For seven days, Yale's campus had a social leaderboard.
"I found out that my girlfriend is MUCH more popular than me."
Good morning everyone. After seeing this walnut butter and cream cheese sandwich from Elbow Bread on my Instagram one too many times, I got one yesterday and ate it in the sun. Heaven.
Today’s letter includes: free merch for some paid readers (new stuff coming later this spring), a computer science major at Yale built his own version of Facemash, my $10 bet on Morgan Wallen’s next album, what Anna Weyant thinks about when she’s falling asleep, and the hottest job opening at Major Food Group.
A student-built site turned the Yale campus social hierarchy into a leaderboard.
Last night, a friend texted me a story from Yale Daily News about the school’s version of Facemash, created by Addison Goolsbee (son of Austan). After doing some research on young Addison, I like the way he codes.
For seven days in April, over half of Yale’s undergrads logged onto a site called Rank Yale to vote on their classmates’ popularity, casting nearly 670,000 votes. Created by junior Addison Goolsbee as part “prank, part social experiment,” the site generated Top 100 lists for each class using an Elo-style algorithm (the same one used in chess rankings). Students could vote up to 100 times a day.
“The whole thing was funny but mostly very weird. Reminded of Mean Girls—we’re all just a bunch of baboons.” - Anonymous Yale student
“I like building things that people use,” Goolsbee ’25, a computer science major who created the website, told the Yale Daily News. “I thought this would be something people liked — and a lot of people did like it. A lot of people didn’t like it, though. That was an interesting dynamic.”
I emailed some Yale students who read Feed Me about how they felt about the popularity contest. Here’s what they told me: