“Not saying they are bad subs, just saying that communities like that already existed and we don’t want to be like everyone else.” “Our community wouldn’t exist today if we allowed anyone/everyone to post everything, we would be just like r/confessions or r/offmychest,” he added. “The key to this statement is ‘Safe Environment’. “Mainly we are looking to enforce our mission statement: ‘Create a safe environment within Reddit to promote and encourage people to share their acts of wrongdoing that they want to get out into the open,’” u/opticalnecessity, a moderator on the sub, told Mashable. Below the “Subreddit Info” is a large, bold statement that reads: “This is intended to be a safe place.” This is followed by a lengthy set of rules on both submissions and comments, which are enforced by a combination of user reports, two bots, and a team of eight moderators. The sub’s main photo shows a priest giving confession, but aside from that there are no real religious overtones. Most of the topics are serious, but a few are more light-hearted (Redditors tag each thread with one of four categories that show up alongside the title: “Light,” “Conflicted,” “No Regrets,” or “Remorse”). There are posts about depression, posts about infidelity, posts from the victims of crime and posts from the perpetrators. It’s not the only community of its kind on Reddit - there’s also r/confessions (opens in a new tab), r/7cupsoftea (opens in a new tab), and several others - but along with r/offmychest (opens in a new tab) it’s one of the biggest. It currently has almost 200,000 subscribers, and a steady stream of new posts are made throughout the day. R/confession was started eight years ago by an account that’s no longer active. The following week, he found out in the papers that she’d died by suicide. I did this for about three hours straight.” Eventually, the girl unfriended and then blocked him. “I tried to help her and she made me look bad. “She would often reply with ‘stop please’ but I didn’t care at that moment,” he writes. When she accepted, he began to send her abusive messages. That night, he added her as a friend on Facebook. “The only people who believed me were my friends,” he continues. They were kinder to her, and cold towards him. After the incident with the bag, though, the man’s classmates treated them both differently. “She must have thought I did it on purpose and she screamed like someone stabbed her.”Īpparently the girl had been a victim of bullying before. “We were in maths, and I accidentally knocked her bag off the desk so I went to pick it up because her things fell out,” he explains. At some point when he was 15, he writes (opens in a new tab), he got wrongly accused of bullying a girl in his class. The story is long, but the details are thin. Somewhere in the world, a man is sat behind a computer screen telling a group of strangers his most shameful secret.

Sites like reddit