Technology captures college students in some of the most influential and gripping ways. For everyone with a smart phone on DePauw’s campus, the newest app Erodr has captured our student body impressively fast. If you are an avid Erodr user, you are indeed a “Rodie”. So what is this app? And what does it do? For those of you who don’t know, it’s kind of like a mass “dear diary” of DePauw’s campus completely composed of the thoughts and happenings of the students here.
The Erodr app has consumed DePauw completely. The creator, Drew Halliday, began trying to develop different prototypes for a social network that is tailored to college students in 2012. Now, just a year later, the app has blanketed the greater college communities. The app has higher security and privacy settings than other social media. So what’s the point of the app? To network a community of students around campus, and connect people with others who might not be in their friend group.
The cool thing about the app is that it can be tailored to a certain college community, or to other campuses within a certain distance. The app only works with a college email address, and you are invisible on the site until you post something or like/dislike someone else’s post. You can set limits, too. If you only want to see posts from men and women over 21 from DePauw—you can set the app to those specifics, and that’s all that will show up on your feed.
The community who sees a post determines its length on the feed. If the post gets a certain amount of dislikes in a certain amount of time, it will disappear from the feed because most people viewing it don’t like it. Interesting concept, I think. Another thing that separates Erodr from other social media is the anonymous feature. Any Erodr user can post anonymously every 48 hours. Whether this feature is beneficial to community growth is in the eyes of the beholder, but it certainly is an asset to those who don’t want to post something with their name on it.
The key to a successful Erodr experience is using the app the way it was intended: to connect with people in the best possible way. On September 30, it was posted on the Erodr Twitter page (@erodr_depauw) that over 20 percent of students have connected using the app. That’s an impressive amount, and it’s grown continuously all year. If you’re skeptical, check it out, you can always delete your account if you don’t like it! Just make sure you’re using it smartly, because let’s be real, it’s being posted on the internet—and screen shotting is possible.