Experience Project

» see experienceproject.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Experience Project was an english-language confession site. You picked a bare one-letter handle, wrote the thing you could not tell anyone with your name attached, and waited for a stranger who had been through the same thing to answer. In those years i was reading turkish forums like donanimhaber and frmtr, where nobody was anonymous and the whole point was your hardware list sitting in the signature. The two rooms could not have been further apart.

Armen Berjikly started it around 2007, first as a small support board for people living with a single illness, then let it widen into every kind of experience a person might need to unload. By its peak it held millions of members and a vast archive of stories filed under one-letter names. It was one of the earliest places on the web built on the premise that anonymity was not a loophole but the entire product.

It closed on 21 april 2016. The founders did not sell it or run out of money in the usual way. They decided they could no longer guarantee that the anonymity the whole site rested on would hold, especially once outside parties started asking for records, so they shut it rather than keep a promise they no longer believed. Almost two years later, in march 2018, the archive itself came down. From Ankara i never touched it, but the shape of its death is the part that stays with me: a site that died to keep a promise.

~ the case file ~

~ the postmortem ~

The reason given was privacy. Experience Project traded on the idea that you could say the worst thing about yourself and no one would ever tie it to you. Once that guarantee started looking fragile, once there was a real chance the records could be handed over, the anonymity stopped being something you could offer honestly. The team chose the clean exit instead of the slow compromise.

~ what got buried with it ~

When the site went dark it took close to a decade of confessions with it. These were not posts anyone had backed up, because backing them up would have meant attaching them to a name somewhere. That was the trade the whole place ran on, and it is why so little of it survives. The confession internet moved on to apps like Whisper and Secret, which kept the anonymity but dropped the long written stories that Experience Project was built around.

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