Two ASU students are giving users who visit their website a chance to play God — or at least, priest.
Political science junior Lonny Ruben and business sustainability senior Nico Fricchione created clearmyguilt.com, a website where users post anonymous confessions and other users rate these confessions as “forgivable” or “unforgivable.” Enough votes for either side would put the confessions in one of two categories: heaven or hell.
The concept is hardly new — sites like Texts From Last Night, PostSecret and FML have been gathering users’ embarrassing secrets for years. Clearmyguilt.com is different because the creators see it as a tool to better people and entertain them, Ruben said.
“This was really brought on by everybody making mistakes and many people carrying them for too long,” Ruben said. “Unlike The Dirty, here you can get things off your chest without hurting your reputation.”
The website is designed to be entirely anonymous.
Ruben and Fricchione read through each submission before posting a selection of the ones they feel would be the most entertaining for viewers.
To preserve anonymity, the creators can see IP addresses for each submission without other identifying information.
Although they have not yet needed to, the site’s owners are prepared to turn these IP addresses over to authorities if they receive confessions that describe a violent crime, Ruben said.
The first phase of the website initially mostly focused on entertainment, but it will become more of a tool for developing a person’s moral compass, he said.
Starting March 2, the site will include advertisements and a location with each post.
Fricchione said the locations will allow people to see which sections of the country are the “evilest.”
Future changes include setting up private profiles and allowing people to share picture and video confessions as well. However, to preserve anonymity, people’s voices would be changed and faces will be blurred in the videos.
Fricchione said they’re hesitant to make changes without user approval, something some social networking sites have come under fire for.
“An important characteristic is our simplicity,” he said. “We’ll change how users want it to change.”
Ruben, who is Jewish, and Fricchione, who is Catholic, said they wanted to make an additional spot for people to assuage their guilt if they couldn’t make it into a synagogue or church to confess.
“Truthfully, I don’t really go to church that often,” Fricchione said. “This is just piggybacking off of the help people can get from church, but we’re not trying to replace them.”
Retha Hill, executive director of the New Media Innovation Lab at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, said voting on whether the confessions could be forgiven was an interesting way of approaching a rather old trend.
“There were a string of these confession websites a few years ago, but I really haven’t heard anything about them lately,” Hill said.
She said the website had potential, but anonymity would suffer if it became popular around small communities and people posted confessions about events that happened in public places.
Ruben said the point of the site isn’t to call attention to mistakes, but to ease people’s guilt over unnecessary things.
“A lot of things people do are wrong, but forgivable,” he said. “Everybody makes mistakes, and we want to give people a chance to free themselves from guilt.”
Reach the reporter at julia.shumway@asu.edu or follow @JMShumway on Twitter.
Like The State Press on Facebook and follow @statepress on Twitter.
