Here’s the sad thing about social networks such as Facebook: more often than not, the person you portray yourself to be is not your true self. How we are perceived means the world to us – as evidenced by Facebook’s 1.32 billion monthly active users – and whenever we sign up for a new social media account, we are given the unprecedented opportunity to ‘reinvent’ ourselves.
In fact, every day is a brand new opportunity to put your own spin on the happenings of the day, and so present yourself in a more palatable light:
The video above might not be too far off-base, at least to Jaden Kim, CEO and founder of South Korea-based development firm Hivenest. In recent years, he’s found himself losing interest in social networks such as Facebook because everyone tends to act differently there – no one is their real self. To him, interesting interactions and conversations take place when human beings behave genuinely and “share from the heart.”
For this reason, he set to work creating a social network called Hush where everyone is anonymous. Much like the founders of similar US-based apps Whisper and Secret, Kim reasoned that the veil of anonymity would encourage users to speak their mind without fear of being criticized or exposed by related parties – in effect, to behave as their real self. The target audience: schoolchildren between the ages of 14 and 19.
Hush’s network is divided into groups according to the respective schools that students are in. Access isn’t restricted, so users can easily join another school’s group if they want to. They can either post a message, or up- or down-vote other messages in these groups.
Two months in, the app has about 34,000 active users. Kim thinks this good progress is due to a strong sense of collective identity in South Korea, in particular among young students who are still struggling to find their identity and niche.
Power of the crowd
Kim initially feared that, students being students, they would take advantage of the lack of identification to engage in vulgar and obscene behavior. To his surprise, only about three to four percent of users actually did this, and other users generally found that distasteful and downvoted anything negative.
Instead, 60 percent of the interactions were made with reference to the students’ daily school life. Interestingly, around 20 percent revolved around inter-school relations of the romantic nature, not too different from ‘confessions’. It’s the modern form of confessional love notes.
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The voting system that was popularised by Digg is presumably the force that compels users to fall in line with what the rest of the group approves or disapproves. On one hand, it seems that this is a good thing – it forces otherwise delinquent students to use Hush responsibly. On the other, it can potentially discourage them from talking about hard topics that they believe would be looked down upon by other users – or worse, encourage cyberbullies to band together and pull votes in favor of their proposed topics.
Such cases are on the rise in Hush’s US-based counterparts. Secret, for example, has come under fire almost literally since the day it was launched for perpetuating cyberbullying, and a recent report by Fortune exposed their poor anti-bullying procedures.
Negative posts make up a paltry nine percent on Hush, Kim explains, and is falling month-on-month, according to Kim. While he isn’t quite sure why this is the case, he jokingly speculates that this might be because Asians are generally more kind than Westerners are.
Kim reveals that the startup will be looking to raise funds closer to the end of the year, which will go towards its push into Japan first, followed by Southeast Asia. At the moment, though, the team is focusing on looking at user behaviour, and figuring out potential streams of revenue based on that.
This app proves that anonymity brings out the best in Koreans
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