This shutdown - and some of the comments here that indicate how nasty Secret had become before it died - is quite interesting in light of the conversation surrounding Google's Real Names Only policy.

Secret cofounders David Byttow and Chris Bader-Wechseler were both veterans of Google+. Byttow, in particular, I recall being quite well-respected as someone who got shit done, quietly and efficiently, by the rest of the G+ team. I didn't know him personally, but I had a few professional dealings with him where I found him to be a straight-shooter that was remarkably effective and helpful. When I heard of the product concept for Secret, my first thought was "Woah, somebody's finally decided to take the other side of the stupid Real Names policy and build a social network that's completely anonymous."

Apparently that doesn't work either, and when you do that, people hate you just as much.

My take-away from this is that social software is remarkably hard, and that whatever you do, people will hate you. The social sites that survive - like Reddit, Flickr, and Facebook - are those that very carefully balance everyone's competing desires, making just enough changes to keep everyone slightly disgruntled but not enough to leave the site. The ones that die - like Secret, G+, LiveJournal - are the ones that either do nothing to moderate or that introduce heavy-handed blanket policies. (4chan, as always, remains inexplicable; somehow it is still going strong despite being a cesspool. Maybe that's the whole point of it, though, to be the Internet's honey pot of bad behavior.)