PostSecret App

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

~ the obit ~

PostSecret began in 2005 as a Blogger experiment by Frank Warren, who handed out blank postcards and asked strangers to mail him a secret they had never told anyone. Ten of them went up every Sunday. It became a book, then five books, and the blog has run that same weekly rhythm for twenty years without advertising on it.

The app was announced in April 2011 and launched for iPhone on 3 September. It did the obvious thing: let people make the postcard on the phone and send it from there, which removed the stamp and the week of waiting. Submissions stopped being a few hundred cards a week and became a firehose. More than two million secrets went through it before the end of the year, and the app went to the top of the paid charts.

What arrived with that volume was content that had nothing to do with confession. Pornographic submissions, and threats specific enough that people complained to Apple and to the FBI. A team of unpaid volunteers was moderating it around the clock. On 28 December 2011 Warren pulled the app from the App Store, and on 1 January 2012 he posted that it would not be returning.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ how the math broke ~

Warren's own account is the clearest thing anybody wrote about moderation that year. Ninety-nine percent of the secrets, he said, were in the spirit of PostSecret. The problem was that the scale was so large that even one percent of bad content overwhelmed a dedicated team of volunteers who were working twenty-four hours a day removing material that was not just pornographic but at times gruesome and threatening.

One percent of two million is twenty thousand. The blog's filter had always been physical, in that writing a secret on a postcard and finding a stamp costs you something, and the app removed that cost without putting anything in its place. Threats were made against the people reading the submissions and against Warren's own family.

~ what he did about it ~

He switched it off while it was making money. That is the part worth sitting with, because the usual ending for a product at the top of the charts is that somebody raises on it. Warren had a book series and a Sunday habit that already worked, and he decided the app could not be fixed by a bigger moderation budget, because the volume was the problem itself rather than a symptom of one.

~ the distance ~

The blog traveled much further than the app ever got. I read PostSecret the way most people outside the US read it, as a page that turned up in links and then in a book you could find in a Turkish bookshop in translation, and the whole app episode happened in a four-month window on a device and a store that very few people around me were using in 2011. By the time the iPhone was common here, this one had been gone for years.

~ what came after ~

Everything that came after it ran into the same wall and mostly refused to admit it. Whisper and Yik Yak both built anonymous posting at app scale and both found that anonymity plus volume produces abuse faster than any team can read it. Both are graves on this site now. PostSecret got there first and then did the thing none of the others did, which was stop.

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