Anonymous Commenting Services

When drafting Reading the Comments (Reagle, 2015) chapter about anonymity and alienation, I started a time-line of anonymous commenting services, often bound to a specific region such as a school. These drama genre services can be used for hateful speech (e.g., bullying and racism), and documenting escapades (e.g., intoxication) and illegal activities (e.g, sexual assault). What used to exist as graffiti in the restroom (Dundes, 1966; Trahan, 2011) has gone online, first in online forums and confession pages and now as apps (Roose, 2014). This list is by no means exhaustive and may not be up to date.

As I discuss in the book, as problems arise on one particular service, it is typically shutdown or “reformed” and one or more competitors emerge to fill the vacuum, as happened with Formspring:

The feature [of anonymity] was so dearly held because they knew it was a source of their popularity; as they attempted to reform it and curb abuse, teens moved to its Latvian based competitor Ask.fm. As a former Formspring executive concluded in the “Killer App” article, “When you took out the nasty, salacious, anonymous part of Formspring, it became a lot less interesting to people” (Formspring executive quoted in Newton, 2013). (Reagle, 2015)

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