Serious question.
Most people carry things they never tell anyone.
Not illegal things. Just thoughts that would damage relationships or reputations if they were said out loud.
Regret about past decisions. Things people hide from partners. Thoughts about friends or family they would never admit publicly.
Therapists exist for a reason, but most people never go to one.
So I was wondering something.
Would it actually be healthier if people had a place to post these thoughts completely anonymously?
No identity. No profile. Just the confession.
I’m building a small experiment called Backroom around this idea where people can post one-line anonymous secrets.
But I’m honestly curious if people would actually use something like that or if most secrets are better left unsaid.
About 10 years ago there were several apps like that: Whisper, Secret, Yik Yak, etc. All faced controversy and went out of business. Today you have Hush.
Yes, a lot of them existed before.
Most of them failed because identity, feeds, and social dynamics slowly took over.
The idea here is to strip everything down so the confession stays the only thing that exists.
grouphug.us. Still have the book on a shelf today.
Some of it was just going after shock-factor, like confessing to screwing lightbulbs where the sun doesn’t shine. Some legitimate stuff, though.
Yeah that seems to happen a lot with anonymous spaces.
Some people use them for shock value. Others actually say things they would never say anywhere else.
The interesting part is what happens when identity disappears.
The Catholics have had that for thousands of years. So maybe there is something to it.
Yeah and the catholics are the most moral and good people around.
Who the fuck sees Catholicism as a proof of success?
To be fair, their version also came with forgiveness and absolution. So I’m sure plenty of pedos confessed their sins only to be told, “say a few hail Mary’s, and try not to do it again. But as far as god is concerned, it’s like it never happened.” So they could convince themselves they did nothing wrong.
I don’t know why you’re using the past tense, the church is still defending them.
That’s actually a really good point.
Confession probably worked for centuries because people needed a place to say things they couldn’t say anywhere else.
Backroom is basically trying to recreate that idea, just anonymously and without religion.
The church invented that to control the secrets in any congregation. So yeah, bad thing. Backroom sounds like a fun idea. How would you ensure peoples anonymity and privacy? How would you fund this?
Good question.
The idea is basically to remove identity completely. No accounts required to read. Posting is session based and nothing links back to a person. Even chats auto-delete after 24h.
The goal is that the secret is the only thing that exists. Not the person behind it.
Funding later would probably come from hosts running rooms people pay a small amount to enter. But right now it’s just an experiment to see if people actually want a place like this.
What would stop it from becoming 4chan?
Fair concern.
4chan is anonymous but completely unstructured.
Backroom is built around hosts running rooms with their own rules. If a room becomes toxic, people simply stop entering it.
So moderation happens at the room level, not through identity.
If a room becomes toxic, people simply stop entering it.
How would this have stopped 4chan? People still go to those toxic message boards.
True. Some people will always seek those spaces.
The idea isn’t to eliminate that behavior.
It’s more about creating rooms where the default incentive is sharing something personal rather than provoking reactions.
Not to shit on your idea, but why would anyone want to read such things in the first place? I get the need to get something off your chest, but I don’t get why someone would be interested in hearing it?
That’s actually the most interesting part.
People are curious about what others really think but never say out loud. Confessions, secrets, uncomfortable truths.
It’s the same reason anonymous confession pages and posts tend to spread so easily.
So no logging IP addresses of people posting or anything like that?
IP addresses are only handled at the infrastructure level for basic abuse protection.
They are not connected to posts or identities and nothing is stored that could link a confession back to a person.
The whole design tries to separate the secret from the individual as much as possible.
I don’t think it is that healthy. You’d otherwise be screaming into yet another void.
That’s actually the interesting part.
Most places where people “vent” are basically voids.
The idea behind Backroom was the opposite. Short anonymous confessions that people actually read and react to.
I have had similar thoughts. I certainly have some deep regrets that I never discuss. I wouldn’t feel comfortable putting them online, though.
PostSecret and /r/confession are/were like this.
That hesitation is exactly the interesting part.
Most people have something they would never say publicly. The question is whether anonymity actually changes that.
I absolutely wouldn’t post anything online I wouldn’t feel comfortable having read out in front of a judge.
1 time I found the Christian bible’s thing about benJoseph’s recommendation about confession…
It was fundamentally different from Catholic confession ( yes, this is related to your point ).
Confession was recommended, but it didn’t say confession to someone.
It may have implied confession to one’s team/community.
It absolutely did not orient any such thing to any church-official.
I’ve found that confessing to LivingSpirit helps.
Research has discovered that it doesn’t matter what one surrenders-to/relies-on, it can be a soccer-ball, an imaginary-friend, or LivingSpirit as I do, but doing that with someone ( from your perspective ) massively empowers lives in breaking addiction, as 1 objective change-in-life.
( see Baumeister’s “Willpower”, & note that while he gives what the evidence says, he rejects it, himself )
Confessing socially I consider narcissistic.
However, there’s another angle to it: it may help others to see that they’re not-alone in their failings.
& that is valuable.
There’s my answer answer for you.
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I’d expect any online thing to be traced back to the person if it was juicy or otherwise usable as kompromat. There was just a news item about using LLM analysis to de-anonymize people, fwiw.
That’s a fair concern.
Absolute anonymity probably doesn’t exist anywhere online.
The idea is more about minimizing identity: no profiles, no history, and posts not tied to accounts. If something leaks, it can’t expose a whole identity because there isn’t one attached.
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Well, as they say, it takes all kinds but I wouldn’t want to be on either end of an anonymous confession of any magnitude.
