Despite the wide popularity of the Jolt, the people who make it run receive little fanfare. Indeed, they are right here among us at the College, a dedicated group of three student computer warriors.
Isaiah Tanenbaum '05
Tanenbaum has been with the Jolt since 2002, when he was recruited as an active participant on the discussion forum. The job offer came in the form of an e-mail asking if Tanenbaum "would consider working for the other side." Said Tanenbaum, "It felt like I was being propositioned by the CIA or something."
Tanenbaum has no programming knowledge beyond what he learned in Computer Science 11, which does not matter because all the routine programming is automated. He approves events, lines up professor quotations, writes polls and reads every post on the Amherst other five college forums. But even if he weren't working for the Jolt, Tanenbaum admits he would scour the forums for fun anyway.
The Amherst Jolt, along with more than 100 other Jolts around the country, reports to Jolt headquarters in Boston, which coordinates the advertising campaigns and national contests, gives general guidance and troubleshoots technical issues. According to Tanenbaum, most of the Headquarters staff worked on their college Jolts. "Or else they just wish they had," he said.
Tanenbaum sees himself as a "second generation" Jolt worker. "The trailblazing work of establishing the Amherst Jolt is pretty much complete. We have a steady stream of events and our forum keeps very active-and we can focus on improving features rather than simply staying afloat," he said. "Some of these new features are the five-college ride board, totally revamped Marketplace, and a host of 'behind-the-scenes' improvements that make it easier for Admins to maintain the site."Tanenbaum said that the Jolt community has grown as well. "There are over 100 Jolts around the country, and the increased userbase means that the national Jolt scene is a much more exciting and vibrant one than it was two or three years ago. That has an effect on everything from the Politics Forum to the now-frequent and much more competitive contests," he said.
Tanenbaum believes the Jolt provides a sense of community. "We get over 1500 unique hits a day, so I think it's pretty safe to say that most every student has visited the Jolt at least once, and many of them stick around. I think the pure volume of users has a value in and of itself, on top of all the features that we offer," he said. "Since so many students regularly visit the Jolt, I like to think of it as the online equivalent of the Campus Center. Except without the toasted bagels."
Tanenbaum's favorite part of the Jolt is the events board. "It is really the only place outside of the physical board in Keefe that there is an organized and (mostly) complete list of events on this campus," he said. "It is also one of our most popular features, so I can feel validated in my love of it." As for his favorite professor quotation: "I love the accidental double entendres we get every now and then from Choral Director Mallorie Chernin. They are usually followed up with something like 'Oh, God! What did I just say? Don't put that on the Jolt!' which is, of course, the surest way for any professor to get any quote onto the Jolt," he said.
Tanenbaum enjoys the variety of posts on the forum. "I am always up for a good forum discussion-we have had some interesting ones lately on religion and how it ought to interact with the public sphere, opinions on stem-cell research, that sort of thing," he said. "But I also like the rambling, half-drunken posts we sometimes get on Saturday evenings, and then the messages the following day asking if anyone accidentally grabbed the wrong person's black peacoat. Those last are especially funny when they come three at a time, from three different people missing three different coats."
Tanenbaum's favorite poll question was "What is your Favorite Soup?" He recalled, "The only answer, of course, was Cheesy Potato (it got 100 percent)."
The Ride Board, Tanenbaum said, is a work in progress. "Really, for something like the Ride Board, it is a question of critical mass: You need a certain number of requests and offers in order to get a sufficiently high match-to-miss ratio," he said. "I do not think we are quite there yet, but every indication is that things, much like the song indicates, are getting better all the time. As more people match drivers to passengers, they'll tell their friends about how the Jolt worked well for them, and those friends will post as well."
Laura Strickman '07
Drama brought Strickman to the Daily Jolt. Second semester of last year, she played Tanenbaum's old flame in "Hedda Gabler." Tanenbaum, having heard of Strickman's computer skills, tapped her for a job. "I was looking for a job on campus, and I thought the Jolt was a fun place to work, so I said sure," Strickman said. "Fairly informal, I know; I think in the future we'll be taking applications for new people."
