked exactly what their concerns were, and proposed ways to address them.
Your site looks very amateur, but from your description, it doesn't sound like you are doing anything clearly forbidden by law.
>someone had written a comment about S which he did not like.
Couldn't this also be done in the reddit? Then is the lack of moderation and language filters the problem?
I honestly think i was pretty respectful to everyone, well until they started being disrespectful to me…
> You could have, for example, asked exactly what their concerns were, and proposed ways to address them.
i obviously did this. But they had already made up their mind…
> Couldn't this also be done in the reddit? Then is the lack of moderation and language filters the problem?
That was something i said too, ppl can do this on reddit. But their response was ‘but we dont control reddit’
For the moderation, i mean i was removing things if anyone reported it, what else could i do?
When I read things like this I glimplse the enormous cultural gulf between generations. I instictively want to take the side of the underdog in most situations. But in this case, I do not find the protagonist very sympathetic. But clearly, many young people feel otherwise. The world is a-changing.
I feel like it's not really generational, I remember bros like this when I was on IRC as a kid and we were all hacking around on stuff and winnuking each other or whatever. Some of them actually grew up and did real things which is always cool to see (I have plenty of said ppl on LinkedIn who are now crazy successful), and then yeah lots of 'em who uhhh, went in other directions.
Yea, I had the same first reaction. But, then I thought: If this were run through a program that re-wrote it to sound more like me, more like a typical, mature, 40 year old tech writer wrote it, I'd probably be feeling sympathetic to the author. So I admit I'm really just rejecting the writing style and the "wassup bro lmao suck my dick bro lol bro bro" attitude. Re-written, I'd probably be pretty solidly behind this guy.
The implementation of the idea looks more like a kiwifarm egg than a facebook egg.
Thinking about Anonymous posting about non public figures is perturbing. If the poster can't be made responsible for the post, then the platform and the platform of the platform (and so on) are in line. That is: new website, then the hosting servers (and so on)
DMCA is a pretty good model for this sort of thing IMO. You take down the post, notify the poster, and if the poster wants they can have you put it back up and tell the original complainant "sue me". If you don't follow that process they can sue you instead.
Yikes, I guess American tendency for narcissism, cultural rot, and attention-seeking at all costs has fully permeated the global culture. This brat will probably be successful in life and that’s exactly why everything’s going to shit.
I am 17 from the same country and this is somewhat juvenile, this isn't an age problem for-the-most-part.
The thing I saw was that, they mentioned investor/startup multiple times. I feel like this is their way of getting attention (All PR is good PR)
There could've been better ways to handle it and I feel like there was no deeper reflection. One of the things I wish to do after something is to learn from that. I am unable to find that realization sadly :-(
Currently in High school, so maybe my expectations were a bit higher of University but I expected better from IIT-Delhi Student/Staff (Both)
OP I hope that you can reflect on these things. There are some good things to learn which you are dismissing here, Have a nice day.
Indians amuse me. "My parents are in the military, you can do jack shit".
How is military mommy and daddy keeping you from ending up in a Delhi landfill in eight to twelve pieces after being disrespectful to the wrong person?
They better try for a smarter son quickly, because you are not getting very old in the place you’re living, pissing people off like that.
> How is military mommy and daddy keeping you from ending up in a Delhi landfill in eight to twelve pieces after being disrespectful to the wrong person
Because his dad is a Colonel and a Senior Bureaucrat in the MoD who was in charge of civilian-military airport construction and attended the NDA back in the day.
That's the kind of background that means they know who to call. The issue is IITD has plenty of students from similar backgrounds (some of whom appeared to appear to have been targeted on iitsocial) who if they wanted to could also call in favors if they felt vindictive enough.
Kids from jawan and shaheed families don't act like this. And this only makes this Mony bloke even more distasteful.
Thank you for taking some time out of your busy day to give me some valuable background information. I learned something new today, very much appreciated.
It’s interesting to see how big the difference in culture is sometimes based on what kind of values you get taught in your military career and at home.
My dad was in the military as well, but he would have whooped my ass in front of the whole school and had me personally knock on every dorm room to ask for forgiveness if I had behaved like that instead of doubling down over the phone.
The author obviously lack maturity, is cocky and I guess we have every reason to hate him. University (from what he wrote) doesn't look bright either but it's India, it's kind of expected.
> At this point I was genuinely feeling really fucking cool, cos I was just thinking this would be a really cool story to tell investors when I have a startup. The site was just booming.
The admin behaviour is expected in an Indian context, provided you behave the way this guy did. I am not saying it's good to snatch the guys phone, but it's expected.
Let me explain the core issue here.
The issue is that if the platform ever devolves into something that can be construed as cyberbullying, then the admin is suddenly in trouble.
In the Indian context, elite public colleges like IITD have some students from quite poor non urban backgrounds, These colleges are cheap, have a strict entrance exam (JEE) and there's no money requirement so you have people from all financial strata. As such, the social dynamic is that the parents "entrust" the college with "taking care" of their kid. Especially in first generation educated. In contrast, in private colleges with homogenous, richer families the social dynamic puts more responsibility on the student. The age of 18 is completely irrelevant in this dynamic.
The point is, the admin in this college is also somewhat of a caretaker of the students. And will face social liability for cyberbullying "happening under their nose". This is true even if it happens on reddit by the way (and the bully is in the same college). Essentially, if there is a way for the dean to intervene and he doesn't, he has failed in his job as a caretaker. That's the dynamic here. Obviously he has deniability if some random american bullies a IITD kid on say HN. But if a IITD kid bullies a IITD kid on any social platform they will come down on it heavily.
Thus, the platform was never going to work and it's problematic before the law even comes into play. Talking about "tell me what rule I broke" without considering the above social dynamics is fairly immature. If they had done the same thing at say an Ashoka University (expensive private college) then they would have faced none of these issues by contrast. If I'm allowed a swipe at the author, this situation is entirely expected given their privileged background.
...in response to someone politely asking to have his profile removed. Then the school told you to take it down and you refused.
You deserved to get kicked out of school.
Yes, this site would probably have been fine (if distasteful) in the U.S...because the U.S. has a different legal system. This site is not legal under Indian law. Defamation works very differently in India.
You should consider yourself lucky that you're able to write this blogpost instead of finding out what the inside of an Indian prison is like.
OP: College is a time to make mistakes, and learn from them. Do you feel you learned from your mistakes? Do you feel there has been any conflict with the people who pointed them out? [0][1]
Has there been a point when you paused and put serious, private deliberation into the question, "am I wrong?" Like several consecutive minutes, at least? It's ok to ask that question. You're even allowed to do it in the privacy of your own thoughts, where nobody else can judge you.
It is your obligation to remove defamatory comments immediately, ideally never allowing them to be posted at all (by means of an LLM). Secondly, you probably failed to provide the profile owners a way to delete their own profile if they seek privacy. These inactions are probably what led to complaints.
I think this kind of puritism is not good, at all. It honestly feels really elitist whenever people bring up the way of speaking, instead of the things being said.
A person from medevial britain could look at your language and say it's the "mouth of a sailor".
Different people speak differently. obv a college student would speak different from like a mid thirties software employee right?
I hope you can look past it and give me your thoughts on the actual story, which i felt was really really crazy
"What do you mean I'm being fired for fucking workplace harassment? You're my goddamn boss, don't you know that swearing has a positive correlation with intelligence!?"
Yeah, something tells me that these studies aren't going to move the needle on swearing and professionalism.
Imagine if this was, say, at a bar. A person holds up a sheet of paper on a clipboard and says anyone can write about anyone else in the bar. Would the police be called? Would legal threats be made? People freaking out like this is not consistent with social norms. It's magical thinking about the internet somehow being different or unique.
Good luck dealing with these small minded administrators.
Okay. Now imagine he's doing it out on the public sidewalk and not using bar property. Would it be justified to use physical force and steal the clipboard owner's property?
