Popular blog and new media project PostSecret, has been enabling individuals to share their darkest and most intitmate secrets has announced that it is shutting down its iPhone app due to posting that are malicious in nature.
Founder Frank Warren said that he is “pained” by the closure of the app. The latter has been receiving numberous numbers of postcards from strangers every week and chooses 20 and posts it in his blog during Sundays. The iPhone app was launched last September.
Frank Warren said in an interview by CNET, “although today—the first day after the death of the app—is painful, it was a wild journey being part of the life of theis alternative social network. Anonymous acts of kindness and malice played out in a creative and complex online culture of 2 million shared secrets.”
Anonymity is part of the huge succes of this blogsite. The iPhone app enables users to take photos and upload upto 140 characters to the PostSecret mobile community. And those responsible for the upload need not worry about his/her identity being revealed. The app has reached the best selling spot in the app store.
Warren said in a postSecret blogpost, “unfortunately, that absolute anonymity made it very challenging to permanently remove determined users with malicious intent. 99% of the secrets created were in the spirit of PostSecret. Unfortuantely, the scale of secrets was so large that even 1% of bad content was overwhelming for our dedicated team of volunteer moderators who worked 24 hours a day 7 days a week removing content that was not just pronographic but also gruesome and at times threatening.”
Image Credit: PostSecret
