GreekRank offers an online forum for campus society where people don’t bother to introduce themselves. The website hosts discussion boards for each major American university, allowing anyone to anonymously post a comment — regardless of their affiliation with the school — and similarly rate that school’s fraternities and sororities. Around January 2026, a Cornell student began flooding GreekRank’s Cornell discussion board with AI-generated posts promoting the online crypto casino, Rainbet.
Below is a transcript of my exclusive interview with the student. Their name is being withheld, and they are identified below as Anonymous (Anon for short). The transcript has been lightly edited, reorganized and condensed for clarity.
Luke Dolan: What first drew you to programming?
Anonymous: I think the thing that drew me to programming is the ability to just create. If you think about software as a canvas, you can paint a solution to any problem that you have. … I think that was a pretty powerful idea to me as a kid. I taught myself how to code. … I've never taken a [computer science] class in my life.
LD: Can you tell me about your relationship to GreekRank?
Anon: I think when I first got to Cornell, I was curious to gauge the social scene here and figure out what was going on. … GreekRank provides this platform where these fraternities get ranked and the sororities get ranked. It's the freshman dream to have all this knowledge distilled into one place where you can just go and learn what's what, what's up, what's down, where everything stands, right?
But I quickly realized over the subsequent months and subsequent years that it is not whatsoever an accurate representation or this distilled version of the social scene at Cornell that I once thought it was when I was a freshman. It has hundreds or thousands of people's individual experiences and biases baked into these reports that get used to create these aggregate rankings that are totally skewed. They're not at all objective. There's not any rhyme or reason to these rankings, seemingly.
LD: Its effect on campus — you would say it served to perpetuate narratives that weren't really true?
Anon: I don't think that's the original purpose of GreekRank. I do think the original purpose of GreekRank is to provide the aggregate ranking side of things, where you just go and see, okay, this fraternity has this many stars and this many ratings, and then you can click in detail and also see written reviews, basically, of the fraternity or sorority. … Due to the anonymity of it, it became a place where people could just air out their dirty laundry.
It became this discussion board, this anonymous town square where people could say whatever they wanted and say stuff that's untrue, potentially; say stuff that's, like I said, motivated by prior bad experiences, stuff that would never come to light in any other circumstance without this anonymity. No one would go on their Instagram story or on Snapchat or something like that and air out the stuff that they were saying on GreekRank — really messed-up stuff about individuals and calling them out by name and by initial. It just became this rotten public square.
I do remember, as I was thinking about this, there's a Black Mirror episode with robotic bees. The premise of the episode, essentially, is that these people are tweeting "hashtag death to" and then someone’s name. It's this game where each day, the top person who has the most uses of this hashtag, these robotic bees go and kill this person. But the end game, the end result of this, is that everyone who participated in the game and everyone who said "hashtag death to" someone were the final targets. The inventor of this game — the hacker who took control of these bees — his eventual point was: You can't just hide behind anonymity and say these horrible things about people. He wanted people to have consequences.
His manifesto, if you will, is that actions need to have consequences. Things that people say need to have a name behind them. That always ran through my head when I was building this whole GreekRank thing. I think it's such a perfect example of what I'm talking about.
LD: What exactly did you do to GreekRank? And when did you begin?
Anon: This started January 2026, I want to say. I was just hanging out with friends … and we were talking about [GreekRank]. We had very similar discussions to the one that we're having now: It's this anonymous cesspool where the worst things of Cornell are said. We thought a lot about the 2023 incident with Patrick Dai. The terrorist threat, where he threatens to shoot up the Jewish living center. … This [anonymity] brings out the worst of Cornell. This is not something that anyone would say to someone else's face, even if it wasn't to the person that they're talking about. They would never say it to anyone, because that comes back to bite them in the butt.
Then we started joking, "I wish someone would just hack it." The wheels started to turn in my head, and I was like, "Wait a minute. Look at this website. This looks like it was built in the dot-com bubble. This is some 2004 janky HTML and CSS bullsh*t. I could probably just do this myself. I don't need to wait for some Russian hacker to come in and take down the whole website."
So literally that night, after I was done hanging out with my friends, I got to work and started probing around the website, seeing how it works, looking for vulnerabilities, looking for ways that I could exploit how it was set up. I found a couple of vulnerabilities that essentially allowed me to automate this posting on GreekRank.
Now anytime someone posts, their post automatically gets buried beneath 20 or 25 or something posts. All these posts are randomized, generated with AI, just complete slop. Obviously, the Rainbet thing. But the whole idea is just to bury any real discussion of anyone trying to air out someone, anyone trying to expose someone. The idea is just to bury the cesspool so deep down that it's completely futile to fight it. It's just a mountain of AI-generated bullsh*t posts.
