Kean’s Discord causes discord

By Jennifer Padilla | Published by March 16, 2018

A group of friends and I were sitting at Kean Starbucks having coffee and reading some of President Trump’s tweets. Occasionally, we find typos and grammatical errors on them and we talk about it for days wishing we could somehow hit an edit button and fix them.

Criminal justice major Steven Torres seemed to have lost interest in the conversation, and was staring at a flyer on the wall.

“Give me a pen,” he said.  “Can you begin a sentence with ‘Or’?”

Before anyone could answer, Torres began to edit the flyer— adding and removing commas, and crossing out redundancies. I joined him, of course.

The poster was full of questions, yet not a single question mark was found.

Written in capital letters, the poster reads:

“KEAN WHISPER

THE OFFICIAL KEAN UNIVERSITY DISCORD CHAT GROUP

DO YOU HAVE A CRUSH ON SOMEONE, YOU THINK BRAD IS GOOD LOOKIN IN CHEM, A CONFESSION YOU WANT TO SAY, OR EVEN IN NEED OF SOME NETFLIX AND CHILL APPLICATIONS  FOR THIS COLD WEATHER. OR EVEN SOME NEW FRIENDS TO PLAY SOME ONLINE GAMES WITH. CHECK OUT THE OFFICIAL DISCORD CHAT GROUP.”

But who does the creator of the poster think they’re persuading?

Torres said he wasn’t the least influenced to participate in any activity promoted on the flyer.

“What a terrible design that was,” he said. “Such a ridiculous run-on sentence.”

However, the content of the flyer instilled curiosity in me. Therefore, I had to find out what goes on in the Kean Whisper Discord chat room– what these “confessions” and “Netflix and chill applications” were all about.

I signed in, and almost immediately had the impression that a person under the username “Can of Cat Food” was the creator, as they were asking users to spread the word.

“I wanted to connect the entire campus as one,” said Can Of Cat Food from a disposable email address. “I’ve been to many colleges where there was some sort of unifying app or chat that connected everyone in some shape or form.”

Can of Cat Food didn’t want to disclose his/her identity.

“I don’t think my identity is important, only my purpose is,” Can of Cat Food said.

Another Kean Whisper user who goes by Ripley Reed, and who also didn’t want to be identified, said the advertising and promises detailed on the flyer “catfished” many.

“My friends and I were actually appalled when we saw it advertised as what seemed like a dating group chat with a slight mention of video games. So I joined,” said Ripley Reed in an email. “The server was filled with memes and funny posts rather than introductions and meaningful talk.”

The graphic design major also had some fitting words for the Kean Whisper flyer: “It looks cheap and clickbait that no one should really look into. It’s just one of those occurrences that makes you think if you should really trust the flyers you see around campus.”

Perhaps this is the reason why they’re continuously taken down, and then reappear on the same walls everyday— but who is taking them down?

I decided to find out what department is in charge of stamping and approving flyers— it’s the Center for Leadership and Service (CLS) in the Miron Student Center.

To my surprise, the office staff immediately knew what flyer I was speaking of.

“We’ve been taking them down every day,” said Julie Queiruga, CLS Customer Service Specialist.

She handed me a Guide to Campus Posting, which stated that there are designated bulletin board posting locations— Starbucks not being one of them.

However, I spotted another section of the guide that discussed the criteria prior to approval. Two bullet points stood out to me: “Is the material free of egregious spelling and grammatical errors?” and “Is the name of the person or organization responsible for the event clearly visible on the material?”

No… and no.

Moreover, the creator doesn’t seem to spend enough time entertaining the new users that join. Some of them comment and never receive a response.

“I personally feel disappointed at the moderator of the group server, since they seem to be inactive,” added user Ripley Reed. “I feel as a moderator on a bigger scale, you should take up the responsibility to manage the server, and I have not been seeing that lately.”

Can of Cat Food commented on the chatroom on Feb. 23 that it’s “official” that we now have a Kean voice chat.

“This is wack,” commented a user.

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