(Elizabeth Tertadian -- The Beacon)
By Laura Frazier, Staff Writer -- frazier13@up.edu
Junior Joe Starzl was having a pretty good day.
Apparently, someone thought his looks compared to the popular country singer Brad Paisley.
"I definitely felt like I was 10 feet tall," he said. "Huge ego boost. I walked a little straighter after that."
So was he able to thank the person who had paid him such a nice compliment?
Unfortunately not, because he read the comment on LikeALittle.com.
The most recent Internet trend to hit UP, LikeALittle.com is an anonymous website where people can post comments about fellow students around them.
Similar to Facebook.com, the website has a general "wall" on which people can write about others. The post starts by identifying the subject's hair color, gender and location before making a comment about the person.
The only catch is that the site is completely anonymous. Posts do not name the person they are describing or reveal the author. Other people can comment on the posts, but they are hidden under a pseudonym, which is the name of a fruit or vegetable.
The website has tabs that allow the author to follow what comments are made on their posts.
Created by Stanford MBA student Evan Reas, LikeALittle posts are grouped by school. There is a specific UP group, and other colleges are separated into their own branches of the site.
Freshman Ali Kratochvil was told about LikeALittle by one of her friends, and after checking it out, she decided it could be fun to have a UP edition.
By communicating through e-mail with site administrators, she set up the UP page and officially launched it about two weeks ago.
She advertised it in her biology class and asked friends to post comments to help get it started.
The popularity of the site can be measured by the number of people who choose to "like" the site by clicking on an icon. The icon is linked to that person's Facebook page. By the end of day one, there were 180 "likes" and after 48 hours there were 500 to 600, Kratochvil said. She was surprised at how quickly the site gained interest.
"I wasn't quite sure people would like it as much as they do," she said. "I was completely shocked."
Kratochvil believes the size of UP helped the site become more popular. Because UP is small, there is the chance a person will know a comment is about him, or about another person he knows, she said. Freshman Rose Harber, who has viewed LikeALittle.com before but has never found a post about herself, agrees that UP's size makes the website more fun.
"Because it's a small school it's easy to tell who they are," she said. "It's more entertaining when you can tell who it's about."
Kratochvil thinks the site must be anonymous to work.
"It's so much easier when you are just hiding behind a computer," she said.
However, Starzl thinks some comments are uncomfortable to read, even if you don't know the author. "It's a fine line between being really funny and really creepy," he said. "It has to be anonymous."
Starzl felt no need to try to discover who posted the comment about him.
"I was a little curious, but not a serious kind of curious," he said. "I think it's really funny. I don't see it as being anything more than that."
Junior Ian Paja also had comments posted about him, and one compared his looks to the character Frodo from the "Lord of the Rings" movies. Paja also didn't care to figure out who had posted it.
"I wasn't tempted," he said. "It's just an anonymous website with random pick up lines."
Harber also doesn't see the benefit in knowing the author of a post. "I wouldn't expect anything to come of it," she said. "I wouldn't want to meet anyone that way and if someone is going to ask me on a date, I would want them to do it to my face."
Even if people wanted to know exactly who had posted a comment, there is no way to know, Kratochvil said. However, Kratochvil thinks the anonymity of the site does allow people to post inappropriate comments. As the UP page site administrator, Kraochvil has to filter all of the posts. They are sent to her e-mail after being posted on the site. She has to remove all posts that have any names attached to them or are racist, sexist, rude or inappropriate. It is her discretion as to what should be removed.
"It's really hard to draw that line," Kraochvil said. "There are definitely things on there that it's like ‘I don't know if your mom would want to know you wrote that.' People are anonymous and think they can get away with it."
Paja has also noticed some inappropriate comments, but doesn't think much of it.
"If there were offensive things it's just people trolling," he said. "It's just someone who has too much free time and does things to get a laugh."
Starzl thinks there are more negative posts about women than men.
"Girls are more objectified," he said. "There are more inappropriate comments about girls."
Paja just thinks the site should not be taken seriously.
"I think people tend to overreact," he said. "It's more or less the high school cafeteria."
Kratochvil believes the point of the site is to share random compliments.
"When you are reading you are always hoping it's going to be about you," she said. "People just like that someone noticed them. That's what it's all about."
(The Beacon)
