Erica Shi | Staff Illustrator

You’re finally on campus and looking to meet new people. Lo and behold, you find Sidechat! You think to yourself, “This is so great! Now I can see what some other people are up to.”

At first, the app is fun. You’re scrolling, in agreement with random posts about Bear’s Den food and how the Qdoba line is too long. You went in thinking you’re in on a campus joke, but you soon realize you are on a page in the WashU Burn Book. Suddenly, it’s not just jokes or someone complaining about their classes, but people making mean comments about their peers, professors, and campus staff they’d never say out loud. Some of these posts have turned into recurring threads that target specific people.

Sidechat is a social media app designed primarily for college students, allowing users to log in through their school emails and post, comment, and send direct messages anonymously. On paper, it’s perfect. Everyone’s in on the same inside jokes, and there’s a sense of common struggle in everyday life we can all relate to. For a campus where it can feel hard to connect, having a shared space is powerful. But are we really connecting?

Sidechat is part of a long line of anonymous apps, like Yik Yak and Whisper, that all promise the same thing: connection through anonymity. Every single one follows the same cycle: initial excitement, sudden popularity, rapid descent into gossip and toxicity, and eventual decline. Sidechat isn’t special; it’s just the latest reboot of a tired script. Yes, anonymity can be freeing. You’re honest, unfiltered, bold, and real. But it’s also a breeding ground for snarkiness and pettiness. 

And the design of the app adds to this issue. The upvote and downvote system turns posts into “karma farming” competitions. Sidechat gives you “karmas” for every upvote you get. Think of it as the “like” button on Instagram. The harsher, funnier, and more outrageous your posts are, the more upvotes you get. The more upvotes, the more “popular” you feel, even if people don’t know who you are.

The shift happens slowly. One minute, you’re upvoting a post about how “chem lab is the worst class you’ve ever taken,” and the next, you’re sucked into gossip about people you don’t know, but somehow have strong opinions on. Anonymity changes the rules of the game. It’s easy to gossip when your name isn’t attached to a post. It’s easy to exaggerate or outright lie when you will never be called out. And it’s easy to forget that the person you discuss is a human being on the other side of the screen.

We like to pretend these posts don’t matter, but they do. If you’re the one being dragged, even vaguely, you know it. Maybe you brush it off, perhaps you laugh along, but the anxiousness and fear stay. The posts, even if not directly targeting us, feed our insecurities and make us hyperaware of how we’re perceived because we know we might be posted if we slip up or stand out in the wrong way. Instead of connecting, it makes us perform: who’s the funniest, who’s the wittiest, and who’s the boldest at throwing shade?

And let’s not ignore the mental health angle. WashU students already juggle stress, pressure, and competition. Adding an app where you can be roasted by your peers, anonymously, publicly, and without recourse, doesn’t exactly scream “supportive environment.”

Some people will roll their eyes and say, “It’s free speech.” Sure, technically it is. The First Amendment protects your right to speak your mind without censorship, but freedom of speech on an app doesn’t and shouldn’t mean freedom from consequences. And when the platform itself erases accountability by allowing anonymity, consequences disappear.

On a college campus, “free speech” has become a buzzword thrown around whenever someone wants to defend saying something cruel, offensive, or flat-out false. The irony? Sidechat doesn’t actually expand speech; it flattens it. Instead of debates, you get one-liners. Instead of dialogue, you get drive-by snark. People may argue that these posts are just jokes, but not all “jokes” are harmless. Hiding behind anonymity to spread gossip or make cruel comments isn’t noble. It’s lazy.

I’m not here to tell you to delete Sidechat. Let’s be real: you won’t. I won’t. It’s addictive. It’s funny. It scratches the itch of wanting to know what everyone else on campus is thinking. But we should at least know what we’re signing up for and rethink laughing at gossip about others. Sidechat isn’t a community. It isn’t a place for connection. It’s entertainment, and entertainment often comes at someone’s expense.

If WashU wants to be a place of real connection, actual free speech, and students lifting each other up, then Sidechat can’t be our go-to form of communication. It’s fine for a laugh or a quick scroll, but let’s stop pretending it’s a community. Because the truth is that Sidechat isn’t our campus talking; it’s just our insecurities, typed out and upvoted. If you’re actually looking for connection, text a friend, join a group chat, or, maybe, talk to people face-to-face. Radical idea, I know.

So the next time you scroll, I urge you to remind yourself that Sidechat is not a bonding activity; it’s performance. And perhaps we should reconsider letting a Burn Book serve as our campus yearbook.