Over the last week or so, you might have seen an app slowly making its way across your social networks, called Sarahah. The app actually launched a few months ago, and it's been growing in regions like Egypt and Saudi Arabia, according to a BBC report[1], but now it's suddenly becoming a big hit in India.
Sarahah is an app for sending and receiving feedback from others, anonymously. The creators described it by saying: Sarahah helps people self-develop by receiving constructive anonymous feedback.
The idea is simple - you create a Sarahah profile, which anyone can visit. Even without logging in, people can visit your profile and leave messages, anonymously. If they have logged in, messages are still anonymous by default, but users can choose to tag their identity.
On the receivers app, all the incoming messages show up in an inbox, and you can flag messages, delete them, reply, or favourite them to find them easily later.
But although the app has become very popular, it's quite polarising. For instance, although it has (at the time of writing) 10,305 5-star reviews on Google Play, it's also got 9,652 1-star reviews, showing a near 50-50 split in opinion.
That's at least in part because of fact that anonymity enables people to act out and behave in hurtful ways without consideration for consequences. Even positive reviews on the App Store still warn that this app is not for the weak hearted. Another 5-star review mentions that people are getting a lot of hateful comments.
Now, to be fair, the developers are also looking at ways to improve the experience. Privacy features mean that you can remove your profile from search results, limiting your audience to people who you share...