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.
A few universities have “confessions” pages on facebook/reddit. I think a key requirement for your platform would be to set up some ground rules and have manual approval for each post.
Even then, you might start to see soapboxing and hate mongering in the longer posts that moderators don’t have the capacity to deal with.
The other solution would be to keep the person anonymous to readers, but not anonymous to the moderators, to prevent one person or entity from sending in a bunch of harmful posts. However, that comes with its own problems like data leaks harming legitimate users
Yeah that seems to happen with a lot of confession pages.
One thing I’m curious about is whether the format changes it. Short one-line posts tend to leave less room for soapboxing compared to long stories.
That might be a good way to go about it, and it’s easier to moderate too
Absolutely this.
There was an anonymous confession page at my college and it became a place where people would share how they treat other students/staff like shit. And some were just hateful like “I’ll never date a [race]”.
It kept going for years and was just a toxic place.