What’s happening with Secret? | Hacker News Reader

What’s happening with Secret?

gigaom.com

85 pointsprostoalex50 comments

Also, I think the perceived value of the application finally fell to the deserved zero. Who will "anonymously" share secrets through an application which doesn't uses Tor, asks for phone numbers and requires a Facebook login?

That's just a stupid tool for stupid kids do stupid things. They also got a lot of problems in Brazil due to schoolchildren using it for harassment -- Google and Apple received court orders to remove the application from their stores.

Most of the stuff I saw on the app hardly qualified as "secret" anyways. Maybe potentially embarrassing ("I really don't want to fly to see my family this Christmas") but other than that kerfuffle about the Google acquisition, few secrets.

Or maybe I just only had lame people on my feed. Either way I deleted the app a week after I installed it.

It failed to gain much traction here in Japan, apart from Brazilians posting pictures of butts and (visiting? expat?) gay guys endlessly posting about saunas in Shinjuku...

Flurry and MessageMe acquisitions were first revealed on Secret. Maybe in an attempt to see what happens when SEC subpoenas somebody.

No it was not stupid, it was far worse than this. It was a nasty tool that allowed nasty people to do nasty things.

Should we ban TOR then? What about VPNs? Anonymity all together? What's the line?

No one here said anything about banning.

>They also got a lot of problems in Brazil due to schoolchildren using it for harassment -- Google and Apple received court orders to remove the application from their stores.

How is a court order not considered banning?

How did you manage to confuse a Brazilian court order with a comment on HN?

The original OP I replied to asserted it was a negative-only application. But it is just a tool and blaming the code for the actions of its users erases any good that it may also do. And just as TOR, proxies, and VPNs can be abused, they also provide an important function for good. If an application should be banned because it could be abused, then what is the limit to what is good and what is bad, and who decides that?

When laws are in place to prevent jailbreaking or using alternative app stores, and those app stores are ordered to remove that application (by court order), for the majority of individuals it is banned (from a strictly law-abiding perspective). danieltillett was positing that it was good that Google and Apple had it ordered for removal because it was abused. But if we assert that it is acceptable to ban anything that can be abused, how does one (or everyone) decide that one tool should be banned but not another? That is what I was asking, and then I was told that no one mentioned banning yet DT and OP were both discussing the ban of an application.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to get all stress-testing tools removed from the internet because someone could possibly use them to DDoS a site /s

>The original OP I replied to asserted it was a negative-only application. But it is just a tool and blaming the code for the actions of its users erases any good that it may also do.

Actually I didn't say that it was negative-only application. I said that it was a nasty tool for nasty people to do nasty things. Nice people can use a nasty tool to do good things, but since the usage of Secret cliff dived as soon as nasty people weren't able to do nasty things anymore, then I think we can conclude it really had only one function - to help nasty people to be nasty.

Edit. I suspect that the founders didn't expect this to be the only use for Secret, but the investors should have known better given the history of anonymous platforms.

There just isn't a compelling enough reason to use ANOTHER social network. There is facebook, twitter, google+, instagram, snapchat, and to some extent reddit. There is only so much time people can attribute to this kind of social engagement.

While I personally have imagined the golden potential behind an anonymous social network (particularly when it comes to data mining; I mean imagine a world where Taylor Swift can't get a million likes because everybody attributes what she says to a hot girl). There is just too many social networks trying to compete for our time. This market is so over populated that at this point starting a new pizza franchise would probably make more economic sense.

While I find this ultimately depressing, this is just how things are. I only hope the engineers at secret don't make a bad mistake and waste that 35 million on a startup that won't overcome this bump in the road. I hope they decide to pivot and pursue an idea that leads their team and their investors to financial success.

That's just my two cents anyways.

>I personally have imagined the golden potential behind an anonymous social network (particularly when it comes to data mining [...])

See, that right there. That is why your anonymous social network isn't going to work or catch on. You're already openly declaring you're tracking your users and then planning on using their data in some fashion that they have no control over. You'll never get the early core adopters you'd need to verify the claims of anonymity, security/cryptography, and so on. Trying to involve money taints long-term roadmap direction and intentions.

I can understand why journalists love this app, but I can't understand anyone using it. I was stunned when it asked for a Facebook login.

Back at Apple there was an internal app called "RumorMonger" which was hilarious. The developer just wanted to experiment with gossip protocols. Of course, HR thought he deliberately intended to undermine company morale. It was my first exposure to bureaucracy.

http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?RumorMonger

- they split it into "friends" and "everything else" because as the service grew there was suddenly tons more boring and also hardcore gay content, and the app was so slow that it really wasn't convenient to scroll past it or skip it. I don't mind the gay content but as a non-gay person there was just a lot of it to sort through.

- to this day it is still it or miss when I open the app on my iPhone. Takes a while to load and often shows old content

- when you get notifications it's not clear whether someone hearted your comment or made a comment, the UX around this is poor

- old secrets don't just die, so there is a constant reflux of stuff that should be forgotten just because someone discovers it and posts a lame comment

- some people started spamming/trolling by posting obviously fake secrets

- someone found a security hole that makes the app not actually anonymous. who's going to post anything really juicy when this exists...

