Stuff like this is great. It's like watching kids who grew up in the Twitter/FB age rediscover anonymous internet forums and imageboards like 4chan. People like anonymous services because you literally don't need to filter what you are saying. That can lead to a whole lot of bad, but some really, really great nuggets of truth and goodness coming out - it feels like tapping into the collective subconscious of the internet.
I guess I don't get the use case, as I would generally think anonymity from people I already am acquainted with would be the least useful (to me).
It really seems like there is an entire class of applications that have risen to answer problems that exist solely because of Facebook's dominance and policies (ie: data collection/retention policies and insistence on identity).
Because this is the default case, we need another word for the hypothetical "anonymous to all, including law enforcement and intelligence agencies". perfect anonymity?
I've never used WUT, but was intrigued by the anecdote at the end: "Sun’s out; in Washington square park. Who’s around?”
I've seen tons of apps that try to solve the "I want to hang out" problem. They all fail because cool people don't use those apps. Psuedo-anonymity can potentially solve this.
Some tried to do anonymous matching, but those had cold-start-network-effect problems. Psuedo-anonymous social networks might be able to back into a solution by attracting early adopters with their "gossip network" use case.
This reminds me of how Facebook backed into essentially being a status, photos, and events platform when it started life as a networked address book.
I think some of it may simply be that hanging out is with strangers is not a way most people want to meet people. Meeting at events or places where simply by being there you have a mutual interest is more attractive for many.
Sorry, I should have said "pseudo-anonymous". At least in Secret, I can see how many degrees of separation I am to someone via our phone address book. I've since edited the original post.
It's anonymous enough that you don't feel the consequences of making a FB status update that no one comments on, but with enough identity to not be creepy.
> I think some of it may simply be that hanging out is with strangers is not a way most people want to meet people. Meeting at events or places where simply by being there you have a mutual interest is more attractive for many.
Yeah, I don't really see strangers hanging out. That would be kind of weird. For a bunch of people to gather in one place, with no overall goal than to talk, hang out, perhaps have some background music but not much else. Maybe some smoking breaks. And then maybe for all of them to go to another place, maybe more towards the city, where you have to pay to do the same thing, that is, hanging out with people with whom you have no obvious common interests except for doing this hanging out thing, and in a much more crowded place.
Wait... what if you added alcohol to the above? Then I can totally imagine it. :)
What we need is a form of anonymous / pseudo-anonymous reputation brokerage. Tokens that identify not a person, but how trusted or how well liked that token has been used. You control your tokens, what networks, where they are used. An older token is worth more to you, and to others that see it. The values associated to a token varies depending on the tokens around it. Upvotes, downvotes, activities, flags from the various places where the token is uses contributes to the values attached to the tokens. It's a fuzzy concept at the moment, but I think as these new generation of applications grow, one that we may see evolve.
No, the very essence of anonymity is have no tie to one's physical identity.
No reputation or information is a recipe for meaninglessness; as a reader I have neither the time nor the tools to fully evaluate every statement ever made to me; I must use heuristics to aid my reading (e.g. I will almost certainly ignore anyone who claims the moon landings were hoaxes; it's not worth my time to investigate his claims).
I'm actually very excited by the idea of anonymous reputation, as it could enable all sorts of the things needed to have a well-run global network without enabling physical assaults on persons.
Many, many forums use a feeble ratings/trust indicator for pseudo-anon users but then you end up with a clique of highly rated posters and the circle jerk is complete. The whole point in anonymity is every post has it's merit in what it says not who wrote it. I can easily skim the various *chans, filtering out shitposting pretty quick.
I wholeheartedly disagree with this, what you're essentially describing is just watered down identity. The whole point of the value of anonymity is that all posts are equal.
This is unrealistic and won't work in practice. If all posts are equal then all posts are equally worthless. It's a sad but basic truth that we need identity and ability to accumulate reputation to be able to hold a meaningful, informative conversation. If everyone is fully anonymous (in a stateless sense), then everyone is basically a "random internet dude".
