So Why is the Smith Confessional Still Popular On Campus?

Earlier this year, Katie Simonson ’25 downloaded the Smith Confessional app, then almost immediately regretted it. A first-year student, Simonson found the site unsettling. “People were hating on Smith, or just being gross,” she said.

She deleted the app. A couple of weeks later, it was back on her phone. “Maybe the vibes on the Confessional changed,” she explained, “or maybe just my perception changed.” Either way, the site was no longer disquieting; at times, she would laugh or agree with some of the posts. Eventually, she started using it as a resource, a place to find out what was going on around campus or receive answers to her more practical questions. “I didn’t get what office hours were at first, and I asked, and people on Confesh were really helpful.” Still, she added that when people do respond in unhelpful ways, “you have to tell them to chill.”

Simonson is not alone in her ambivalence toward the Confessional. Since the site’s launch at Oberlin College in 2006, the Confessionals of Cornell, Middlebury, Mount Holyoke and other colleges and universities have stirred controversy. At Oberlin, it was first described by users as “escapist,” “ignoble” and “so addicting that it’s sick.” In 2007, following concerns on part of the administration, the president of the student body at Amherst College sent a letter asking students to refrain from posting. Meanwhile, the administration of Sacred Heart University successfully pressured the owners of the Confessional network to shut down the school’s version of the site. 

Today, only two Confessional sites remain operational—and the Smith Confessional is the most active out of the pair. When asked about the site, students on campus generally regard it as a toxic or mean landscape, and perhaps rightly so. But if Smith students dislike it, why has the Confessional endured?

For some, the pull of the Confessional comes from its gossip; for others, its humor. For Cezanne Del Castillo ’23, it comes from its recommendations. She has used the Confessional to learn about peoples’ experiences with different kinds of piercings and local hair salons. “And when I was a first-year,” she said, “I asked stuff like ‘Where is Bass Hall?’” 

Like her, many others see the Confessional as a practical tool: it’s where to ask the questions only Smith students know how to answer. But when Smith moved online due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Del Castillo noticed that, for many students, the Confessional was also a place to vent about family situations, mental health issues and COVID-related problems. 

This function of the Confessional—a place to exert emotional catharsis and receive reassurance—might also be the reason why it is still running. Shibo Xu, self-proclaimed “janitor of the site”, explained in an interview with The Sophian that he maintains the site because “even if one student in a year finds some value and it helps them in their roughest times, late at night when they have nobody to turn to and they go post on the Confessional and get something back positive—to me, that’s more than worth it.”

The key mechanism of the Confessional, anonymity, is what grants users the privacy to release emotions they would not feel safe voicing otherwise. But anonymity alone does not suffice: if this were true, then it would be enough for Smith students to vent on Omegle or on throwaway social media accounts. The fact that the Confessional only allows access to members of the college is what lets students be vulnerable: though their identities might be masked, students are still talking to a community they, to some extent, know. 

For one student who preferred to remain anonymous, the balance between privacy and community is comforting. “Especially as someone who is not a white person,” she said. “The Confessional is where I feel I can say the things I couldn’t say in person at a predominantly white institution.” What attracted this student to the Confessional was the freedom: there, she could vent about her experiences as a student of color without tying the backlash to those ideas to her real identity. 

But she was not the only one empowered by the lack of social consequences. As the Black Lives Matter protests unfolded across the United States, the anonymous student read posts on the Confessional that would grow to disturb her. What she described as “shitty, dumb, stupid opinions” eventually pointed her toward a very specific anxiety: “I was nervous at the fact that students here were racist.”

During quarantine, she looked at the Confessional multiple times a day. Since returning to campus last August, she estimates that she looks at it once a week. “And I really haven’t come across people like that on campus.”

“That’s why I think it’s really toxic to constantly be on the Confessional, because it warps what I think of people here.” She added, “Even back then I felt, well, maybe I do need to leave this for a second. I need to touch grass. Not everyone at Smith is like that.”

This student’s experience is not unique. Last year, a Black student was the target of racist comments on the Confessional after the Valentine’s Day event they helped organize ran out of teddy bears. In her thesis, “Identity and catharsis in a digital space of localized anonymity,” Abigail Camille Butera ’21 identified this incident as an instance of the Confessional being turned into a space of social violence. 

That’s the double-edged sword of anonymity. Butera writes, “for all that it can provide emotional cleansing, especially in spaces where the individuals using the Confessional find themselves emotionally and socially restricted, it can also enable and provide a platform for bigoted perspectives and opinions.” In other words, what makes the Confessional repulsive is also what makes it so attractive: for every person who seeks advice, there is another who seeks agreement for their own violent actions or views. 

It’s an uncomfortable trade. For people like the anonymous student, embracing the benefits of the Confessional might bring collateral damage to one’s mental health. So some, like Nina Wattenberg ’24, have decided that the risks of becoming involved with the Confessional outweigh the benefits. 

It’s not that the place is not an alluring idea. “From a human perspective, wanting to know the tea—I think the Confessional would be interesting for that,” she says. But the emotional vulnerability enabled by the site also degrades its value as an information source or a platform to productively discuss campus issues. Wattenberg continued, “You can’t take everything you read on the Confessional seriously. These are things people are saying because they don’t have another outlet, but also these are things people are saying without accountability. I sort of prefer not to go down that rabbit hole.”

The Confessional is useful, cathartic, and comforting. It is also mean and toxic. The question remains: why haven’t all students decided that the costs outweigh the benefits?

Perhaps the answer has to do with the specifics of Smith. In the same interview with The Sophian, Xu explained that, to him, the Confessional’s perdurance on campus “has to do with the fact that [Smith] is an all-girls school.” The other Confessionals were based in colleges with similar age range, size, and geographical location—but it was only at Smith and Mount Holyoke that the sites remained active. To Xu, these colleges’ Confessionals have “a stronger sense of community, like: I might poke at you, but I’m not going to stab you with a knife.”

A student quoted in Butera’s thesis emphasized a similar point: “I think the high proportion of women contributes to people being cognisant about making it feel like a very safe place.” But the people who have been harassed on the Confessional would question these characterizations: being on the receiving end of anonymous online attacks to one’s identity or character is certainly more alike to a stab than to a friendly poke.

So, paradoxically, the Confessional’s popularity on campus might have less to do with the Smith community, and more with changes in society at large. As the world moves online, workplaces, geopolitics and religious communities are being shaped by the internet. The Confessional is another manifestation of this long process of disruption and adaptation. As the academic aspect of colleges and universities moves online, it only makes sense that the social aspect will too, to Facebook groups, subreddits or walled communities like the Smith Confessional. 

Perhaps every institution eventually finds its digital analog. The anonymous student mentioned that after spending too much time in the Confessional, she felt she needed to “touch grass”: to reconnect with the real world and walk away from the internet. But as the digital world begins to shape the real one, walking away from the internet will become harder and harder. Whether the Confessional is violent or liberating, or both at the same time, the questions it asks—about accountability, privacy and anonymity—will only become more relevant in the years to come.

In the meantime, the Confessional maintains its controversial fame on campus—and Smith students find ways to live with its offerings and limitations. Simonson, the first-year student who downloaded and deleted the Confessional app this August, said, “I feel like people are actively working not to make the site worse, because they don’t want it to be. I don’t want it to be, so I report stuff that is outright bullying. Some people might say that is censorship, but I don’t care. It’s Confesh. It’s not that deep.”