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.
I think old school version of this is writing a letter then not sending it or burning it. Unsent letters are a historical gold mine.
More importantly, the presence of an audience make it likely people will embellish or lie to get responses. Which is why anonymous confessions are always more dubious than anything else. I don’t think earnest anonymous confessions are bad though.
That’s a fair point.
Once there’s an audience people start performing.
One reason I’m testing very short one-line confessions is to reduce that effect. Less room for storytelling, more just the raw thought.
I think it’s healthy. There’s some growth as a human that can only be done through engagement. I consider it good for growth and mental health, especially if people can reply back and give you honest feedback (which being anonymous might help with)
That’s kind of the hope.
Not therapy exactly, but a place where people can say something honestly and see how others react to it.
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.
Can users talk to each other like with messages or is it like writing a letter in a bottle where there is no way to have a back and forth chat?
Right now it’s closer to a message in a bottle.
People can react or comment in the room, but it’s not meant to become private back-and-forth conversations between users.
Ah ok, i like the message in a bottle style. I would think karma and other types of incentives for using the platform might defeat the purpose of it being a true and organic experience
Yeah that’s exactly the concern.
Once people start chasing karma or likes the confession stops being honest and starts becoming performance.
Part of the idea is to remove identity and incentives so the only thing left is the thought itself.
you can send messages to users on lemmy and reply back. but ig the instance owner can see them,thats why you use matrix and send your id to the user to chat with.
It’s called an alt account on Reddit
Or you can still go to a priest if you want to embrace tradition
Alt accounts still carry reputation though.
The idea here is removing the profile entirely so the confession stands on its own.
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.
Sounds like PostSecret but entirely online.
I’m sure there can be a lemmy sub for this, though, but I encourage you to keep building.
Yeah, PostSecret was actually one of the things that made me think about this.
The difference I’m curious about is what happens when it becomes continuous instead of a curated project.
The Catholics have had that for thousands of years. So maybe there is something to it.
And the church used those confessions to control things.
Yea I was going to say… for blackmail!
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.
Set up Tor and make a chat confession group and you’re pretty much there
Simplex is interesting.
The difference here would be that it’s not private messaging. The idea is short public confessions that appear in rooms and disappear again after a few days.
More like anonymous graffiti than a chat group.
If it’s public it doesn’t disappear. People will make copies.
You could have a home site or group and multiple sub groups though.
True. Anything public can be copied.
The idea isn’t perfect secrecy. It’s more about removing identity and permanence so people feel safer saying something once and letting it fade.
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.
Moderation kinda depends on identity, as the trolls who want every room to be toxic will enter every room and make sure it’s toxic if there’s no rudimentary identification.
That’s a fair point.
The idea isn’t that anonymity magically solves trolling. It’s more that rooms create friction. If a host bans someone or locks access, that person doesn’t automatically get the same reach everywhere else.
In big anonymous feeds the trolls and normal users share the exact same space. Rooms try to break that dynamic a bit.
It probably won’t eliminate toxicity, but the hope is it localizes it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The church used to defend pedos. They still do, but they used to too.
Just a warning on running a service like this - any website that allows arbitrary text entry from anonymous users will be found and flooded by bots very quickly.
The most innocent, least damaging version of what happens is adbots posting links to shoddy websites selling “essential oils” and other homeopathy nonsense.
More obscure but more malicious, text posts are used to control botnets for cybercrime. Basically a human running the botnet will post a string of letters and numbers to a website which the bots have been programmed to look for instructions. Websites that allow anonymous text entry are convenient for this because if the criminal activity is investigated, it’s hard to trace the instructions from the controller back to a real person.
Just be aware that people will abuse your service for purposes you did not intend. You’ll probably need both automated tooling for identifying and blocking bot traffic, as well as human moderation.
That’s a really good point.
Any anonymous input system will attract bots sooner or later.
The experiment is partly about seeing how much structure (rooms, hosts, limited formats) changes that dynamic compared to open anonymous boards.
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.
I’m sorry Lord, I farted earlier, in church, but couldn’t apologize, as we were having a prayer…
Network size will be the main problem. Many many many projects with delightful features have been deployed. Extremely few last because only a few people end up using them. Not to discourage you, but be prepared.
Also, consider how the service will be used for spam. I set up a simple link shortener a few years ago. Like 2015 or maybe earlier. I didn’t advertise it, but spammers still found it and abused it, so I had to take it down (too lazy to create a login system or anything, just decided to abandon it).
Especially an anonymous service will require moderation. Are you prepared to moderate it? Have to report certain illegal content to the proper authorities; and/or authorities might subpoena you for information about postings.
Again, things to consider.
Also, currently, people post to places like reddit and various other places already. So you want to figure out what makes your platform different, better, and attractive to audiences.
Good points honestly.
Network effects are probably the hardest part of anything like this.
That’s partly why I’m trying the “room” approach instead of one huge anonymous feed. Smaller spaces are easier to moderate and hopefully harder to spam.
But yeah. If the confessions aren’t real or interesting the whole idea dies anyway.
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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.
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
Maybe could say it’s a Pastafarian ritual for the same legal protection as confession in Christian religions?
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.
Check out the “game” Kind Words, kind of a similar concept.
Yeah, I know it. It’s a nice concept.
The difference here would be that everything is anonymous and public by default. No profiles, just short confessions appearing and disappearing.
Afaik it is anonymous (to other users if not to the devs, I also haven’t played the sequel), though not entirely public as there’s some opaque mechanism determining what you see or don’t see, and content isn’t visible to people who don’t have the game. Have you thought about strategies for sibyl resistance? This is a big thing I think it gets right, there is a built in filter, and simultaneously little incentive to maliciously bypass it.
Good point.
The idea would be that rooms are moderated by hosts, and posts expire after a few days. That removes a lot of the long-term incentives for spam accounts.
It probably wouldn’t eliminate abuse entirely, but the structure makes it less rewarding.
It’s been done: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whisper_(app)
And more generally, anonymous message boards have been around for a very long time. I don’t really see what niche is left to fill. It’s also a huge risk to build a product around anonymity and controversial opinions. People will use it for illegal shit and you have to deal with that. At least 4chan has a small army of janitors to keep the site clean and posting controversial opinions isn’t even its entire identity.
That’s fair. Apps like Whisper existed before and most slowly turned back into regular social feeds where identity and likes started to matter again.
The experiment here is to remove as much of that as possible and see what people actually say when identity disappears.