Also the guy with a clipboard is only showing those notes to a couple people at a time after they journey to his location, which makes a pretty big difference for the amount of disruption. There's no magical thinking about the internet being special. The social norms are different because the situation is so different.
They stole his phone using physical violence. It's in the article. I'll quote it for you.
>So i was like chill out bro, ill just delete the video, but the dean said, "no confiscate his phone".
so one of the guards just snatched the phone from my hand
the dean said wipe everything, and dont give him his phone back. I was like wtf is happening? bro I have my private photos on there dont do this. like you cannot do this. I tried reaching for my phone but one of the security guys just held me. and started being rough with me. like pushing me around and shit.
That wasn't really because of the website though. The meeting could have been about basically anything and grabbing the phone for recording could have happened. It was bad but let's not mix up the two situations.
Tell me you never been to a bar without telling me you never been to a bar. Bars are usually a huge hot or not (well, parties in general). People are talking and gossiping about each other the whole time. At worst you only be talked about as well.
Bars probably don't have a directory of everyone that attends the bar, that you scraped and published without permission.
The fact that a person is a student at the school can be very sensitive information. The classic example is someone who leaves an abusive spouse/family and does not want to be found. Now their name and picture is out there, and their timetable and therefore whereabouts could be partially inferred from the school calendar by someone who knows their interests.
> The fact that a person is a student at the school can be very sensitive information.
But they were already in the directory? That's much more "out there" than the gossip site.
I'm really skeptical of this line of logic. It feels like motivated reasoning based on not liking the site, because a privacy issue like that is easier to attack (if it's real). I think the meaningful criticisms are based on the actual functionality, the commenting.
I understand that opinion, but the opposite view is now conventional. Corporate/college directories are usually not available in public, but only with a local auth. Even if the scraping site restricted signups to local email addresses, the college is responsible for the distribution of its directory PII so could not allow this.
Leaking PII like this would be illegal in Canada for example.
I don't understand how the word "leaking" would apply here. Unless there was an unmentioned login wall for the directory he scraped, the site is mirroring the names and faces off of a much larger and already public site that nobody has said a single word in complaint of.
Yeah, but he also took students' PII and put it on his website. If someone did that in a bar, there's a good chance they'd get their face punched by others in the bar.
The college was being abusive and they probably cannot take your phone and delete your stuff. What an awful thing to happen. By the way, the dean was not being nice by visiting you, don't go through Stockholm Syndrome, he was checking on you because he knew what he did was wrong.
IIT Delhi is in India so I'm not sure what the law looks like there, but yeah a university physically stealing an adult's phone and deleting his personal photos would definitely be illegal in the states.
I wonder if Delhi is the equivalent of a one-party or two-party consent state in the US? If it's one-party then OP recording their conversation wasn't even illegal.
This is really cool. Most people here are whining that you, a college student, aren't acting like an adult. I hope you can look past that; it's supposed to be hacker nature to do stupid stuff like this.
It bothers me that most comments here are high-and-mighty. Did you guys really do nothing you regret when you were younger?
> it's supposed to be hacker nature to do stupid stuff like this.
I've seen this (or similar) twice in the comments here now, and I'm just astounded by how bad this take is. It's hacker nature to explore. It's even hacker nature to try to break things to see if they can be broken. But it is not hacker nature to think it's cool to precipitate harm to others. That's just being an asshole.
> What the site was is that, I had scraped data for all students at IIT Delhi, and made a profile for all of them.
> anyone could make an anonymous account, and then comment anything on anyone's profile.
Oh, good, they made a harassment factory.
So he watched the social network then
It doesn't matter. This is how Facebook started. It's how a lot of things started.
Young people doing (sometimes questionable) experiments.
The fact that the default response to this is "omg" and "this guy deserves to be in prison" is an indication of the dark times we're headed towards. A society unable to tolerate deviance from the norm, is a society that will fail to adapt to inevitable changes to the norm. And the norms are changing.
I am pretty pro-privacy. And yes, I find it to be fairly thoughtless, but that's no reason for coercive intimidation. The fact that this was the reaction to someone doing an experiment speaks poorly about the society it took place in, and explains why there haven't been any major breakthroughs - in consumer tech, science or the arts – from within that country.
More generally, HN's reaction is disappointing. This is a very hacker thing to do. Hackers have always been people out at the edge doing things that get them into trouble. The fact that most people on HN want to crush that rebelliousness – that hacker spirit – is sad to me.
I think there's a dark undercurrent in global culture, where people would rather live in a world where they're poor but able to control others as opposed to one where they're wealthy but unable to exert control over others.
"A society unable to tolerate deviance from the norm, is a society that will fail to adapt to inevitable changes to the norm" I feel the same way about societies that continue to fail lessons of history and repeat the same damaging (and often easily avoided) idiocy.
If this were completely uncharted territory, you might have a leg to stand on here. But you are correct that this is exactly how Facebook started, and we know exactly how that goes, the poster is correct that this just leads to harassment at scale.
The author's response was the main problem, showing a complete lack of character or ethical concern. There is a world of difference between being a hacker with a sense of rebelliousness and a jerk who thinks there should be zero consequences to their actions.
If we're using the Facebook example to call this unacceptable, we should really be fighting a lot harder against Facebook itself. Because it still has a reasonably positive reputation overall and it's affecting billions of people.
> If we're using the Facebook example to call this unacceptable, we should really be fighting a lot harder against Facebook itself.
I don't think many here would disagree with you.
> Because it still has a reasonably positive reputation overall and it's affecting billions of people.
I'm gonna disagree with you. Maybe it's because I live in the Bay Area so the culture is affected by the proximity of tech companies. But my family in the middle of the country mostly seem to be on the same page, so I don't know how you explain that. It may be that I'm drawn to people who care about these topics and some degree of sameness is expected within family dynamics resulting from the parents' values raising us. Whatever.
I think a good portion of society considers FB a garbage product but don't know of an alternative and just accept it for what it is. I think a smaller portion of society recognizes that they are amoral and terrible for society. How many countries have now discussed legislation to limit kids accessing social media (whether you agree or disagree)? That didn't spring out of nowhere fully formed. Years of criticism got us there.
"There is a world of difference between being a hacker with a sense of rebelliousness and a jerk who thinks there should be zero consequences to their actions."
Given the external consequences of certain actions, for all intents and purposes that "world of difference" may exist only inside their skull.
I don't think this person belongs in prison, but the internet also isn't the place it was in 2004? You do bear responsibility for what you do online, and this was irresponsible. We should encourage kids and others to experiment and make mistakes, but the kid shouldn't have put up this website and should have taken it down as a responsible member of the community
Speaking of which, the author is possibly an even bigger asshole than Zuckerberg. Oh you don't like what anonymous somebodies wrote about you under a profile you didn't even create yourself (because I did it for you)? Why suck my dick!
Go, have your fun, experiment, fuck around, push boundaries. Don't make profiles for me based on info you found, public or not, and then sign me up to receive notifications for messages on it without my permission.
Yeah, Facebook started in college, but it didn't start with scraped data and auto-generated profiles.
I suppose it would be worse without the notifications, even though they are form of spam, because then you wouldn't know what some anonymous posters are writing under a purported profile of yours.
Facemash, Mark's pre-facebook project, was a page to vote on student attractiveness, with names and pictures of female students scraped from Harvard.
I will not hold my breath waiting for someone to defend him.
Ah, true, I forgot that bit. My bad. Still, though... oof.
And zuckenberg turned out to be an asshole later, creating products that cause harm and supporting Trump.
So, it all checks out.
For values of "later" equivalent to "at that point".
I don't think "this is how facebook started" is much of a defense.
I’m pretty sure thefacebook didn’t scrape data. It was also private.
