And to skip to what really matters: I stopped following postsecret years ago, when it created the forum. It seemed to change the whole idea of it when there was the ability to respond to postcards. You were no longer releasing a secret into nothingness, you were releasing it anonymously into a crowd. This I think made people less likely to share dark secrets (I remember a few animal related posts that had intense backlashes) while also making people want to do it for attention (or well more likely to do it for attention).According to the Chicago Tribune, a police spokesman said the Grand Crossing police station received an anonymous phone call about the posting. Cops searched Jackson Park and turned up nothing, said the spokesman, but passed on the information to Chicago detectives.
I find this . . . trend(?) of reddit sleuthing to be pretty disturbing and I think that it's an important thing to think about. It's one thing for everyone to "police themselves" but when people start to believe that they are the police, well, that is no good at all.
In a small community it is fun to sleuth around and see what pops up and what information you can get from essentially nothing. Someone says "that looks like a place where I used to visit in Chicago" and another scours google maps to find the exact location. You ponder whether or not it could be real, fantasize about what if it actually was, wonder about the person behind the murder, the situation, the decision to post it online, and that's it. You realize that it is a fun little detective roleplay but you really don't have the power to discover or implement or incriminate anyone. The problem is reddit is so big and the information isn't between a small group of people. It isn't private either. And the consequences of a private forum or email exchange can't be stumbled upon by the masses to share and incriminate and even implement punishment - whether physical harmful punishment or emotional/reputation punishment. The second the detective role-playing switches from private fantasies to public sharing, it changes completely. Then someone can come along and post a link to the facebook of a kid they went to highschool with that has the same glasses and brown hair next to a well-researched, or evidence based article. And the next person can come along, skim the thread, and assume that this facebook, with no evidence to back it up whatsoever, is true simply because it is associated with something that is true. And then lives get ruined.