What they find there is like nothing else online, a bizarre collective subconsciousness. Lately, some who have tired of the usual Twitter discourse have returned to test the waters - and others are discovering the app for the first time. But that remaining user base is more anarchic than ever. It’s true that engagement has fallen off a cliff, from a reported 250 million monthly visitors in 2017 to just 30 million in 2020. You might assume, then, that Whisper has since faded into a virtual ghost town, one more casualty of the internet’s relentless evolution. That last concern was somewhat overblown, but it pretty much ended the positive press cycle. The network was flooded with spam, it had a bullying issue and people worried it would track their location.
Sexual predators were using it to lure potential victims. Despite its core assurance of privacy, the app collected enough data that the company could rat you out to law enforcement if push came to shove. (Snapchat, with its temporary photos, held similar appeal.) By 2013, tech media was hyping Whisper as the next big thing, but in 2014, the flattering headlines were dropping. The platform was immediately popular with Gen Z youths then fleeing Facebook in droves in hopes of minimizing their digital footprint. How boring.Īnd so, in 2012, the world eagerly welcomed a new app called Whisper, pitched by founder Michael Heyward as the “ anti-Facebook.” The idea was to harvest anonymous confessions and gossip for content: Type your secret, pair it with an image and set it loose without worrying that the disclosure could come back to haunt you. Posting under your real name, to everyone you’d ever met, called for painting yourself in the best light. But long ago, before Trump’s MAGA movement and the pandemic, we had a different complaint about Facebook: It turned everyone into self-congratulatory dorks. Nice timing, what with the slew of embarrassing stories to come out of internal memos leaked by a former employee. With the popularity of Kik and SnapChat, maybe future updates of Berri will allow users to connect to social messaging apps, or even just plain old cellular contacts.Facebook’s rebrand as “ Meta,” is the big news in tech this week, as the company positions itself as more than just a social network for spreading misinformation. The means of limiting an anonymous social circle shouldn’t be limited to Facebook. Depending on the user, that could be five or it could be fifty friends.Īnother issue Berri will have to address is Facebook’s declining popularity with teens. Before that app can be used as intended, Berri’s users will need to reach a threshold at which anonymity outweighs predictability. In reality, if you only have five Facebook friends using Berri, it’s going to be painfully obvious who is behind each post. A common complaint with Whisper and Secret is that not enough users are actually using the app, and Berri wants to limit a user’s interactions even more. Now, despite the apps advantages, Berri has a long road ahead of it. Simply restrict a user’s interactions and make their posts private.
According to a female reviewer in the App Store, after her first post on Whisper, her inbox was immediately flooded with men asking for her “A/S/L.” The solution to these problems is obvious. Whisper and Secret have begun to develop a sort of Craigslist “casual encounters” element. Unfortunately, the problem with anonymity doesn’t stop there.
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The service is definitely not appropriate for those with thin skin - which, to be honest, is every teenager ever.Ī review of Whisper in the App Store put it well, “For those who have suffered from depression, I implore you not to get this app.” Users churn out sensationalized posts and hack away at each other through the security anonymity.
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Anonymous social media is a little like The Purge - nothing is off limits, and everyone is free game. In this way, it’s essentially an extension of a Facebook status without the elitism and social pressure that deters so many Facebook status updates.īerri’s claim is that it offers a workaround to a serious and growing issue. In a move that seems like common sense, Berri has differentiated itself from competitors by strictly limiting a user’s postings to Facebook friends.