I got into trouble in college which nearly became a police matter simply for scraping emails. I didn’t even store the data. I was just testing a tool that I had created and actually found a data bug in the college’s IT system where it gave me access to all the emails instead of access to only the group that I was supposed to be part of.
If it wasn’t for the fact that I self reported (actually I reported the bug to IT thinking I would be rewarded, lol) it would have become a police matter. Because I self reported before they reached out to me the Dean and college President let it remain a code of conduct violation.
> The fact that the default response to this is "omg" and "this guy deserves to be in prison"
Straw man fallacy. Literally nobody here has said he deserves to be in prison.
> This is a very hacker thing to do. Hackers have always been people out at the edge doing things that get them into trouble.
It saddens me that you don't recognize a difference between "thing that gets you in trouble" and "thing that harms others". Getting in trouble is not the problem here.
>I think there's a dark undercurrent in global culture, where people would rather live in a world where they're poor but able to control others as opposed to one where they're wealthy but unable to exert control over others.
I agree-ish with everything generally except this. I don't think this is a global thing at all. I think this is at best a subset of people in mostly western nations.
That said, I no fan of the author or his actions (which paint him like a real jerk). The facts don't really support the benefit of the doubt you're giving him here.
Great swathes of adult nations vote for and tolerate idiocracy writ large, whilst young people are trying something, anything, in a strange new society. I can't always agree so I stop and think more, if it's not already too late.
it's not 1999 anymore. you can't create malicious sites and then cry "I'm just a nerdy teeeeen" afterwards
Devil’s Advocate: I would expect a dumb teen to not understand the history and blast radius of social media like a former teen that grew up on that trash did.
Devil’s devil’s advocate.
He had several rounds of warnings before things escalated (not counting the local bully).
The author explained that he had watched (and quoted) The Social Network, in which Zuckerberg gets in academic trouble for doing exactly this.
Huh? This is not a "dumb teen" smoking weed in the parking lot, this is a student at IIT Delhi, which has a sub 1% acceptance rate and is one of the most elite schools in the world, that is smart enough to make a social media app.
You can in fact do that. Kids do stupid things all the time. We need to teach them, not ostracize them.
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2017/6/5/2021-offers-resc...
Thank you for this comment.
I printed it out so I could paste it on my toddler thrashing machine :)
Oh, good, they made TheFacebook
Ah but, after the first of anything the ladder must be pulled up.
That's an indictment of humanity not the creator.
> "the DEAN threatened to kick me out"
So when did the clickbait title apply? The author is honestly, from this article, quite a horrible person.
Absolutely agree. No care about how their platform is being used, chooses to laugh at the almost instant presence of bullying and gossip, takes no responsibility, infringes upon the institutions name, etc. Ends with ego.
The universities reaction was over the top.
The author also needs to improve their grammar. The occasional capitalisation is diabolical. Either do, or don't, and at least if you don't it's obvious you're a child.
> The author also needs to improve their grammar. The occasional capitalisation is diabolical. Either do, or dont, and at least if you dont its obvious youre a child.
* Either do, or don’t, and at least if you don’t, it’s obvious you’re a child.
I deserve that correction. Have an upvote.
I don't think the capitalization is what's tipping people off this kid is a child.
This kid is an adult.
Only legally. The posted behavior is not adult behavior.
I couldn't make it through the whole story because the hum... "writing" (?) gives me a headache. He's a horrible person just for writing like this.
Look, a piece of valid advice, and let me prefix this with I’ve been in business a long time and I run a big company.
If you want to get anywhere, it’s only going to happen by making deals with others.
For this, you need to be kind and caring. You need to negotiate with people and make everyone feel good, like they’re getting a good deal, not your response: “bitch come suck my dick” which by the way is sexual harassment.
You had one opportunity to remove the account of the guy who complained and issue an apology, and you failed. If you had just done this, your site would still be up and viral.
At any point in your negotiations with the Dean you could have offered to work with him to incorporate his feedback and reinforced how the platform was going viral and that it was going to be good for publicity because of its parallels to Facebook. You needed to identify his core concern (perhaps control) and resolve it mutually (make him an admin account or something). That’s what being a leader is about, not being an egotistic maniac.
> You had one opportunity to remove the account of the guy who complained and issue an apology
Yup. Giving users the ability to hide content on their own pages would have been a good start. (Or at least flagging it for manual review.)
That said, there are always idiots you have to ignore. Learning how to balance responsiveness is a real life skill. (As is not giving in to base instincts by insulting those potential idiots.)
ESH. The kid displays a continuous lack of self reflection. That doesn’t look great to future investors. (The worst line is “like cos I knew the police can't really tell me to do anyhting, and my parents are in the army too so intimidation obv wont work.” In the end, he got intimidated. And relying on that makes one’s value outside a local context dubious.)
That said. He’s a kid. And he showed chutzpah. Certainly nothing horrendous.
The dean and authorities come across as power-hungry numpties. Nobody should be losing their temper. They should be able to cite rules and begin disciplinary proceedings and then negotiate afterwards if they want the site taken down.
Everyone has mentioned this is ethically bankrupt, and I totally agree.
Very little mention of the fact that this project is extremely ho hum from a technical perspective and in terms of creativity.
This is maybe 2 steps up from a Hello World example app. It could have mostly been generated by Rails scaffolding script 15 years ago, not even mentioning AI could crap this out in 20 minutes. Most frameworks have build-a-twitter-clone docs that are actually more complex than this.
And the idea of people having profiles with the ability to comment on them is pretty much feature zero on every social media app ever. I remember thinking this was cutting edge stuff 20 years ago on Xanga.
Cool toy project I guess (morals aside) but not quite the proof of 200 IQ this guy seems to think it is.
This guy is too cocky for his own good. Still, an interesting case study in how to trip up on your own arrogance and still not learn anything from it.
They're doubling down like that Cluely guy to try to save face from it, pretending to be too gangsta to care.
I don't know much about India, but if you're going to go that route, it better be as easy to make it by there as a uni drop-out as it is in the US.
> pretending to be too gangsta to care.
> I don't know much about India, but if you're going to go that route, it better be as easy to make it by there as a uni drop-out as it is in the US
It's affluenza.
His dad's a Colonel in the Indian Army and a senior bureaucrat who worked on infrastructure and civilian-military airport development ($$$).
Worst case this kid lays low for a couple months, gets admitted into a private university in India thanks to daddy, and his dad will use his network to get him a job and start his career.
That said, given the way he wrote the article, the comments he made on HN, and the kinds of comments I've seen users make on iitsocial (some homophobic and sexual harassment posts targeting students who happened to be lower caste) I could see someone getting pissed enough to file an FIR on him under IPC 354 (non-bailable), 504, 505, and 509 as well as the SC/ST Act to make an example out of him.
Even if he is found not guilty, getting an FIR means you will never get a visa anywhere (because all countries ask about your criminal background) and getting a job would be extremely difficult without family support.
And becuase this would have become a big news story which would have made IITD's admin look bad (rich upper caste son of a Colonel aided and abetted in sexual harassment of OBC woman at IITD) during election season they tried to give him an offramp, which he stupidly ignored.
Edit:
Jesus, he admitted to committing defamation with full cognizance [0] (and it's already been archived [1]).
> "ok so i was just doing marketing, we were uploading rumors and gossip about people"
Yeah, he can't be saved. He can get an FIR filed against him under IPC 499 and can easily be found guilty of defamation under IPC 500 (non-bailable) on top of the other IPCs listed and the SC/ST Act.
[0] - https://monyatwu.com/dailyblog/day29/
[1] - https://web.archive.org/web/20260406220532/https://monyatwu....
I typically believe in granting forgiveness for the stupid mistakes people make when they're young. I certainly asked forgiveness and apologized for past behavior.
I'm on the fence about this one given the trollish behavior and lack of remorse. I halfway hope you're right and he gets his wings clipped forever. I'm also not especially sympathetic to people who attempt to knowingly capitalize on the unearned status afforded to them by family.
