In 2004, a guy named Frank Warren started handing blank postcards to strangers on the street, in Washington, DC, and they had one sentence written on the front:
Tell me a secret.
People mailed the cards back anonymously with their deepest secrets that they normally wouldn’t tell anyone….things like regrets, resentments, and even affairs that they had throughout their life.
Some postcards just had simple messages, and others looked like works of art that people spent hours on, covering them in magazine clippings, paint, and photos.
At first, a handful of postcards arrived in the mail every few weeks, but as word spread about PostSecret, thousands of of cards started arriving and Warren had more cards than he knew what to do with.
Warren started scanning them and uploading them to a blog called
PostSecret.com, and it felt inherently different than other sites on the net. It was a simple image of the cards for everyone to see and share, and that’s it.
It kind of felt like a window into someone else’s life that you weren’t supposed to know or read, but had full access to.
By the mid-2000s, millions of people were checking the site every Sunday when Warren would upload new postcards. Eventually, Warren’s project became published as best selling books, and some of the work was showcased in galleries and museums for others to see and experience.
The site is still active today, and people continue to use
@postsecret as an outlet to share things about their lives. What started as a side project, became one of the internet’s windows into people’s deepest secrets.
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