Hacker News Reader

Comment by nerdile | Hacker News Reader

"Unfortunately, it was later removed from the app stores."

Sure sign of a trustworthy middleware author

I also have no idea what sarahah was. But I used a search engine and read about it. It took about 30 seconds to understand why the author is using his app as a reference. It was wildly popular for a while but was used in a way that the mighty duopoly of Google and Apple disliked, so it got removed.

No platform should facilitate targeted anonymous messages; that’s one thing we’ve for sure learned about social media, in part thanks to Sarahah. It should be noted that the reason Google and Apple “disliked” it is that hundreds of thousands of their customers petitioned to have it removed. Those people were mostly parents whose kids were getting bullied anonymously.

anonymity brings many challenges indeed. with regards to the petition and what's commonly shared in conventional media, we have proved to Apple that it's based on a falsified case that our filtration system doesn't allow, the removal's story is rather complicated and not justified and many other anonymous apps were allowed, what we were told after clarifying this to Apple was: "executives requested the removal". Anyhow, this is no history and we surely learned many lessons from sarahah an interesting fact is that sarahah's original idea was inspired by my boss's request for feedback, and the early version of owlears was just that (anonymous feedback in the workplace) Thank you

> No platform should facilitate targeted anonymous messages;

Isn't this basically all social media? Or just the internet in general? It's pretty trivial to do on any platform I can think of.

Most social media requires some identifying details to make it difficult to cyberbully someone without recourse. Sarahah did not. A lot of young people suffered because of Sarahah

Thanks for the explanation; i had never heard of it before this thread.

Is it really difficult though? You need a phone number but that's about it which in US doesn't even require presenting an ID right?

that is very helpful, perhaps I didn't take into consideration that many people digitally active today don't know about it. thanks for sharing this

It was a knock-off/copy of apps that pivoted or shut down in previous years(circa 2015) for the same reasons. They simply failed to take the lessons learned from apps like Secret, Yik Yak, and Whisper about facilitating wanton anonymous post on the interwebs

can you please tell me more what trustworthy middleware author mean? (I didn't get it, sorry)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com