> "It's a sad but basic truth that we need identity and ability to accumulate reputation to be able to hold a meaningful, informative conversation."
Not true. We do not need to accumulate reputation to have a meaningful conversation. For example, I've seen informative conversations on Secret with the only identity mechanism being the icon they're assigned (presumably at random per thread).
Edit: I also don't recall usenet having a mechanism that 'kept score'. Slightly before my time so I may be wrong about this.
But you have an identity mechanism; even if it is per thread, it allows you to attribute a collection of writings to a single author.
I'm not talking about "keeping score" in a system. I'm talking about the ways human handle identity and associate properties with objects. I may not see your karma, but I see your nick. I don't know your name, or anything about your life, but I know your nick is a reference a person somewhere. If I keep seeing comments written by user amirmc that stand out because of their clear argumentation and reasonable tone, I start to recognize the author and accumulate a feeling of respect. So the next time user amirmc disagrees with me, I treat the arguments with little more care and consideration than usual, because I recognize author as a reasonable person.
This is a natural mechanism of human interaction. My point is that if we reject the entire concept of identity, we will lose a lot of information vital to evaluating an argument.
Think of books, though. They're the best available counterpoint to what you're saying. People don't necessarily care about the author of a book, but they do care about the content of the book and its ability to piece together a larger idea.
Within forum post culture there's a built-in tendency for content to be fast and disposable. This makes identity relatively more valuable, because it allows a stream of posts to be put in context, just like with a book.
On the other hand, I might well not bother with a book unless I know the author of good. I'll almost certainly prefer a book with a known good author over one without. This is just to prevent my time from being wasted, to maintain a decent signal to noise ratio.
Not really. I might not know the author, but I rarely read completely random books. Most of the times I read things recommended by other people. The context is not in the book, it's in the way I found out about it.
It would be incredibly useful if there were a link to the App in question.
WUT isn't very googleable, it wasn't entirely obvious from the article that it's an iPhone exclusive App, not a website or available on Android.
I'm working on a search product now. I find it really fascinating that many people immediately know and have adopted this "specific-type general-type" query structure, whereas many others have no idea.
It feels like we're on the verge of slowly evolving a new human-computer communication language. Definitely within the next 20 years it will happen. Not just a list of instructions or model descriptions like programming languages are, for example you can't translate an arbitrary Engish sentence into a programming language. No, I think this time we're watching a full language, in the linguistic sense, evolve in front of us.
Of course, search engines will also have to evolve beyond the "do-know-go" communication types that they're married to now, to get to the next stage.
Not sure how you can call these apps anonymous or "semi-anonymous". I tried Secret a month or so ago, and the first thing it asked me for was my phone number. So, this one requires Facebook? Maybe I'm misunderstanding the meaning of "anonymous".
Agree on Facebook, but how would you get around the phone number for Secret? I don't have the app, but as I understand it, it uses your contacts list to find out who to send messages to (i.e., the phone number is the username that it uses to know to send your friends' posts to you).
Paul here. Happy to answer any questions you may have.
facebook login is annoying but did get us out the door. poor grammar is intentional.
We used to have the words "WUT" repeated 200x in the app store copy, but Apple politely told us that wasn't good enough. We had more than a couple people tell us it was great though.
>facebook login is annoying but did get us out the door
Do you plan to allow for a truly anonymous registration option that doesn't require anything beyond an email address (no facebook, no scanning my contacts, no phone number)? If so, when should I look for it because that's the feature that would make me try out WUT.
Are you both the creator of WUT and the author of the original piece?
EDIT: posting too fast, so I'll just edit this post. I think you should edit your blog post with a disclaimer that you're a creator of WUT. It's not that I don't like reading about the products created by HN members (I like it a lot), but I (and I assume others) do want to know when the author has a vested interest in what he's writing about. The piece is interesting, thank you for writing and posting.
