Senior, Whig-Clio launch online debate platform

A new website to be launched Monday exclusively for University students aims to serve as a platform for debate and as a hub for students to anonymously pose questions and answers.

The site, called Princelink, will feature questions from faculty members to which students can respond. It is open to University students as both an online debate hub and as an outlet for anonymous questions. The site — funded in part by the American Whig-Cliosophic Society — promises to allow “interact[ion] with students and professors like you’ve never seen them before.”

Access is limited to those with University email addresses in order to protect the privacy of students, according to the site’s creator, Mark Pavlyukovskyy ’13. Students must sign up with a valid Princeton email, which then gives them access to the two sections of Princelink: Tiger Debate and The Connection.

On the Tiger Debate side of the site, students can both respond to various questions asked in video by faculty members and vote on the best responses. Each post is tied to a student’s netID, which Pavlyukovskyy said he hopes will both motivate students to post well-thought-out responses and help students get in touch with each other easily.

Current videos on Tiger Debate feature questions by University President Shirley Tilghman, Wilson School professor Stan Katz and journalism professor Evan Thomas. Once the discussion ends on a specified date, Princelink organizes a catered meal for students and the individual who posed the question to gather and discuss the issue.

Meanwhile, The Connection serves as an anonymous question-and-answer setting where students can post questions and answers without leaving any public identification. Students will be able to request contact with others through a “meet me” button, but Pavlyukovskyy said that the goal is to let students ask questions that they wouldn’t be willing to ask in any other setting.

“People ask me, why are these two things together?” Pavlyukovskyy said. “Sometimes it’s hard to find the people who you can relate to because you don’t really want to tell everybody,” he said, referencing The Connection.

Pavlyukovskyy said that he got the idea for the site when he noticed how difficult it could be to truly connect and discuss meaningful things with other students on campus. He said he hopes that Princelink might help students across campus connect with one another by discovering others with similar interests and problems.

“It’s really hard to get to know people really deeply really quickly,” Pavlyukovskyy said. “I felt like that was a problem.”

The site was first worked on by Pavlyukovskyy and his friend Alex Chuka ’14. In Pavlyukovskyy’s junior year, they worked with USG president Bruce Easop ’13 to attempt to secure money and technical support to develop the site. After that, Pavlyukovskyy also reached out to Whig-Clio president Cara Eckholm ’14. Whig-Clio provided sponsorship to improve and polish the site by hiring professional programmers and getting the help of Joe Margolies ’15, Whig-Clio’s graphic designer.

“It sounded like an interesting way to move debate online,” Eckholm said. “It’s an interesting new format through which we can spread debate on campus.”

Regarding the future of the site, Pavlyukovskyy said he hopes to expand its features to let students ask questions as well and perhaps even allow them to post short, fun video clips on the site, but those plans are not likely to happen in the immediate future.