Honestly I stopped using Secret when I realized that I could probably be outed as the person telling the secret pretty easy. You only need like 7 friends on the app for it to tell you your friend posted something, so at that point finding who posted something is trivial.

It's a weird privacy model to try to reason about. Your anonymity depends on how many contacts your _contacts_ have. If you have a thousand contacts you may have no idea who's posting the secrets you see, and you might feel more anonymous as a result. But that's a mistake, because if any of your contacts has only a few, they can probably identify you.

Theoretically, you'd still have some plausible deniability, since it could be one of those people pretending to be you.

Maybe, but if it's something that sounds like you, or is a situation related to you, or even if a friend knows that out of all their friends you use secret the most, all these things can harm your privacy. Imma stick with 4chan for this one.

Initial traction seemed to be punctuated by relatively high-value leaks from silicon valley, which earned it attention from SV media. More broadly, "leaks" trends towards cyberbullying. A perfect example of bubble economics, with the value of startups being largely based on how they feed the startup industry, not the economy as a whole.

I thought it was a bad sign that the founders pocketed $6M 6 months post-launch. [1]

[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/secret-founders-pocket-6-mill...

What they should have done was charge to reveal the author of the secret. That way they acknowledge that true anonymity is just an illusion and also curbs harassment, while at the same time generating revenue.

Ooh, social experiment as business model. I like it.

Although I'm pretty sure LinkedIn already stole that one.

Interesting experiment, but I can't think of an incentive for anyone to post interesting secrets when they know others can pay to reveal their identity.

Have some of the money paid to reveal them also paid to the person who is revealed perhaps?

Perhaps if the poster can choose the price, that could work, but I think it's more likely that that would just make no one interested in the secrets.

Have two payment pools: reveal poster and don't reveal poster.

I still don't see why anybody would post, but for the first week or so, the carnage would be amazing :D

I've never used it, but the way it came to my attention might be telling; hearing of a startup thinking people were posting about them on Secret. A 'pay what I want to reveal who I am' model could be interesting, rather than just pay to reveal. One of the only ways I can see adding payment into the idea of anonymous posting that doesn't disincentivise posting altogether.

Secret is one of those things that is fun in the first few weeks, and then it just becomes another app on your phone that you don't click on anymore. Bad press might have contributed to its decline, but fundamentally the idea isn't one that would have taken off. It needs to somehow provide more value to the end-user to justify spending one's time on the app.

They named it for something it isn't. Kind of like "Vitamin Water."

? Are there no vitamins in Vitamin Water?

> Wait—are there consumers who really think Vitaminwater contains actual vitamins?

> Coca-Cola’s legal team would say no. In court briefings, attorneys representing the company claimed “no consumer could reasonably be misled into thinking Vitaminwater was a healthy beverage.”

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-07-26/drink-decept...

There are vitamins in vitaminwater.

The problem is, that doesn't make it a health drink. Stuff's loaded with sugar.

Yes, there are vitamins in vitamin water. OP is lame.

Secret basically seems like a hackathon project, no wonder users are finding no value in it after a short stint.

Most startups these days are hackathon projects trying to gain funding. It's laughable half of them manage to become actual companies.

I really disliked the negativity and I know many others who agreed and also deleted the app. It just wasn't worth it. I'm not at all surprised they are struggling.

I don't believe cracking down cyberbullying or harassment was the cause.

I think was a wrong formula packed by hype.

Yik Yak (which I adore) is still doing strong.

IMO, the main issue (as others reported) is that you start with your friends then friends of friends then popular then basically has not anymore sense to me because I don't know anymore anyone.

Remember Yik yak pretty much on the same market is doing really well and IIRC got recently another big amount of investments.

Secret has an image problem. Pando Daily's article on Secret is titled "With bullying app Secret on life support, investors learn the risk of investing in assholes".

http://pando.com/2014/12/06/with-bullying-app-secret-on-life...

So basically the only value of secret was as a tool to harass and intimidate.

It strikes me as a bunch of "adults" acting like teenagers with this app.

I don't blame the founders so much as the investors here. They really should have known better.

It's one possibility but another is that it was ready to crater just like so many other apps that have a flash of popularity and then just as quickly fade.

Also did anyone note that the piece seemed to be written by a 12-year-old? "It looks like Secret will be majorly overhauling its product soon."

Does anyone's else other than a 12 year old (mentally if not physically) actually care about secret?

Yes. The use of the dovetail joint metaphor stood out particularly.

Or perhaps they just completely botched their moderation implementation. Starting with the same information, ending at nearly opposite speculative conclusions.

At the end of the article:

    In this market, a conscience may be bad for business.

If a conscience might be a liability in the market you are in you might want to reconsider the market you are in.

The app is unbearably slow. I still use it, but it's unnecessarily frustrating. I'd attribute the decline in usage to it taking half a minute to refresh.

I think the answer is “competition.”

Secret is losing in the marketplace and its competitors—namely Whisper and Yik Yak—are winning.

If Secret just rebranded with the name Trololo I'm sure downloads and usage would take off again.

The Mr. Trololo Song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oavMtUWDBTM

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