Main Page Related Sites RSS Feed
I want to share a few thoughts on an arcane and largely unknown social media website that no longer exists: Boxed Thoughts.
Boxed Thoughts predates Twitter and is almost as old as Facebook, and existed before Facebook was open to the public. (For those that don't remember or don't know, when Facebook started out, it was only open to college students.) It was kind of similar to Twitter insofar as you would post short messages in boxes (but with limited styling), but two important differences-- You were anonymous (without a choice to be otherwise, being given a number instead of claiming a username), and you were limited to posting once an hour. (It might not be an hour-- I'm not sure on the time limit.)
As you might imagine, this resulted in an interesting dynamic. With the users being anonymous, people could rant, cry, or celebrate. They could be gleeful, morose, moody, optimistic, pessimistic, or, in some cases, inebriated. With the limitation on how often you could post, it encouraged putting thought into your post.
It called itself "An overview of human thought." I haven't seen anything quite like it since, but now I can only see the archived version.
It was fascinating to see people essentially putting a part of their inner monologue up for others to see anonymously. It always reminded me of something from the old "Super Mario RPG" game, when you reach an area where you see people's private wishes.
I'm not sure what happened to the original site, but I do know that at one point it was renamed to Notemine and moved to a different domain. At that point, there were far fewer users, which drastically impacted how it felt to use it.
Since I've become a web developer, I've often thought of recreating it. It would be extremely easy to do. But there's a fundamental difficulty in building a website with user-generated content-- What the users can put on there. I would need to be able to make sure there's no illegal content, no doxing, etc. It's also a different world now-- It would be half MAGA and half orange-man-bad. I don't know that it would be quite as interesting as it once was.