In the UC system, pop culture based ignorance is considered especially heinous. In UC Berkeley, the dedicated podcast host to investigate these felonies are members of an elite squad known as BearPod. These are their stories. Hey everyone, I'm Megan and I'm Michelle and we are back today with episode 2.
On this episode we will be speaking with the founder of the Berkeley Confessions page, Spencer Moutihill. The Confessions page serves as an anonymous forum for students to post about their experiences at Berkeley. Today we are joined by Spencer Moutihill and he is actually the founder and admin of the Confessions page. So, a couple questions for you.
First off, can you just introduce yourself? Yeah, sure. So, I'm Spencer Moutihill, third year majoring in Applied Math here at UC Berkeley. I do run the Confessions page as well as the new incarnation of the overheard page and I'm also a member of the team for the meme page.
So, I got a lot of my play but I'm managing it. So, how many hours do you spend on Facebook and when you're on so many pages? Right, so I mean I'm on Facebook a lot like a normal person would be just like browsing and doing stuff and I try to integrate some of my jobs into that time so a lot of it is being a moderator and looking for things that are bad and might need to be removed from pages or looking to approve things onto pages. But I also do have to spend some time, I usually like every week or sometimes if I'm lazy like every night I go in and I have to actually schedule the Confessions for the next day.
And my mods do help me with that a little bit but I do a lot of the work myself with that and I schedule 10 a day every day forever. And so, you know, sometimes last night I did like 20 for like next two days and so I have to go through and vet all the Confessions and I only approved like a third of them. So it's a pretty selective process that I do spend a decent amount of hours all the time and I'm like, okay, I'm going to go. How many, sorry, how many Confessions would you say you get like a day?
So per day I get about 35 right now, per day. When I started out it was less but now it's about 35. It's been pretty steady at that pace for a while now. We did a little bit during Winter Break but we're back at that.
So that's a lot, you know, in total I've gotten 6,000 Confessions now like sent in. So yeah. So you've talked a little bit about this with the process of like like, like maintaining the mean page or the sorry, it means on my mind, the Confessions page. So what inspired you to kind of found a page?
What made you think like this is what Berkeley needs? Like there isn't a market for this yet. So I'm actually in this kind of Illuminati conspiracy with the mean page admins for all the other college mean pages in the country. So like NYU, Harvard, Stanford, Princeton, UCI, all the different colleges that all have mean pages, all the admins are in the one group chat and we talk all the time.
And so this has been since like last year. And so over the summer, last year, you know, talking a lot, I got to talking with the person who is the admin for the UC Irvine pages and UC Irvine, they do have Confessions page that they recently started up as well. And I saw that and I saw that it was a cool idea. And I noticed that while Berkeley had had a Confessions page in the past, it didn't anymore.
And I remember my old community college also had one and I thought, you know, I'm in a great position personally having this overheard page in this mean page as leverage to create the Confessions page and run it. And I thought I could do a good job. And I kind of modeled it off there, the UCI model, added my own stuff and figured out I went along. Okay.
So you brought up something very interesting and Illuminati of mean page people. Can you elaborate on that a little more? Like, what's going on there? So I shouldn't reveal all the secrets, but oh, oh, so it really started when we were around like March last year, like March 2018, which is right after I had become a moderator for the pages overheard in memes.
And we were all in the group that was formed because we all wanted to do this big April Fool's Day joke for April Fool's that year. What we ended up doing is we ended up changing all of the meme pages names to the same name, which was Guy Fieri memes for flavor town scenes. And that we changed it all the same picture, the same name. So it was impossible to tell the pages apart for that day.
And it was just chaos in the pages. And through that big collaboration, we all got together in the one chat and then we just kept on talking and it kind of became this friend group and we've had meetups with the other members. I met the Princeton person, the Stanford person, the Johns Hopkins person. So yeah, it's pretty cool.
So we do lots of fun talks in that. So as the founder and the moderator of the confessions page, so many people are sending in such like personal and secret information and it's kind of you have all of that, just on your computer, what's it like to be privy to that much information that people aren't going around talking about? Yeah, so it's actually really crazy. And I really, I should have known going into it, but it would be.
But I didn't realize that people would just be sending me. I mean, there are things that have been sent to the page that I literally cannot see the light of day. I can never tell anyone. Like only my mods and I could probably ever see, it should have never been sent to me.
I should have never have seen it. Like, you know, stuff that I could get in trouble for saying. Wait, I have a question, sorry. Are things sent in anonymously or is it from someone to Facebook?
Yes. And Google has a setting that you can do where it collects emails and it has a setting where it doesn't collect emails and it has a not collecting emails. So it is completely anonymous. I did a poll actually and two thirds of the people said, yes, we believe it's anonymous and one third said that they don't believe it's anonymous.
So one third of people think I'm lying to them who use the page. But it is anonymous, so I cannot see. And because it is anonymous, people are unable to send in like anything. And it does range from the completely mundane to the things that can never be said in public.