I don't know how you could write this and possibly think you come across as smart or mature. How you didn't get kicked out immediately is beyond me. These people did not consent to be included in your site; you had no right to air their personal lives because you think it makes you special.
If you're ever going to record an interaction with people who do not want it seen by the masses that they are breaking the law, you need to ensure that you livestream it.
Then you can tell them, "Go ahead, confiscate my phone. Proof of your illegal acts have already left the building, and the country."
I was honestly just recording it cos i thought itd be cool to see in the future. Wasn’t going to show it to anyone except maybe my friends
I call bullshit on that statement. With they way the rest of your article reads, what are the chances you wanted to put it up on the site?
Prompt: make a viral story about a cartoonishly obnoxious person feeling persecuted for facing any real consequences for their antisocial behavior.
lol this happened at my college (IIT delhi). He's being disengeious in the blog, the reason they made him take the site down is cos people writing some really really bad things about students, and Obv that should not be allowed at a place for higher education. Be more mature.
> He's being disengeious in the blog, the reason they made him take the site down is cos people writing some really really bad things about students
I don't understand what you mean. The blog is very clear about that being the problem.
The blog is very clear about the author understanding that other people were saying it was a problem.
The blog is also very clear that the author, personally, does not understand why this is a problem.
You have a perfectly fine point about the blog post in general but for the discussion of whether it's disingenuous that part doesn't matter.
Yes exactly. We were already in agreement, and I built upon your earlier point.
I meant he's being disengeious in being surprised about the dean. like this should have been obvious to him, obv if you make something like this, you will face consequences...
The only surprise I see related to the dean is around getting his phone grabbed, which seems like legitimate surprise.
That, and after acting like a complete asshole, running straight to daddy the minute the shit hits the fan. And bawling like a complete pussy when he crosses into the “find out” part of FAFO.
Guy writes a website that scrapes data of people without their permission, is repeatedly warned by authority and uni personnel to stop, doesn't and then writes a piece on unfair treatment. Shucks.
I don't think he's being disingenuous. OP is transparent they started a campus gossip website inspired by The Social Network.
> I had scraped data for all students at IIT Delhi, and made a profile for all of them.
> anyone could make an anonymous account, and then comment anything on anyone's profile. Each profile also had 4 fields, where you could tag anyone, in the "has dated", "crushing on", "crushed on by" or "haters" category.
I am surprised that OP, having seen that movie and quoting lines from it during his meeting with the administration, didn't see this coming.
> also at one point i literally said the social network dialogue, " I feel like i deserve some recognition from you guys"
I meant he's being disengeious in being surprised about the dean. like this should have been obvious to him, obv if you make something like this, you will face consequences...
for real, IIT is difficult enough, last thing it needs is a "tea" situation, avoiding nonsense trends like that goes a long way towards more prosperous futures for everybody.
What's a "tea" situation?
How is some people writing bad things about some students a valid reason to make me take my website down? like iit should honestly have been proud of me for building something cool, which over 80% of their uni is using. instead of threatening to kick me out...
"Why would a school get mad that I built a website that had stolen nude photos of the female students that I found on revenge-porn sites? They should be proud of me for building something that all the male students love and the female students view daily to make sure they aren't on it. 100% of students use it!"
Sounds a little bit like that.
It's incredible to me that you don't feel any responsibility for a platform that you created. What happens on the platform is shaped directly by the choices you make as its creator - to be anonymous or identifiable, what the topics of discussion are, whether moderation happens.
By allowing anonymous commentary, scraping every student's data and seeding the conversation around "rumors", you created an environment that is perfect for targeted harassment. You created the platform and maintained it; what happens on that platform is absolutely your responsibility.
I highly recommend that you take this opportunity to do some introspection and consider why so many people were upset.
> consider why so many people were upset.
Were there lots of people upset? Or was it a small number of people with power who were upset? Like, I'm not at all surprised by how this played out, but it's not clear that anyone was upset beyond some people who don't take well to criticism.
Say hypothetically 1000 people were having great fun using it to cyberbully 10 people. It’s impossible to say that it’s no big deal because 99% of users loved it, unless you know exactly how much the 1% hated it.
This was exactly my point You can always find 10 people who will hate on things, that doesnt mean you should get to ruin things for 1000’s of others
If the thing directly impacts them then yes, it should get to ruin things for the rest. If you don't understand why that is desirable then somebody should make a website describing which NSFW websites you like to frequent to spook your future investors.
it's like a trolly problem where the main line is "status quo" but you can optionally pull a lever labelled "students who like anonymous internet rumoring get more of it and also some students are victimized"
You can always find people who will like something, that doesn't mean you should do it.
For example, there are people who watch some sick shit on the internet, that doesn't mean you should serve it up.
I honestly think the "targeted harrasment" thing is completely overblown. i mean that was just a very very very small part of the site. like okay, maybe 3 people are getting hurt (which btw, they could js report and id take the post down), but over four thousand kids were also enjoying using the site right? like people would come up to me everywhere and say how much fun they're having etc.
Surprise surprise: the arrogant selfish child doesn't have empathy for anyone else.
If four thousand kids were all laughing at a rumor that you had a small dick, and every girl you were interested in laughed you out the door for the rest of your college career, would you really be like "it's ok, 4k people are having fun"?
I guarantee OP would be the guy calling the site operator and threatening to jump him.
you say in your own essay that you're response was "bitch sick my sick". you come across as a narcissistic arrogant spoiled brat.
There are several legal issues, including:
- You created profiles for students without consent
- You enabled anonymous posts about identifiable individuals
- There was no effective moderation/control system
Core issue: once you're aware of harmful content, you’re expected to act. If you don't address it in a reasonable time, you can become legally liable.
So you made JuicyCampus[0]/YikYak[1] and are surprised you’re being ostracized for it?
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JuicyCampus
[1]: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2022/03/07/yik-yak-re-em...
My idea and the implementation was honestly much different from these. It was a pretty cool abd unique implementation i think, where you’re commenting on actual person profiles instead of random gossip… hence the virality
So I've been online for over 30 years now and literally every community I've been a part of with over 1000 members eventually has someone build basically this exact same thing. It's about as original and unique as starting a t-shirt business or a discount card for students.
As for your claims that people like it because lots of people were using it, you are being ignorant. People in the community refresh on sites like this/flock to them because of fear. They are afraid of what people are saying about themselves and their friends.
I guarantee if you actually polled users you'd find the vast vast majority of them would wish the site didn't exist. Usage != Support.
It's not like people do not make this kind of websites because it's challenging technically (it's trivial) or because they did not think of it. They don't because it's shitty idea.
You might have gotten positive acknowledgement of the technical work if you were like, 13. By your age (which I assume is greater than 16 or 17) you're expected to understand things like "not enabling anonymous attackers to harass the shit out of literally anyone at your entire school with impunity".
If this is your viewpoint, that people should be proud of you for creating a platform for gossip and bullying, where it has real deleterious and negative effects on people's lives, then im going to say it - you are a legitimately selfish person who lacks empathy.
Seed funders are likely notice these personality traits and refuse to invest, because someone with those qualities is an investment risk for multiple reasons. For example, in this story you've infringed a brand name, scraped and used personal data without permissions - likely also breaking terms of use, created accounts portraying real people without their permission, established a system to defame (the relationship component), created unwanted spam (emailing university emails automatically) and failed to have in place appropriate moderation. Why would investors put their money against such a risky proposition?
To me, OP seems like someone who's deliberately trying to become the villain because he's seen the social network movie too much and is fantasizing that he'll gain the same wealth and fame as Zuckerberg by being the villain. Except here, he started crying when the consequences of being the villain caught up to him.
OP needs to realize that we are no longer in 2005 when the Facebook was founded. Nor is he in the US. He's in India which has much different laws and culture. And case law and our understanding of the harms of cyber bullying and harassment has drastically evolved since 2005.
