On Stanford’s campus, rumors are spreading. And in the 21st century, gossip takes a more modern form: on campus, students use Fizz, an anonymous social media app where only people with a stanford.edu email can post. Fizz is widely popular: between April 17th and October 12th of this year, students posted on the app more than 36 thousand times.
How this was made
We collected all data from Stanford’s Fizz “new” feed. Times are Pacific. We tagged posts by matching keywords: a post counts as m4f or f4m if it contains that word, in any capitalization, anywhere in the post. Repeat posts are posts that match the text of another post, ignoring capitalization and spaces. Line shade reflects upvotes minus downvotes at the time of collection. Posts from one account are missing from October 6 onward.
To count the users behind this year’s m4f personal ads, we searched Fizz for “m4f” and sorted by most recent. Then, we blocked the author of each result one at a time, repeating the search after each block. We did this until no m4f posts remained, recording the posts that disappeared together after each successive block. While we assume these posts were made by the account, it is possible that a post deleted between two searches would be falsely attributed. We did not include posts that only mention m4f, such as jokes and commentary. Posts deleted before October 12th are not represented in this sample. We did not record what other posts were made by these accounts. We did not attempt to (or find a way to) identify them further than associated posts.
This piece is inspired by the fantastic work of The Pudding, specifically their story “They Won’t Play a Lady-O on Country Radio.”