Negative Image of Greek Life

[MaggieMaggie]

I am pleased Greek Chat usually remains positive and often has posts with great/accurate information. Sadly, we all know about Greek Rank and the negative Greek image this site promotes. While I don't condone GR, I don't think we can ignore the site since so many impressionable PNMs and young people looking for information on-line quickly find this site. I do believe this site influences impressionable people and is often just a forum for bullying. I wonder if there is litigation that may have prompted a recent post allegedly by GR? While I hope the post is true, I suspect not as there continues to be misinformation and bullying posts all over this site. Why do I look at the site? I think it is important to know what information, gossip, misinformation, and hate speech is being perpetuated by GR at various schools. At some school sites, the posts are just revolting. But, I think it is naive to disregard the impact this site can/may have. Copy of post follows:

Addressing Rumors by GreekRank@Staff:
It seems there have been some rumors and false allegations surrounding Greekrank.com and we would like to address them.

Greekrank.com is not easy to run given the competitive and anonymous nature of its users. We do, however, feel it is morally necessary to enforce certain rules and try our best to keep the site as clean and positive as possible.

Let us make it clear: Greekrank employees, writers, and affiliates are not encouraged or paid to post in discussion forums, or leave ratings. Posts and ratings are not manipulated by our staff - if an old post is bumped to the top, it is because someone has recently replied to it. If a post or rating is removed, it's because it was spam, repeat, or malicious content (although, we are human, and mistakes are sometimes made). Writers are paid only to write articles for the blog - this is standard practice on most websites. Between 20,000 and 50,000 users visit Greekrank everyday - trust us, it is a nightmare trying to moderate all of these users, the last thing we would want to do is try to cause more drama, or contribute to the already enormous number of posts. We have implemented many features in an attempt to REDUCE drama inducing, defamatory, and malicious content. We have done this because we feel we are ethically required to, and also to make the moderating process less daunting.

Some of the steps we have taken to reduce malicious content include:

1) Warning users not to call out individuals by name or post defamatory content. After all, cyber bullying is a crime in some states.
2) Removing the ability to rate negatively for the "Looks" category.
3) Running filters to remove malicious posts before they are even reported.
4) Removing reported ratings and posts, and offering especially concerned users the chance to prioritize their reports.
5) While a user can choose to sort the fraternities or sororities at a school by rank, the default option is alphabetical order.
6) Manually removing defamatory content when users contact us and reach out personally.

Over the years, Greekrank has changed ownership and management several times in an attempt to make the site more positive and clean, and hundreds of thousands of posts and ratings have been removed. We would also like to announce that the site has just received new funding, ownership, and management, and users can expect a redesign of the site, as well as a more positive atmosphere by mid-March 2016.

If you would like more information, or still have more questions, please feel free to contact us and we will be happy to address your concerns. We know there is still a lot of work to be done to make Greekrank.com more positive. We sincerely appreciate those users who report malicious content, and encourage you to continue doing that.

Addendum 1: To further address the issue of drama and revenue on Greekrank - We try to grow our traffic and revenue organically, by adding more schools (over 800 now), keeping fraternity and sorority lists updated (we get hundreds of requests per month to add organizations), and by adding new features to keep users interested. Relying on increases in drama is not a sustainable business model - in fact we believe a large decrease in drama will make Greekrank more trusted, helpful, and sustainable in the future.