I have recently found myself addicted to a website called “Group Hug“. The website itself willingly admits that

the idea is for anyone to anonymously confess to anything. it actually feels kind of good to know that someone will read it.

This is completely confidential. no information about you or your computer is stored. in fact, we only collect the text you type, the date, and a random number.

One of the very interesting things about these thousands of collected anonymous, personal confessions is that the key words in them are linked. Words like “jealousy” and “sexual” and “friend” and “drunk” are all associated together, so that readers can see lists of confessions that deal with those ideas in some way.

I love this website! It gives me a safe way to satisfy all of my people-watching tendancies, and it gives me ideas for stories to write, and it gives me a way to confess some of my own secrets. I imagine that if I had no personal friedns whatsoever, this kind of reading material would remind me what I was missing, for better or worse.

I think part of what keeps the “Group Hugs” website so interesting is that it is edited. There are some rules for what will be published and what will not. This way irrelevant material, spam, etc. is weeded out along with “things that will probably not make it through our crack team of confession-readers:”

• gratuitous vulgarity
• known urban myths
• all capitals
• obnoxious formatting
• obvious lies
• bragging
• confessions about this site
• confessions not involving you
• responses to other confessions
• contact information
• web site addresses

In order to keep up the material’s appeal to the widest possible audience, readers can contribute to the moderation of “Group Hugs”. For me, this is the best way to read the confessions, one at a time, and voting on each along the way. Votes can only be “yes”, “no”, or “maybe”, so that there is no room for any kind of qualatative statement beyond whether or not the confession should be published.