If you were to stick Facebook, internet memes and a confessional box into a blender, the result (aside from a bunch of splinters and a banjaxed laptop) would most likely be the anonymous sharing app Whisper.
Only instead of getting four Our Fathers and a decade of the rosary for your trouble, you get replies and hearts.
Whisper is a secret-sharing site, where users can anonymously upload a confession or thought, accompanied by an image, in order to speak their minds to the world. There’s no personal details, no real names and no lists of friends, making it a floating patchwork of anonymous secrets with no identities attached to them.
It can make for compulsive reading, particularly for the sort of person who wishes their stop was further away when they happen to overhear a juicy conversation on the bus (like…um…me) and the secrets range from murky to tragic to hilarious.
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In a way, it’s like the flipside to Instagram, where carefully curated photos of fancy cocktails and flattering selfies give way to raw honesty and dark secrets that might not otherwise see the Amaro-filtered light of day.
It’s also a lot like the PostSecret project, but with a social media spin and no need for stamps or Pritt Stick. However, some users are apparently treating it like a hookup site and using it as an opportunity to hit on other posters, despite knowing absolutely nothing about them. Some guys’ boner-quests know no bounds. You’d almost admire their tenacity if they weren’t so creepy.
It’s easy to see the appeal of an app like Whisper, as it can be cathartic to write out, or in this case type out, what’s bothering you or weighing on your mind and send it out into the ether. Like a streamlined problem page.
Would you use an app like Whisper? Is there anything you’d like to get off your chest? And have you overhead any particularly good conversations on the bus? (Don’t lie, we all do it. Right?)
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(pics via whisper.sh)
