Fed Up? Send Your Complaints to Snubster

By Lauren Barack -- School Library Journal, 5/1/2006

What do Tom Cruise, America Online, and hot dogs have in common? They’re among the pet peeves listed on Snubster.com. The new social networking site allows registered users to rant about almost anything—or anyone—they don’t like.

Some recent examples? There are those annoying coworkers “who have overly long personal phone conversations,” reads one post. As for “guys who talk at urinals,” well, need we say more?

Users can set their entries at one of two levels: “on notice,” which puts an expiration date on the submission and is meant for an offender who’s been just a bit naughty or the extreme “dead to me.”

With more than 3,000 registered users in just two months, Snubster is catching on fast with kids of all ages, although its founder definitely knows when posts are coming from the youthful side of the spectrum. “You can definitely tell there are teenagers on the site,” says Bryant Choung, Snubster’s founder. “They put their teachers on there for too much homework or being too hard on them.”

A prime example? “English 300 is Dead to Me because I hate this class with the burning, fiery passion of a thousand suns,” reads one post, recently placed on the site by a user named Cordi.

The Arlington, VA–based Choung launched Snubster as kind of a joke for his friends. He got the idea, he says, after his boss at Raytheon started a list on an office whiteboard of people who had annoyed him. “But you could easily erase the list,” says Choung. “So I thought of creating something more permanent.”

Choung is already toying with adding some new features, and he launched a forum on the site for users to send him ideas. For now, it’s just all good fun—except for the rare few times posts get a little too nasty—and too personal.

“I had one guy contact us and ask us to remove a post that mentioned him by name,” says Choung. “But it wasn’t a student. It was between two businessmen—who should have been grown adults.”