OP should also realize that this is at IIT in India. There's already a huge suicide problem amongst students in India due to competition. Adding cyber harassment to that isn't the best idea.
I really hope you'll find something in life to live for that actually benefits people.
Here’s where I think you went wrong:
1. IT Act 2000 — Section 66C / 66D (Identity Fraud / Impersonation) You student data and sent emails appearing to come from or relate to official IIT systems. The email notification system especially is sketchy. sending emails to official addresses using student identity data without consent borders on unauthorized use of identity/credentials.
2. IT Act 2000 — Section 43 (Unauthorized Access / Data Theft) Scraping student data from IIT Delhi’s internal systems without authorization is almost certainly a violation here. Section 43 covers unauthorized access to computer systems and extraction of data.
3. Information Technology (Reasonable Security Practices) Rules, 2011 You collected and published sensitive personal data (romantic relationships, social associations) without consent, no privacy policy, no opt-out. This is a clear violation of the SPDI Rules under the IT Act.
4. Indian Penal Code Section 499/500 — Defamation The platform explicitly hosted rumors, gossip, and accusations (dating history, “haters”). Anonymous posts that damage reputation = defamation. As the platform operator and publisher, you have exposure. Unlike Twitter or Reddit, you’re not a passive host. You designed the romantic/social tagging features.
5. IPC Section 354D — Stalking The “crushing on / crushed on by” fields combined with the email notification system is very problematic. Enabling someone to anonymously tag another person and then notify them about it could constitute facilitation of stalking.
Also, it was simply uncool.
The reaction was swift. Let's hope there are real consequences, because consequences are the only thing that change behavior.
They wrote at the bottom:
> I'm going to be THE WHIZ KID BILLIONAIRE OF THIS GENERATION. WITNESS HISTORY.
Hey, wonderful. But the rules apply to us all, your whiz-ness.
you are still being disingenuous. We live in a society, the college as a whole is a society of various people. Your site was hurting some people's sentiments and that's enough reason to take it down. I can admit it was maybe cool, but try to do cool things which do good to people, not harm. and be a little more humble.
> Your site was hurting some people's sentiments and that's enough reason to take it down.
Like hell it is. I got news for you - every website hurts someone's sentiments. That's no reason to gatekeep.
I mean the only thing this site could do is hurt people?
I agree so fucking much… anything can hurt someones sentiments
I suspect if he changed the name to not include the college name, while people would be angry, there wouldn't be a real reason to take it down. The sending emails to the college system is also iffy.
Lack of moderation was the real issue with the site.
I mean ppl could contact me if they wanted anything removed… several people did too
But people did contact you. Many people. And you told them all you wouldn't take anything down.
The most constructive feedback I can come up with you is to think of other people's feelings before doing anything, and don't do anything at scale until you've proved that you can do this. Failing that, learn how to fight. You are too skinny to be this selfish.
It's too late. Content was already distributed the moment it was posted.
Not only it's too late, but when that guy asks, the reply was "bitch come suck my dick".
So people had to know your site before they can get anything removed.
That’s not the right way to do it, just like Facebook‘s shadow profiles.
You want to use my data, you ask first.
That's literally how most platforms work.
No, most platforms require that the user creates an account don’t scrap data do create them without consent.
What you mean are spammers who scrap web pages for email addresses to sent unwanted mails.
Harrassment site.
Sites like these are only one step up from revenge porn.
I guess that’s how you get to be in Forbes 30 under 30 right?
I was under the impression you just paid for that
Joke is more about the fact that quite a lot of 30 under 30 end up serving prison time - mostly because they think they are smarter than everyone and that they can BS and get away with such things like one from TFA.
I know he watched the Social Network before he did this :)
> satpura hostel kids), yall are some bitches. so be a good bitch and come suck my dick instead of crying to the police and the dean
Wow. Not at all sympathetic to this attitude.
> At this point I was genuinely feeling really fucking cool, cos I was just thinking this would be a really cool story to tell investors when I have a startup. The site was just booming.
I hate what the world has become with adulation of startup culture and influencer chasing. It brings out the worst in people.
With the writing being at the level that it is, I struggle to take the claim "I was telling him, sir, give me one actual rule im breaking and i'll take the site down" Seriously. OP obviously didn't clearly understand why people were having a negative reaction to the site; I expect they might not recognize rules or laws even if they were cited.
I am actually pretty surprised how bad the writing is in the article. As far as I know, IIT is one of the most prestigious universities in India.
I mean, this guy seems absolutely clueless. Anyone with even the slightest social awareness would know this site is going to result in hurting people and people are going to really dislike him for making it... and further his own conduct is super immature (wtf is [0])... He basically made a harassment service, complete with allowing anonymous posting? Definite "FAFO" moment. I don't feel a shred of sympathy for his situation.
When you build social technology, you have a responsibility to put some serious thought into what the social effects are of what you're producing. Every feature will have social and psychological implications for the people using the service. If you don't care about that, you especially shouldn't even be trying to make social-related software.
[0] https://monyatwu.com/blog/iitsocial/pic7.png
I find it hard to blame the young ambitious teenager and much easier to blame the grown-ass adults in supervisory roles who apparently can't cite a single violation by name and later violently steal a kid's phone.
The kid might have some things to learn, sure, but the adult behavior is what I would call "super immature".
I’m actually pretty tired of young ambitious assholes who build themselves off of other people’s misery, and I choose to not celebrate it. That said, the university overreacted.
the "young ambitious" horrible human being. but his "parents are in the army", so it's all good.
I agree about the adults but I can blame both.
The teenager is on a trajectory to become a very capable person, technologically.
They are also behaving like a sociopath and may well be on a trajectory to cause an awful lot more harm than good in the world.
This event could have been a great teaching moment if it was handled by an adult with the capacity to execute on it.
Everyone sucks here and the future is.worse for.it.
honestly, i do not get the hurting people thing. like ok, i do get it, but i just feel like people should be more thick skinned in general, people have said a lot of stuff about me too... but i just dont care. and like ok, if you do care, just report the post, i would have taken it down. why do you need to call the police and tell the dean to kick me out? that's just very malicious. and i mean i kind of get why people were writing bad stuff about people like these
Hurting with words via live speech is one thing. A website amplifies it and makes it permanent.
When people say stuff, only other people around them hear, and even then it can be denied. When people write things online, what they write is public for everyone to read, and it's permanent, forever screenshotted and reposted.
The irony is this blog post is a massive self-own. Without a doubt, for the rest of your life some percentage of people you interact with will google you and read this post and close a door you wanted to go thru in your face. But at least it was your own choice, and it’s based on truth. For everyone who got slandered on your site it wasn’t their choice, and it may not even be true.
>just report the post, i would have taken it down
Last time someone asked to take down a post, you said "bitch come suck my dick" according to your own blog.
I don’t know if you will read this, but if you do maybe I can suggest a rule of thumb for posting things under your name publicly.
You should assume that people don’t know you, and they will not give you the benefit of the doubt. So it is in your best interest to make your public image as unimpeachable as possible.
If the person looking at your blog post is a potential employer, they will not spend a long time weighing pros and cons of your employment. They will pass you over and tell you nothing.
They wouldn't need to report it if you hadn't put their names there without permission. Further, you signed them up to be notified of comments without their permission.
Doesn't matter what people wrote about them, the simple fact is that you did that to them with their data. That you can't grasp the concept of crossing private boundaries like that is disturbing. Stop laughing about this and start looking inward.
> if you do care, just report the post, i would have taken it down.
But people explicitly asked you to take things down, and you refused from the very start.
So you basically created a cyberbully site and your excuse is people should be more thick skinned.
Did it ever occur to you that you are the one having a problem? Maybe you have a lack of empathy or sympathy.