Strickman monitors the Jolt, updating it at least once a day in 15-and 20-minute work sessions. She routinely approves and posts events and professor quotations. This year she managed the Halloween contest, taking costume pictures and buying a candy-filled pumpkin for the prize.
It's not all fun and games behind the scenes at the Jolt, however. "Parts of it are enjoyable, and parts are boring, and once in a while it's difficult," she said. Her favorite part of the job is writing the Jolt polls and reading feedback, though she despairs when comments turn negative.
"Updating events is boring. Sometimes people, for reasons that escape me, will submit the same event six or seven times and I have to go through and see if all the posts are actually the same, then prune most of them out," she said. But she has to keep an eye out, even in the grind. "Once someone submitted a perfectly normal event, and I almost posted it-but then I realized that for the website to get more information, they'd given the URL of a porn site," she said. "Sometimes people puzzle me."
The polls are Strickman's favorite part of the Jolt. "We get an average of 500 responses a week, which is a pretty good cross-section of the student body," she said. "Sometimes I wonder about something, just at random-like, which do people value more, being smart or being kind-and while before, I'd have just shrugged and gone on to actually do my homework or something worthwhile, now that I work for the Jolt, I can ask all of Amherst. What power."
Strickman has her favorite Daily Joltisms. "There was a professor quote about a dearth of chalk colors- 'Looks like it is going to be a puke-green lecture today'-that I was particularly fond of. My favorite poll might be the Rock-Paper-Scissors one-it was so random, but people analyzed it so much. I was delighted," she said.
Though 3-D Pong is the current favorite procrastination game among the student body, Strickman prefers Alter Ego. "Great game; you make life decisions in all stages from infant to old person and see how your life ends up. I always end up dying young," she said.
Jason Chang '05E
Chang calls himself a "Jolter." In describing the job, he said that's the most specificity he can come up with.
"We mostly share the basic tasks," he said. "I'm almost entirely responsible for updating the Valentine menus because I wrote a program that corrects some of the common gaffes and ugliness in the published menus, things like misplaced or missing commas, or 'Pear 1/2s' or 'O'Brein potatoes' instead of 'O'Brien,' and then never really showed anyone else how to use it," he said. "I'm also the most experienced programmer of the three of us, so writing new code or updating code that interacts with the database driving the site falls to me mostly. I also have more experience working with the ghastly innards of the site."
On average, Chang spends a few hours a week on the Jolt. "The most enjoyable part is weeding through the professor quotes as they come in. We have access to the entire backlog, so it's kind of fun reading them and coming up with ways to present them, like adding (hopefully) funny links to the text," he said. "Most of the rest of it is just by rote, except for the occasional new programming project, which is usually very challenging due to the near total isolation we have to work in (no documentation on site internals, little sample code, etc.)."
Since Chang started as a staffer on the Jolt, he said there have been more contests and "more things coordinated by the national headquarters."
"I've liked to think it provides a quick information resource and a broad forum for the exchange of ideas and (recently) goods and services," Chang said of the Jolt. His favorite part of the Jolt is the quotes, followed by the food guide.
Policy on anonymity
Because Jolt users can make forum posts without identifying themselves, in recent years racial slurs and attacks on individuals have been spotted on the site. "I certainly am concerned when I hear about people putting up anonymous posts that are hurtful to individuals or denigrating to groups," President Anthony Marx said. "Anonymity is important for those who feel the need for it to protect their criticism, but it should not become an invitation for scurrilous attacks on individuals or groups."
Tanenbaum says that the Jolters use discretion when evaluating posts. "We have a forum policy that outlines what is and is not acceptable, and most posts are clearly on one side or the other," he said. "We do have an 'instant kill' button that we use with a good dose of discretion for those that clearly violate the policy. As for posts that skirt the line, we try to take a lenient approach as much as possible. According to our surveys, most users would rather that we err on the side of leaving a borderline post up rather than off."
The exception that we make to our generally hands-off policy is if a user writes to us to request a post dealing with him be taken off the site. When we get messages like that (one, maybe two, per semester), we take the post down as soon as we can.