The Tab Meets UCL Compliments

Perhaps the vanilla of the Facebook page world, UCL Compliments has just over 600 friends. This isn’t much compared to the 1,700 likes on Spotted: UCL Library or the 2,500 of the bereft UCL Confessions. And so it leaves us wondering, are the positive intentions behind this page too nice for the cynical students it’s intended for? Anonymous hate or sexual puns seem to flow from our fingertips, but kind words just seem laughable. So The Tab decided to talk to the founders of the page to try and understand why they think it could and should be a success.

Are you trying to replace UCL Confessions?

Founder 1: Not really I mean, I think we’re completely separate to that.

Founder 2: We didn’t come up with UCL Compliments, it started in the US. Queens College in America did it and then 80 other universities in America copied them so we thought we’d do it for UCL.

So what was the aim behind starting the page?

Founder 1: Well I guess it’s just for fun! It’s always fun having people messaging you; you get to find out who likes who.

Do you think there’s too much hate and not enough love sometimes at this university and is that maybe why you started the page?

Founder 2: Yeah definitely, I mean even on UCL Compliments we’ve had to delete a few people who keep writing obscene comments on the wall, saying things like ‘this is the worst page we’ve ever seen’. But the page isn’t hurting anyone, so to have such a strong reaction, enough to put their names next to the comments, it just shows what people can be like.

Founder 1: We were talking about this earlier, the pages in the US are so good. There are actually genuinely nice people talking about people in a really nice way.

So do you think the concept is too nice to take off at UCL?

Founder 2: We thought that but then we realised that most of the students at UCL could be students at American universities, since it’s so international.

Do any other British Universities have compliment pages?

Founder 2: We had a look but I don’t think they do. We’re on the group page with UCL Compliments so you get to see all the other American universities, and we haven’t seen any British ones.

And what do you plan to do to promote the page and help it to really kick off?

Founder 1: It’s really hard because if we send too many friend requests we just get blocked by Facebook. So we’ve got to choose wisely with mutual friends, which is how we’re going to build it. It might take time, and people just prefer looking at confessions than compliments I guess.

All this leaves us wondering, why is keyboard venom so easily administered by the student body?  But despite the sad truth that UCL Criticisms would probably be a far more successful concept, maybe we should stop the cynicism now and hope that UCL Compliments can change this.