I guess I'm too old for this sh*t, the whole thing just sounds terribly juvenile.
Preliminary comment on tone and behavior in writing: Everything about the story, from the described details about what allegedly happened to the way those details are communicated, is infantile. That makes it very hard to treat the author as a reliable narrator about specific details.
Anyway...
> anyone could make an anonymous account, and then comment anything on anyone's profile
Jesus christ. You built a platform specifically designed for targeted abuse. I know that you're still young, but one day when you're older I hope you come to realize that a platform for spreadings rumors about others is not an ok thing to want to build. You don't have the moral high-ground here. The only thing you accomplished was being a creep.
This whole blog post shows an extreme level of immaturity that I really do hope you grow out of. Literally every line is absolute cringe.
> this is that story. its really really fucking crazy.
The craziest thing to me about this story is that everything in the story makes you look bad and yet you chose to post it anyway.
You either:
A) never realized that you were building a harassment platform despite being told this multiple times, which demonstrates a complete lack of awareness
or
B) thought it would be a good idea to build a harassment platform, which demonstrates a complete lack of empathy
I'm surprised at how few comments there are about just how creepy this is. Going to a university is not implied consent for random people to throw up searchable websites with your name and face, let alone allowing random, anonymous other people to attach anything they want to it in a comment section.
I get it he was copying The Social Network, but just because it's been done before doesn't make it better now.
I'd rather live in a world where a student's website hosts an anonymous mean comment about me than live in the authoritarian nightmare of how the school officials, guards and police acted in this behavior.
Tea is still available on the app store, which is a far more targeted harassment and slander app, than this one that was clearly more of a 4chan style "for the lulz" that no one would take seriously.
> I'd rather live in a world where a student's website hosts an anonymous mean comment about me than live in the authoritarian nightmare of ...
False dichotomy fallacy. Also fallacy of emotive language. That is a deflection, not a rebuttal.
> Tea is still available on the app store
Whataboutism. Fallacy of relative privation. That is a deflection, not a rebuttal.
Since we're talking about worlds we'd like to live in, I'd like to live in a world where people believe that it's bad to think harassment platforms are ok/cool/fun.
Tea being available is relevant! Your list of fallacies is less useful than the comment you replied to, despite its flaws.
Also using emotive language isn't a fallacy, get out of here with that. Using the phrase "authoritarian nightmare" does not replace logic with emotion like an actual fallacy would.
The manner in which the school got the website taken down was via an authoritarian nightmare, so it's not exactly a false dichotomy in this case. If not for the authoritarian nightmare the site might still be up.
Though it's admittedly possible they could have eventually gotten the website taken down through less thuggish means.
The false dichotomy is that the two scenarios are presented as the only two options when they aren't the only two options. The use of "authoritarian nightmare" is the emotive language.
I wish the people currently building the global terror nexus would have that mature realization.
My intention was not to build a “targeted abuse” platform and thats not what was built either. “Abuse”, if you can call it that, was just a small part of the site. The main point was to make the social life more happening, which it did… people got to discuss things, confess to people, hangout and make posts with their friends
For the “immature and infantile” part, i disagree with you on it. I do not believe someones style of speaking should have an effect on your interpretation of their words. Youre just doing yourself a disservice
It doesn't matter what your intention was, the point was that that was what it did. You didn't think hard enough about how people would use it given the (lack of) constraints and moderation you designed it with and you didn't take responsibility / accountability for what you had facilitated.
Your response to this seems to be: "People need to be more thick-skinned, I would take it down if they asked & it's unfair that they escalated to the dean." as if that somehow invalidates the criticism you're receiving. It doesn't. The fact that you don't really own up to that shows a lack of emotional maturity which makes it hard for people to feel sympathy for you. Until you actually understand why people had problems with what you made, you won't get a lot of sympathy for how you were treated either.
It's like those videos where some clueless racist spouting off garbage on the subway eventually gets punched by someone else. Yes, the assault is definitely "more" wrong. But you won't find a lot of people feeling sorry for the racist.
Why is your intention relevant here? Sure: in the US if you kill somebody accidentally then you'll be convicted of manslaughter instead of murder. In your situation, intention is relevant to whether the school decides to throw you out or just discipline you in some way.
But intention is irrelevant when understanding what harms the site will cause. Plenty of sites have been created for noble purposes, and achieved great things, and yet still ended up driving some users to suicide. "Oops, I didn't expect that to happen" might make someone punish you less, but it's not going to change what was built or what effects it had on people.
I mean, at that age I did some stupid shit too and thought it was cool. I'd even get defensive and double down when someone challenged me by saying I had fucked up and hurt people. Hopefully you're still just in that defensive stage and you'll be able to see things more clearly when you get some distance from it.
Hint: if this continued to be popular, there is no way you could control it. (Never mind that you clearly had little interest in controlling it thus far; you've basically stated that your opinions on what is serious vs trivial harassment are all that matter, and when you could get around to deleting things is soon enough.) You would be directly responsible for trashing the school's social environment and harming a lot of people -- many of whom aren't male and/or whose daddy and mommy are not in the military. You don't get to decide who is and isn't vulnerable.
Please learn something about human nature and what people do when given the power over people they feel rejected by or superior to. Especially when the attacks are anonymous.
> I do not believe someones style of speaking should have an effect on your interpretation of their words.
It has an effect on interpretation of your character. That's unavoidable. Welcome to the real world, I guess.
I love how OP directly borrowed the plot of The Social Network by scraping the campus directory for a student rating system. And somehow it's playing out in the exact same way.
> I had scraped data for all students at IIT Delhi, and made a profile for all of them.
> anyone could make an anonymous account, and then comment anything on anyone's profile. Each profile also had 4 fields, where you could tag anyone, in the "has dated", "crushing on", "crushed on by" or "haters" category.
> he told me, take the site down or you WILL face DISCO, so again I was like sure, I dont mind it (I was just gettting reminded of Social Network lmao)
> also at one point i literally said the social network dialogue, " I feel like i deserve some recognition from you guys"
It’s actually uncanny Maybe some of the things im doing are inspired tho
The advice I have as someone who also pushed boundaries is to be more creative next time.
The school will hate you no matter what. But this project doesn't appeal to VCs because social networking isn't trendy anymore.
Try doing something fresh with AI.
Example: the founder of Cluely got expelled from Columbia for creating an AI to cheat at LeetCode-style interviews.
He also spends his time posting what some call unprofessional engagement bait on social media. However, he just had a $15 million Series A.
He should probably drop out, seek funding from Thiel and start his company. He could call it something like "visagebank" or similar. Then in a few decades he can join the select club of dickheads ruling the world.
That's clearly his aspiration. I think the window for that has passed, though.
This is a johnny-come-lately who is just acting out a script that VCs are already sick of.
Very nice thread by the former CEO of Reddit about online behavior, moderation, etc: https://x.com/yishan/status/1586955288061452289
Per the thread, it’s possible this problem could’ve been solved by burying the site in affiliate links…
I've never seen someone with net negative karma until now.
When I had made some hackernews comment/karma analysis sometime ago, I know that there are some people with negative karma.
1 Proven -247
2 VentureHawk -89
3 adamyormark -50
4 oldpersonintx2 -45
5 sevenstar -35
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46874249
https://monyatwu.com/dailyblog/day29/
> ok so i was just doing marketing, we were uploading rumors and gossip about people.
1. Is the student information that you scraped publicly available on the Internet or was it necessary to login in order to view the student information now displayed on your website? 2. Did you take down the profile or comments related to S (the “college gangster”) in response to them asking you to?
One can hope that time will lead to more maturity than was shown in launching a site like this or acting that way when pressed.
Yes, the admin didn't handle it well, but the writing style and general tone of this post/incident is incredibly off-putting. All while talking about future "investors" and how many great ideas he has. You created a clone of hot-or-not (or whatever Zuck called his site) and you think you're the next coming? Get real. There was nothing innovative here at all, it might be one thing if it was innovative while being scummy but it's just scummy and a tired copy.