I neither benefit from yelling my secrets into the void or reading someone else’s.
That’s fair.
Some people probably feel exactly that way.
Others carry thoughts they would never attach to their name anywhere.
Others carry thoughts they would never attach to their name anywhere.
As do I, I guess the difference being that sharing that thought without self-attribution would serve me no better than keeping it safe inside.
It’s been done with real postcards. Not that you can’t try a different take.
This site has been around since 2004:
Just don’t open it to comments. People don’t need that and it’ll get ugly.
Just don’t open it to comments. People don’t need that and it’ll get ugly.
Doesn’t it just not feel like confessing at that point? Maybe I’m just an attention whore?
Nah. The therapeutic effect is from the confession not from the shitty advice or even confirmation or absolution.
Everyone wants attention. It’s one of our basic needs. But, it’s better for you to get it from positive things. Getting it from negative things is like getting your calories from soft drinks.
Sometimes people just want to say something once without it becoming part of their identity.
That’s different from attention.
I’d worry that people who shouldn’t see those confessions would be able to access them.
That’s a fair concern.
The idea is that there are no profiles and no identity attached, so the confession exists on its own without linking back to a person.
It’s less about who reads it and more about removing the connection between the thought and the individual.
This idea reminds me of https://postsecret.com/ . I don’t know if it’s helpful, but it’s interesting.
PostSecret is interesting because it’s anonymous but still curated.
What I’m experimenting with is even simpler.
No profiles. No identity. Just very short one-line confessions people were never supposed to say out loud.
More like raw thoughts than stories.
How about curation though? Having been on the internet for some decades, I can see something like this uncurated go one of two ways - wholesome as fuck or completely unhinged.
That’s the interesting part.
If people know their name and profile are attached, they filter themselves.
When identity disappears, you sometimes get chaos, but you also get honesty people never show anywhere else.
The question is whether the honesty outweighs the chaos.
Sadly people have getting more and more wild with their actual name and image attached over the last few years, but I like the initiative and hope that a wholesome spirit sets in quickly to make it a light on the otherwise muddy internet.
What about slop machine infestation prevention? Or is that something to work with further down the line?
Honestly the format helps a lot.
One-line confessions with no profiles removes most incentives for bots or farming.
I like your optimism and hope you are right. Keep us posted on the projects development!
Appreciate it.
I’m mostly curious what people actually say when identity disappears.
Likes, comments and general engagement, or just the one line thought? I’d think less engagement also will help to keep it a good place. What do you plan there?
Mostly the one-line thought.
Engagement tends to change how people write.
Well, it could go either way.
One of the reasons therapists exist is they’re not blank voids like the internet.
They can respond in human ways, be real and realistic. Help put the confession into context of a person’s life.
Without that, it’s a role of the dice. Some people will come away feeling lighter.
Some will come away with a sensation of having talked themselves into believing they’re a piece of ****.
I guess that’s why AITA is such a popular format.
That’s the tradeoff.
Therapists contextualize. Anonymous spaces reveal what people won’t contextualize anywhere else.
Cathartic maybe, coin flip on whether it’s therapeutic or not.
Yeah that’s probably the honest answer.
Some people just need the thought to exist somewhere outside their head.
Whether that helps or not probably depends on the person.
Well, there’s actually been research into it.
Since that shit is dry as hell, and there’s available articles about it, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/fulfillment-any-age/202202/why-it-feels-so-good-confess
This one gives a nice overview.
So, I’d say it’s pretty realistic to say that “confession” has mental health benefits.
That being said, true anonymity is going to be vital if you’re going to try to build something online. Not just for the people that might want to use it, but for you too. You really don’t want the legal issues if someone were to confess on your service and it became part of trial evidence. You may be thinking it’s not a big deal, that it’ll never happen, but it does happen already with social media.
The less you’ll be able to provide, the less hassle you’ll have. So keep that in mind. Reddit, Facebook, VPNs, they all deal with legal requests regularly, but they have legal departments to handle those to keep a barrier between the people running things and the consequences of users’ actions/words.
Me? No fucking way I’d even confess to jaywalking online, period. And I have never done that (that’s actually true, I’ve never been in a situation where it was useful. Small towns and infrequent visits to cities ftw?). I’d also advise anyone else to never do so.
Also, if you’re a priest/minister and your religion has a confessional seal, you have pretty robust legal protection about not having to break it, in many places. Therapists also have a degree of confidentiality that they’re legally required to maintain. Your online service has neither. So you’ll also have responsibilities above and beyond what therapists or ministers have. Well, you may, since local laws vary, and I’ve never heard of a lot of legal precedent around mandatory reporting for online services. But even if you aren’t currently required to report a range of things, not doing so might open you up to lawsuits and/or eager prosecutors looking to set a precedent.
I guess what it comes down to is: yeah, it could help people. But better you than me
Those are really good points.
The legal side is something I’ve been thinking about as well. The idea is to store as little as possible and avoid accounts entirely.
But you’re right that anonymity online always has limits.
I think that it is probably good. On the other hand, I don’t think that you necessarily need to build something specifically for that purpose because the internet was basically built from the ground up with anonymity in mind. Some of the internet has moved away from that, but there’s still plenty of capability for people to be anonymous if they want to be.
That’s true in theory.
But most anonymous spaces today are still built around profiles, threads, or reputation.
What I’m curious about is whether people behave differently when the post is literally the only thing that exists. No profile. No history. Just the confession itself.