LD: So without revealing too much, it seems like the system waits for someone to post and then responds.
Anon: It's a passive system. If GreekRank is quiet, if no one's posting on GreekRank, the system's quiet. … The minute someone posts, it starts churning out posts and it starts burying it.
LD: Why did you choose to promote Rainbet? That was such an interesting call to me because many of the students I asked before I decided to write this article — I asked, ‘What are your thoughts about GreekRank?’ — they all said, ‘I thought Rainbet purchased it and they've been running guerrilla marketing.’
Anon: It was more to have just a funny thing where it's so obvious that something is up. … I thought it would be funny to have some sort of signature almost, so you know this was made by a bot. It's deliberately drowning out everything else. Rainbet, the reason I used it is … it was all over Instagram Reels and I thought it was funny. You see people going into stores and filming these POV Meta glasses videos. It's kind of the same avenue of trolling. … It feels fitting to just force Rainbet as this egregious stamp on almost every post.
LD: I want to move on to the effects. I want to know what you've personally seen change since you've taken down the site.
Anon: It's interesting because GreekRank, since its whole thing is anonymity, no one is going, ‘Oh, I can't post on GreekRank anymore.’ … No one's proud to use GreekRank. Everyone who has posted on it knows why it's so bad. They know it's embarrassing to use for good reason because if you use it, you're kind of a pussy. You're hiding behind this wall of anonymity and assuming that you can say whatever you want.
I think it definitely has shifted the way discourse happens at the school. It's taken out a channel where people can anonymously say whatever they want. Like I said, this anonymous cesspool of a public square is now, all of a sudden, gone.
And where does that discussion go? Well, some of that discussion goes to Sidechat. But Sidechat is different from GreekRank because, on Sidechat, you need a verified account through Cornell. You have to register with your Cornell email to be able to post there. So there's not the same layer of anonymity there. You can still say whatever you want, but it's much more heavily moderated. If you're calling out people by name, your posts will get taken down. If you say something, it can get traced pretty easily back to you because your account is still tied to an email.
LD: What would you say to those whose posts have been buried?
Anon: Go to Sidechat.
LD: What’s going to happen to Sidechat?
Anon: Stay tuned.
LD: On to a more serious note, then. With the new Chi Phi civil lawsuit drawing renewed attention to Greek Life on campus, how do you think discussions would be different if GreekRank weren't flooded with these promotional posts right now?
Anon: I think if GreekRank were in a usable state right now, the climate at Cornell would be a lot more hostile. I think even on Sidechat, even without this total layer of anonymity, you're still seeing people get doxxed. You're seeing terrible things being said about Jane Doe, about the people in Chi Phi who weren't necessarily involved, who were just in the fraternity, being aired out by name, even though they had nothing to do with this.
You're seeing people who weren't even involved on any side. They weren't Jane Doe. They weren't involved in Chi Phi at all. Just people who have been posting their opinions online. … You can imagine how much worse that would be if there was this extra blanket of anonymity where someone could really say whatever they want. No account attached to their email. No repercussions that can be tied back to them. … Watching how hostile and divisive the campus has become, even without GreekRank, is sad to watch.
But you don't have students going up to each other in the street, airing this stuff out about each other and saying horrible stuff, right? Because there's not this layer of anonymity. I think if you have that, it makes campus feel like a lot more hostile of a place than it really is. So I'm extremely glad that GreekRank is not in the picture. I texted some of my friends today, poking fun at it, being like, ‘Isn't it hilarious that GreekRank isn't relevant right now?’ … It's not even part of this discussion.
I also think this story around Chi Phi has become so sensationalized and has just blown up in the national media. The last thing that Cornell needs for its image as an institution, as a university, but also our image as a community, as a school community — the last thing that we need is CNN or ABC News scrolling GreekRank and seeing horrible things that are being said about Jane Doe.
The school has an image problem right now. Having people hiding behind anonymity, airing out whatever egregious things they want to say, is the last thing that the school needs in terms of its image and its reputation in the world.
LD: Would you do this again?
Anon: A million times over. A hundred percent. It's sort of ironic that this interview is anonymous, and that the whole attack on GreekRank that I've done is under this blanket of anonymity that I'm criticizing myself. But even if I could do it again and have my name be out there, that I was the one who did this, I still think I'd do it. Because for the sake of the school, for the sake of the community, I think this is a good thing.
I think GreekRank brought out the worst in people. I think other platforms still, to some extent, do have these issues. Like I said, stay tuned for what's coming next. But GreekRank was the worst. I would do it a million times over. I think this is a positive change for this community. Positive change for the school.
Luke Dolan is a member of the Class of 2027 in the School of Industrial and Labor Relations. He is a staff writer for the Arts & Culture department and can be reached at lpd39@cornell.edu.