I agree that the tone is off-putting and immature, but attacking the author and the site doesn't change the fact that it gained traction and many students seemed to enjoy it (if we can believe the claims). There's clearly a demand for this type of site, so any technical or novelty merits are irrelevant.
What the author did wrong was mishandling the negative response. If he had been open to the feedback and worked on a plan to address the concerns, the site might have stayed up. Hopefully this is a learning opportunity, as he clearly needs it.
I mean it's not at all related to hot-or-not? I feel like this site idea, and the implementation was really innovative honestly. and also, "you think you're the next coming? Get real" lol just witness history
What's innovative in the site idea or implementation? There's nothing there, it's just rehash of 20 years old idea.
Hahaha, I get 'The Social Network' vibes from this story. You should read his other posts also. Let's just say the guy has more than enough confidence.
I really felt like i was living in the movie too. also for the posts, haha thanks for reading. i feel like they'll be pretty cool for people to look back on when im really succesful
No investor with any brains who reads this post would ever give you money. And no job that reads it would ever hire you.
Well Zuckerberg, this is the brainrot staring back at you.
Reading this wasn't easy, but let's appreciate the authenticity.
This post doesn't reflect well on you, you were disrespectful to every person in the story. You really need to grow up, and you could've handled this way better.
You could have, for example, asked exactly what their concerns were, and proposed ways to address them.
Your site looks very amateur, but from your description, it doesn't sound like you are doing anything clearly forbidden by law.
>someone had written a comment about S which he did not like.
Couldn't this also be done in the reddit? Then is the lack of moderation and language filters the problem?
You're applying US law. I dont think this passes muster on all Indian laws.
I honestly think i was pretty respectful to everyone, well until they started being disrespectful to me… > You could have, for example, asked exactly what their concerns were, and proposed ways to address them. i obviously did this. But they had already made up their mind… > Couldn't this also be done in the reddit? Then is the lack of moderation and language filters the problem? That was something i said too, ppl can do this on reddit. But their response was ‘but we dont control reddit’ For the moderation, i mean i was removing things if anyone reported it, what else could i do?
> Each profile also had 4 fields, where you could tag anyone, in the "has dated", "crushing on", "crushed on by" or "haters" category.
>Another cool thing was that whenever someone commented on your profile or tagged you, I'd send you an email on your official iitd email.
That’s quite the opposite of respect. More like spam.
When I read things like this I glimplse the enormous cultural gulf between generations. I instictively want to take the side of the underdog in most situations. But in this case, I do not find the protagonist very sympathetic. But clearly, many young people feel otherwise. The world is a-changing.
I feel like it's not really generational, I remember bros like this when I was on IRC as a kid and we were all hacking around on stuff and winnuking each other or whatever. Some of them actually grew up and did real things which is always cool to see (I have plenty of said ppl on LinkedIn who are now crazy successful), and then yeah lots of 'em who uhhh, went in other directions.
Yea, I had the same first reaction. But, then I thought: If this were run through a program that re-wrote it to sound more like me, more like a typical, mature, 40 year old tech writer wrote it, I'd probably be feeling sympathetic to the author. So I admit I'm really just rejecting the writing style and the "wassup bro lmao suck my dick bro lol bro bro" attitude. Re-written, I'd probably be pretty solidly behind this guy.
Hey 1whizkid1, the Forbes 30 under 30 pipeline is waiting for you.
You have to bring it back; it’s your awesome work
The implementation of the idea looks more like a kiwifarm egg than a facebook egg.
Thinking about Anonymous posting about non public figures is perturbing. If the poster can't be made responsible for the post, then the platform and the platform of the platform (and so on) are in line. That is: new website, then the hosting servers (and so on)
DMCA is a pretty good model for this sort of thing IMO. You take down the post, notify the poster, and if the poster wants they can have you put it back up and tell the original complainant "sue me". If you don't follow that process they can sue you instead.
Yikes, I guess American tendency for narcissism, cultural rot, and attention-seeking at all costs has fully permeated the global culture. This brat will probably be successful in life and that’s exactly why everything’s going to shit.
They will have to grapple with the hollow, gnawing feeling in their gut for the rest of their life.
It's some vindication, but it's also just sad.
sounds like a strong case of ego
If you were 2 decades earlier you could have been Zuckerberg. Hope you learned something from this experience.
Apparently he got what he deserved, his karma currently is -17 (have never seen a negative karma).
I am 17 from the same country and this is somewhat juvenile, this isn't an age problem for-the-most-part.
The thing I saw was that, they mentioned investor/startup multiple times. I feel like this is their way of getting attention (All PR is good PR)
There could've been better ways to handle it and I feel like there was no deeper reflection. One of the things I wish to do after something is to learn from that. I am unable to find that realization sadly :-(
Currently in High school, so maybe my expectations were a bit higher of University but I expected better from IIT-Delhi Student/Staff (Both)
OP I hope that you can reflect on these things. There are some good things to learn which you are dismissing here, Have a nice day.
Hey Mony, I want to follow your blog, please have an RSS feed for it if you can.
Sorry but the author sounds incredibly annoying.
Indians amuse me. "My parents are in the military, you can do jack shit".
How is military mommy and daddy keeping you from ending up in a Delhi landfill in eight to twelve pieces after being disrespectful to the wrong person?
They better try for a smarter son quickly, because you are not getting very old in the place you’re living, pissing people off like that.
> How is military mommy and daddy keeping you from ending up in a Delhi landfill in eight to twelve pieces after being disrespectful to the wrong person
Because his dad is a Colonel and a Senior Bureaucrat in the MoD who was in charge of civilian-military airport construction and attended the NDA back in the day.
That's the kind of background that means they know who to call. The issue is IITD has plenty of students from similar backgrounds (some of whom appeared to appear to have been targeted on iitsocial) who if they wanted to could also call in favors if they felt vindictive enough.
Kids from jawan and shaheed families don't act like this. And this only makes this Mony bloke even more distasteful.
Thank you for taking some time out of your busy day to give me some valuable background information. I learned something new today, very much appreciated.
It’s interesting to see how big the difference in culture is sometimes based on what kind of values you get taught in your military career and at home.
My dad was in the military as well, but he would have whooped my ass in front of the whole school and had me personally knock on every dorm room to ask for forgiveness if I had behaved like that instead of doubling down over the phone.
What the fuck is this ? Is this even real ?
The author obviously lack maturity, is cocky and I guess we have every reason to hate him. University (from what he wrote) doesn't look bright either but it's India, it's kind of expected.
> At this point I was genuinely feeling really fucking cool, cos I was just thinking this would be a really cool story to tell investors when I have a startup. The site was just booming.
This is Mark Zuckerberg posting this, check.
Quite the personality this kid, I must say.
The admin behaviour is expected in an Indian context, provided you behave the way this guy did. I am not saying it's good to snatch the guys phone, but it's expected.
Let me explain the core issue here.
The issue is that if the platform ever devolves into something that can be construed as cyberbullying, then the admin is suddenly in trouble.
In the Indian context, elite public colleges like IITD have some students from quite poor non urban backgrounds, These colleges are cheap, have a strict entrance exam (JEE) and there's no money requirement so you have people from all financial strata. As such, the social dynamic is that the parents "entrust" the college with "taking care" of their kid. Especially in first generation educated. In contrast, in private colleges with homogenous, richer families the social dynamic puts more responsibility on the student. The age of 18 is completely irrelevant in this dynamic.
The point is, the admin in this college is also somewhat of a caretaker of the students. And will face social liability for cyberbullying "happening under their nose". This is true even if it happens on reddit by the way (and the bully is in the same college). Essentially, if there is a way for the dean to intervene and he doesn't, he has failed in his job as a caretaker. That's the dynamic here. Obviously he has deniability if some random american bullies a IITD kid on say HN. But if a IITD kid bullies a IITD kid on any social platform they will come down on it heavily.
