Remember how exciting Honesty Box was? You never knew whether that new message would be an anonymous love letter or a nasty slur. But an Honesty Box now is passé, as irrelevant as a Gifts box or countdown to the end of LOST. On March 13 a site called NU Post-It launched that facilitates Honesty Box interaction for Northwestern students, except via e-mail instead of Facebook.
The group is anonymous. Appropriately, they agreed to respond to our questions via email. We cannot, of course, verify their claims, so take the answers with a grain of salt. Also, after you read, let us know how you feel about NU Post-It. Have you used it? Do you wish they didn’t filter messages? Sound off in the comments.
Why did you start NU Post-It? In your answer on the site, you address how people might use it, but there’s no sense of what’s in it for the team. Data? Pure altruism? Renown?
To be completely open, we started this service to send our own anonymous notes. Everyone on our team has things we wish we could tell people, but for whatever reason, we can’t. We asked, “Wouldn’t it be cool if you could send anonymous notes to people on campus?” We got to talking, and here we are, anonymous emailing service at the ready.
We wanted people who are admired to know they are admired, but once we started the project, we started to care more about how other people might use it. We hope that our website affects a huge portion of the student body. We want people to share their inner feelings with one another, even if it means starting anonymously. We are curious to see how other students might use this site and what kinds of messages might be sent. We’re also total geeks and love doing things like this.
How large is the group that runs NU Post-it?
We have a pretty small team.
Can you say whether or not this is a student project? An “independent group” could include adults or researchers, which might seem a little sketchy.
We’re all undergraduates here. No sketchy stuff. We used the phrase “independent group” because we didn’t want others to think we were part of an established campus group. You probably wouldn’t call it a “student project,” but the team is entirely made up of students.
Is there a connection to Deru here? This seems very much like something they would initiate.
Nope.
What service is able to disguise the sender of the message?
NU Post-It works by taking entered data from our site (name/email and the message), putting them into our system, filtering, and sending an email. If someone’s name is entered, his or her email address is fetched from the Northwestern website by our system. The recipient’s name and email address are hidden from the filtering, so while the system knows who’s getting what message, we don’t.
The only work we do is scroll through the content of messages and filter them accordingly. If something is deemed hateful, derogatory, or vulgar, we get rid of it. Once we clear messages for sending, the messages are sent in bulk automatically.
Since you’re not entering your email address or any other login information, we have no way of tracking who is visiting the site (and subsequently sending messages). We do use analytical tools so we can track statistical data about our users (browser type, location, referral links, etc.), but we can’t link any of that to a person’s identity. You can send Post-It’s from a public computer, personal laptop or smartphone on- or off-campus, and in all cases, we won’t be able to link messages to senders.
If it is done by computer, are those records kept? Are the messages stored at all? If so, for how long?
Computers are doing most of the work, and we have them keep records to make sure no one is getting harassed. If a specific person keeps getting messages, we’re alerted of this and can take further actions to stop it. Once messages are sent, they are stored in an electronic archive. We would like to keep the messages as long as possible so we can analyze the kinds of messages sent over a longer period of time.
Couldn’t the service be used by stalkers to harass certain students if there’s no trend monitoring of the sender or recipient?
This was definitely a concern, but we have checks in place to make sure this doesn’t happen.
What’s the breakdown of messages? How many anonymous love letters? Jokes to friends?
Judging from the first couple hundred Post-It’s that were sent, we’d say they’re about 95% positive. Most of them are wonderful to read. Honestly, we can’t always tell if they’re for good friends or the secretly admired, but most are incredibly heartfelt.
Since we only have so many data points to work with, we’d estimate that of the positive messages, only about 15-20% are so-called “anonymous love letters” and the rest are just general, supportive messages to friends. We saw a lot of messages concerning finals, but other than that, we see no other trends from our data. We assume that most of the negative messages we received were sent to test our system judging from their structures.
How does this differ from Honesty Box?
The Honesty Box is a message in and of itself. If you enable the Honesty Box on your Facebook profile, you’re welcoming, maybe even requesting incoming messages. Like everything on Facebook, there’s a public facet to everything you do. You’re broadcasting to everyone who views your Facebook profile that you’re OK with receiving messages, and most likely, you want to receive them.
NU Post-It isn’t just restricted to people who enable this service. Granted, if you do want to stop receiving messages, you can unsubscribe. We want to let everyone send messages to anyone on campus without pressure of the public knowing. When you send or receive a Post-It, no one knows except the two people involved, and to send a message, someone has to visit the website and actually type in your name. There’s a much more personal element to NU Post-It.
A human filter is obviously subjective. Are there any borderline messages you’ve struggled with? What have those been like (not specific messages, but just general themes)? What counts as vulgar? Kisses? Sex? Do you worry about the lack of context?
Yes, there have been a few borderline messages, but we are able to hash it out between our team. The question we always ask ourselves is “Would someone want to receive this message?” Kisses and sex are not vulgar, but derogatory slurs are. When it comes to filtering content, we really just ask ourselves that question and usually the answer is pretty clear. The borderline messages we received so far have been sexually charged or had semi-serious implications. We do worry about not having the messages in context, but this service really isn’t meant for extraneous inside-jokes.
What would be the ideal number of users? Would you expand the team if necessary? Is the team paid? If so, where does the funding come from?
We have no ideal number in mind. Whether eight or 8,000, we’ll be happy if the messages sent through our service make other people happy. We doubt we’ll need to expand the team, but it’s definitely possible. For example, if the message volume gets to be too large, we’ll definitely expand. The team isn’t paid. We do this because we love it.
How long will the service run? What are your long term goals, if any?
As long as possible. Our long term goals are to get people talking more and to make people happy.
What has traffic been like since launch? Did it die down over spring break? What about finals week?
Unfortunately, we started right at the beginning of reading week. We probably had about a hundred Post-Its sent a day for the week, but messages died down during finals and Spring Break. We know numbers will jump up again once classes get started, though.