Dartmouth Compliments brings sunshine to campus
If you’ve been scrolling through your Facebook news feed recently, then you’ve probably noticed a new Facebook “friend” who has been growing in popularity.
"Dartmouth Compliments" gives you the opportunity to send an anonymous compliment to anyone in our community. Facebook friends of Dartmouth Compliments then get tagged when they receive a compliment. The account holders will first Facebook message students who receive compliments to give them the chance to veto anything they might find offensive or uncomfortable.
Dartmouth Compliments, called “Dartmouthh Compliments” on Facebook to evade certain naming restrictions, currently has 1,707 friends and posts on average five compliments a day. The small group of people who run this profile adopted the idea from Queen’s University in Ontario, Canada. Columbia University, Yale University, Princeton University and the University of Pennsylvania also have their versions of a Compliments page.
The owners of Dartmouth Compliments said they started the Facebook page to spread positivity throughout the College community.
“The goal of Dartmouth Compliments is definitely just to put some smiles on people's faces,” said the anonymous owners of Dartmouth Compliments in a Facebook message. “In a place like Dartmouth, it's really easy to get caught up in classes and the million things we have going on and start to feel stressed out and isolated. We definitely believe that there's a great deal of love in our community, and we thought that this would let us help spread that love in a small but important way.”
The Twitter account @DartmouthhComps is a parallel social media account for Dartmouth Compliments. With 63 followers to date, it has yet to tweet a compliment. The students managing the Facebook profile have said that they do not know who is behind the Twitter page or Dartmouth Crush, another Facebook profile similar to Dartmouth Compliments.
The people managing the Facebook profile have utilized the website's information section in a humorous way, writing that their employer is “Spreading Love.” The Compliments team humbly attributes its success to the people who send in compliments.
“We’ve been so grateful for how well people have responded,” said the owners. “We frequently get messages from people thanking us, but the truth is that we’re not really doing all that much. We only have things to post because people at Dartmouth have so many lovely things to say about each other!”
It is certainly refreshing to see people respond respectfully and kindly to the compliments, especially in an age when social media can get controversial. A big thanks to Dartmouth Compliments for bringing some warmth to our community!