Thus, the platform was never going to work and it's problematic before the law even comes into play. Talking about "tell me what rule I broke" without considering the above social dynamics is fairly immature. If they had done the same thing at say an Ashoka University (expensive private college) then they would have faced none of these issues by contrast. If I'm allowed a swipe at the author, this situation is entirely expected given their privileged background.
Congratulations on the successful launch, Mark! (2004)
What an asshole.
I ain't reading all that, but do you really think it wise to recreate TheFacebook in 2026?
This is the most self indulgent story I've ever read.
It brings value to nobody.
only a couple steps away from Idiocracy
what does this mean lol
I cannot tell if it's satire. The writing gave me a literal headache.
FTA: "Mony: bitch come suck my dick"
...in response to someone politely asking to have his profile removed. Then the school told you to take it down and you refused.
You deserved to get kicked out of school.
Yes, this site would probably have been fine (if distasteful) in the U.S...because the U.S. has a different legal system. This site is not legal under Indian law. Defamation works very differently in India.
You should consider yourself lucky that you're able to write this blogpost instead of finding out what the inside of an Indian prison is like.
In fairness, they didn't ask for their profile to be taken down. They asked for the entire site to be removed. Ditto for the school.
I don't think this was a good site, but it's still important to get the details correct.
OP: College is a time to make mistakes, and learn from them. Do you feel you learned from your mistakes? Do you feel there has been any conflict with the people who pointed them out? [0][1]
Has there been a point when you paused and put serious, private deliberation into the question, "am I wrong?" Like several consecutive minutes, at least? It's ok to ask that question. You're even allowed to do it in the privacy of your own thoughts, where nobody else can judge you.
0 – https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/oppositional-...
1 – https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/narcissistic-...
It is your obligation to remove defamatory comments immediately, ideally never allowing them to be posted at all (by means of an LLM). Secondly, you probably failed to provide the profile owners a way to delete their own profile if they seek privacy. These inactions are probably what led to complaints.
Hard to have the high road with the mouth of a sailor
I think this kind of puritism is not good, at all. It honestly feels really elitist whenever people bring up the way of speaking, instead of the things being said. A person from medevial britain could look at your language and say it's the "mouth of a sailor". Different people speak differently. obv a college student would speak different from like a mid thirties software employee right? I hope you can look past it and give me your thoughts on the actual story, which i felt was really really crazy
This is how evil tends to win. Idiots will select the “cleaner” option even if it’s worse.
Usually ad-hominem fallacies have a little more padding than that.
https://edition.cnn.com/2021/01/26/health/swearing-benefits-...
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/01/170117105107.h...
"What do you mean I'm being fired for fucking workplace harassment? You're my goddamn boss, don't you know that swearing has a positive correlation with intelligence!?"
Yeah, something tells me that these studies aren't going to move the needle on swearing and professionalism.
That's not what's on display here.
Imagine if this was, say, at a bar. A person holds up a sheet of paper on a clipboard and says anyone can write about anyone else in the bar. Would the police be called? Would legal threats be made? People freaking out like this is not consistent with social norms. It's magical thinking about the internet somehow being different or unique.
Good luck dealing with these small minded administrators.
Any bar worth going to would kick out the asshole with the sign and ban them from returning.
Okay. Now imagine he's doing it out on the public sidewalk and not using bar property. Would it be justified to use physical force and steal the clipboard owner's property?
What about this imaginary scenario has anything to do with OP scraping their college’s student directory to populate their rumor mill website?
Where did stealing property come from?
Also the guy with a clipboard is only showing those notes to a couple people at a time after they journey to his location, which makes a pretty big difference for the amount of disruption. There's no magical thinking about the internet being special. The social norms are different because the situation is so different.
They stole his phone using physical violence. It's in the article. I'll quote it for you.
>So i was like chill out bro, ill just delete the video, but the dean said, "no confiscate his phone". so one of the guards just snatched the phone from my hand the dean said wipe everything, and dont give him his phone back. I was like wtf is happening? bro I have my private photos on there dont do this. like you cannot do this. I tried reaching for my phone but one of the security guys just held me. and started being rough with me. like pushing me around and shit.
That wasn't really because of the website though. The meeting could have been about basically anything and grabbing the phone for recording could have happened. It was bad but let's not mix up the two situations.
But it didn't work on him; his parents are in the army.
> I knew the police can't really tell me to do anyhting, and my parents are in the army too so intimidation obv wont work.
So what are you complaining about?
Tell me you never been to a bar without telling me you never been to a bar. Bars are usually a huge hot or not (well, parties in general). People are talking and gossiping about each other the whole time. At worst you only be talked about as well.
Bars probably don't have a directory of everyone that attends the bar, that you scraped and published without permission.
The fact that a person is a student at the school can be very sensitive information. The classic example is someone who leaves an abusive spouse/family and does not want to be found. Now their name and picture is out there, and their timetable and therefore whereabouts could be partially inferred from the school calendar by someone who knows their interests.
> The fact that a person is a student at the school can be very sensitive information.
But they were already in the directory? That's much more "out there" than the gossip site.
I'm really skeptical of this line of logic. It feels like motivated reasoning based on not liking the site, because a privacy issue like that is easier to attack (if it's real). I think the meaningful criticisms are based on the actual functionality, the commenting.
I understand that opinion, but the opposite view is now conventional. Corporate/college directories are usually not available in public, but only with a local auth. Even if the scraping site restricted signups to local email addresses, the college is responsible for the distribution of its directory PII so could not allow this.
Leaking PII like this would be illegal in Canada for example.
I don't understand how the word "leaking" would apply here. Unless there was an unmentioned login wall for the directory he scraped, the site is mirroring the names and faces off of a much larger and already public site that nobody has said a single word in complaint of.
It's not public, it's just accessible to the student body. The directory has restrictions on how it is to be used.
Those restrictions are presumably not going to permit a user script that adds a "harass this student" button to the directory page, either.
Yeah, but he also took students' PII and put it on his website. If someone did that in a bar, there's a good chance they'd get their face punched by others in the bar.
Interesting story, despite the clickbait title. Keep up the good work.
What’s interesting about it? Sassy kid acts without thinking, learns nothing. That’s the whole schtick.
The college was being abusive and they probably cannot take your phone and delete your stuff. What an awful thing to happen. By the way, the dean was not being nice by visiting you, don't go through Stockholm Syndrome, he was checking on you because he knew what he did was wrong.
IIT Delhi is in India so I'm not sure what the law looks like there, but yeah a university physically stealing an adult's phone and deleting his personal photos would definitely be illegal in the states.
I wonder if Delhi is the equivalent of a one-party or two-party consent state in the US? If it's one-party then OP recording their conversation wasn't even illegal.
Defamation is illegal in India, so a defamation platform would be problematic.
Two-Party consent.
And just like Zucc he is shielded by privilege - his father's a senior bureaucrat in the MoD who attended the NDA.
Additionally, based on the comments on iitsocial, a large number of users were commenting how it was devolving into a doxxing mill.
Doesn't matter, he'll land on his feet given his familial background.
And this is why my parents immigrated to the US in the 1990s and I remain grateful for that.
This is really cool. Most people here are whining that you, a college student, aren't acting like an adult. I hope you can look past that; it's supposed to be hacker nature to do stupid stuff like this.
It bothers me that most comments here are high-and-mighty. Did you guys really do nothing you regret when you were younger?
> it's supposed to be hacker nature to do stupid stuff like this.
I've seen this (or similar) twice in the comments here now, and I'm just astounded by how bad this take is. It's hacker nature to explore. It's even hacker nature to try to break things to see if they can be broken. But it is not hacker nature to think it's cool to precipitate harm to others. That's just being an asshole.