A Sad Day for Secrets

Dear friends-

We are gathered here today to mourn a great loss- the loss of the PostSecret iPhone app.

The fact that the app is gone makes me sad. The reason that the app had to be shut down makes me even more sad.   Long story short, the PostSecret app allowed user to anonymously share their secrets with other app users.  The app was wildly popular, with tens of thousands of secrets being posted everyday (some of which were mine).  Unfortunately, a few users with malicious intent started posting inappropriate, pornographic, gruesome, and, at times, even threatening content.  Despite these users only making up about 1% of the app users, the scale of the app was so massive that even this 1% was too much for the moderators to keep track of and keep a hold of.   A huge part of the app and of PostSecret as a whole is anonymity, which made it difficult (if not impossible) to block certain users from using the app.  As sad as I am to see the app close, I really do understand why Frank (the creator of the PostSecret project) had to shut it down.  It's upsetting how just a few people with bad intentions and an iPhone can bring down an entire community.  You can read Frank's statement about shutting the app down and see where PostSecret will continue to thrive here.

In memory of an app that I used like crazy over the past few months and sometimes turned to when I needed a little support or release, I've posted below some of my favorite secrets that I came across while using the app.  Some of them made me sad, some of them made me giggle, some of them made me hopeful,  some of them made me say, "Me too!",  some of them made me relieved, some of them made me angry and frustrated, some of them hit a little too close to home, and some of them I just liked, despite not really relating to them.  I could write an explanation of what I think of each secret, but I think I'd rather let them stand on their own.   They're the secrets of strangers. They don't need explanations.

 

The app may be closed, but it will live on through the PostSecret projects, in the hearts of the people who used it, and on my iPhone (because I can't bring myself to delete it yet).