Views on Social Network Anonymity

Excerpts - Feb 7, 2014 - NY Times - Entering the Era of Private and Semi-Anonymous Apps

... a slew of new apps — including Wut, Secret, Confide, Popcorn and Telegram — that have come out in recent months are intended to let users either talk secretly with people they know, or blurt out random comments to total strangers.

Telegram offers private chatrooms where you can set a “timer” and all the text vanishes after a set period of time — usually one to five minutes.

But there are some that go beyond just messaging and are created to be social. The idea of an “anonymous social network” might sound as ridiculous as a puppy that doesn’t like going outside for walks. Yet that’s how this new crop of social apps work.

Secret, which seems to be relishing its 15 minutes of fame, allows you to gossip anonymously about whatever you want. It’s unclear if the “secrets” being shared are fact or fiction or from whom they came.

In an email message, David Byttow and Chrys Bader, co-founders of Secret, said the app was not intended to be full of spite, but rather to increase authenticity and empathy between people online.

The new social app called Wut is a bit like Facebook with only your friends’ status updates and nothing more. It’s dead simple. When you send a message, only your friends will see it, yet they will have no idea the note came from you unless you say.

While it may sound totally bizarre, it’s also incredibly fun, and because you know it’s just your friends on the network, it’s surprisingly personal. Wut feels intended to make people feel good, not bad.

Mr. McKellar said Wut is intended to be “a very lightweight and very casual social network.” He said there was “no doubt or fear with what you’re posting; there’s no anxiety.”

Additionally, Wut’s alerts are silent, so your phone doesn’t vibrate or ding loudly when someone sends a message on the network.

Then there is Popcorn Messaging, which allows you to privately chat with anyone in a one-mile radius of your smartphone. The app hopes to enable people to anonymously talk with other people at local events, including sports games, or to just find people to banter in the area.

Excerpts - Mar 18, 2014 - NY Times - New Social App Has Juicy Posts, All Anonymous

But a five-week old social app, Secret, is testing the limits of just how much sharing Silicon Valley thinks is a good thing. That’s because the sharing is done anonymously.

Secret, like a number of other recent apps, connects people anonymously through their address books. Messages appear only as from “friend” or “friend of friend.” Juicy posts that receive a lot of likes or comments also appear occasionally, identified simply by the city or state where they originated.

... since the service was introduced less than two months ago, it has gained popularity among early adopters and particularly among the tech crowd.

The company recently announced that it had raised $8.6 million from a number of well-known investors, including Alexis Ohanian, a founder of Reddit, and Bing Gordon of Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers.

Mr. Ohanian, who invested as part of his new firm, Initialized Capital, said that “apps like Secret become an outlet for people to speak honestly about things that would otherwise result in career damage.” He added that the company also appealed to him as a contender for the future of social networking beyond the scope of Facebook.

Others in the valley directly criticized Secret.

“For me, it’s nothing more than what you would see etched on a bathroom wall,” said Mark Suster, a venture capitalist, in a telephone interview. “Anyone can say anything on a private network — any grievance with a work colleague or score to settle. You have the ability to slander that person, and there’s no measure of your authority or reputation.”

Christopher Poole, who started 4chan, an anonymous message board that attracts 20 million people each month, shrugged off the assumption that identity obscuring alone is enough to breed bad behavior.

“People use Facebook to say all kinds of terrible things,” he said. “It really just depends on who is in your network.”

Mr. Poole also pointed out that Secret was hardly the first anonymous social network, saying that the earliest versions of these services were message boards that did not require real names or photographs. He suggested that perhaps the frenzy around Secret came from a larger desire to interact in ways that weren’t tied to public profiles, which has largely been missing from the era of social networking on Facebook, Twitter and Google.

Unlike older, Web-based message boards and forums, Secret posts are easy to pass around through text messages or on social media. All you need do is upload a screenshot to spread something meant for a few friends to dozens or even hundreds of people.

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