Welcome, @ezrasuki. Interesting idea and timely (anonymous is trendy!).
While anonymity empowers people to share their true feelings, it also empowers trolls and hate speech. I could imagine this becoming a nightmare for some people in larger companies. What are your thoughts about this? Any concerns?
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Hunter
Hi there I am the creator of Offgarden.
Offgarden is a place to have an anonymous, private, civilized dialogue with your coworkers without having to worry about prying eyes, information leaks, or publicly airing dirty laundry.
Participants are limited to those that use the same corporate email domain, so only your coworkers can read the discussions or add to them.
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Hunter
Here's how i came up with the idea:
One day, I wanted to complain about something at work but ended up not doing it because I worried about what co-workers would think of me.
Then I realized this happens pretty often, and thought it was bad both for me and the company. So I thought it would be nice to have a place where you could casually ask or suggest things at work without risking your reputation or relationship.
I hope it's helpful to a lot of people as much as I imagined!
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Hunter
@rrhoover great point!
I think it has a lot to do with what problem it's solving. There are different types of anonymous message boards targeted for various types of communities.
For example in case of an anonymous message board for college campuses (like Juicy Campus), it doesn't provide value by solving a pain point, but instead provides entertainment value. So they lean towards gossip, sexual, flirtatious content and often becomes toxic as a result. People don't really care if the site becomes toxic because they all know that they will be college students for 4 years and then they will move on, and nothing's that serious when you're in college.
Whereas in case of Offgarden, it exclusively targets workplace. At work there is much at stake. Work is a place where we make money to sustain our living, and it's a place where we will be staying indefinitely--at least until we find a better job and move on--and we all have stress at work for various reasons. So I think the driving motivation is very different. When we bring anonymity to the workplace context, suddenly its primary value becomes solving pain points, instead of providing entertainment value.
And we all know that this pain point is very real, so I believe that most people will not want to ruin the potential value this can provide by playing around with gossip, trolling, flirting, etc. (I hope :) ) Also, already existing behaviors at workplace are different--for example people usually don't hit on their co-workers--so I think that will make a lot of difference.
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