And so, you know, some of the things I've had to have big talks with my moderators about should be published this. You know, what's the ethical implication of doing this? And some things, you know, we just had to say no. And it really has been a learning experience, I think, for me about what you can do.
And you know, you're also limited by the platform of Facebook because they have turns and conditions and so we have to think about that as well. So, I'm not going to ask you to say anything, of course, that you already are not going out there. But when you're talking about stuff that's like two signs of people to like, are we talking about things that are like illegal? Or things that are just like really touchy subjects?
Right. So, some of the things, a lot of things that fall in this category are things where it starts talking about specific other people. And we do have a place for talking about specific people in a good way in like a wholesome way. We do that every week, wholesome ones days, 12, 30 on ones day.
But you know, we post like five things. But people will send in negative things about people too. And sometimes it's just kind of petty drama and sometimes it's like serious accusations that, you know, if I posted like I could maybe be responsible and they could like sue me for libel. So, when people are sending in these confessions, you like, you can't see who they are, but you're able to like respond to them?
Right. So, I'm sorry, if I was misleading. I can't really respond to them. Occasionally people will message me and say, I sent in this confession, I would like you to do this thing.
Like maybe I would like you to not post it anymore. So, there's some confessions that I've gotten where people took it back before I actually got posted. And so, then I know who those people are and I can talk to them and respond to them. But most people I don't actually know who they are at all.
I can't respond to them. Sometimes I have posted confessions and then posted a response to them to address like some issue that they brought up. But I don't have a way to directly address them. And I wish I did sometimes.
But you can't have that and also have it be anonymous. You know, you can't have both. Okay. So, on kind of a different note, there have been some rumors that I've heard and I've seen even confessions on the page about this that you guys have posted that some of the confessions are actually written by the moderators and they're like trying to like get attention for the page.
So, do you have anything to say about that? Do you want to like falsify or confirm these rumors once or for all on the pot? Okay. So, I have heard that many times and you know, people have not seen all the different confessions submissions that I've got about that as well because people talk about it.
I have never ever submitted a single confession. I have never posted anything that I have written personally on the page. I will never do that because I feel that it would be a bias to post my own thing because obviously I'm going to post it if it's my thing but for other people I'm filtering them out and posting it and not. And so I just think it's a conflict of interest.
As for like the, it's interesting that people believe that right because I have to wonder what people think my opinions are because I post so many different opinions that can flick with each other and people complain about all kinds of opinions and you know, say that they're disgusting at both you know, every end of every spectrum and I just want to know which ones I think are mine because I can't hold all these opinions myself. They can't all be mine right? You know, but no, I have never, maybe some of my mods have because they might have been not told me and then I selected them but I definitely have not ever submitted or posted anything of my opinion. What is the moderator process like, like how did you select the moderators that currently work on the page?
Oh, so good question. So I actually, when I started Overhurd, I made Josh Weinstein a moderator because he was kind of a legendary figure of the Overhurd page in the previous incarnation. He's a graduated student now. And so I made him a moderator.
I also made my friend Isaac a moderator because he offered me an illicit deal and I took it. You know, it's semi-seriously. So I made those two moderators at first and then I added on a team of five more moderators through a process in which I actually got applications that were detailed and I narrowed those down and then I interviewed about nine candidates and then I selected from this line candidates for actual people who got to become moderators. That happened last semester.
And so those people, Giki Isaac, Uzoma, Chitanya and Sanjeev and Kautava, yeah, those people got added to that process. And shout out to them. They're super cool. They have been great help.
And we were talking to the memes admins. They had a couple of run-ins as public figures almost where one of them can't even RSVP to events anymore because people go there just to find her and talk about why didn't you send me, or why didn't you post my meme. So have you had anything like that happen before? Yeah, I have actually.
So even before I became a moderator of the page, I posted a meme on the memes page I think it was a year ago almost now. Yeah, it was a year ago. And it was very popular and it was a video meme and it was a music video that I did. And so it had my face on it.
And people started recognizing me around campus. And I would get every day for a few weeks. People would run into me and say, hey, you're that guy. And I'm like, yeah, I'm that guy.
And so already people were starting to know me and recognize me, which is crazy, for a meme they never met before. And after I became a moderator at admin, there were only more of those. And so I've gotten people coming into my work and recognizing me as I'm serving them their burrito. And I've gotten submissions from Confessions from people who say, hey, you don't know me, but I live in your dorm and I've seen you around.
And you're cool. So people are definitely recognizing me all over the place and asking me all kinds of questions about things. I've never had a GSI recognizing. There are a lot of GSI confessions and I got one submitted to me about my GSI for data eight last semester.
And one time I was in my discussion and I got this confession. I was like, hey, do you know that I'm the admin of Confessions? And my GSI was like, yeah. And I was like, do you want to see Confession about you?
And she was like, I guess, you know, and so I showed her this confession. It was a nice one. It was like, I saw this GSI and she was so good at doing the midterm. I did add a commission.
No, I definitely saw that one. And I was like, who in during a midterm is taking the time to watch their GSI? A surprising amount of time. During my midterms, I'm sweating and crying and like writing as fast as I can.
I don't even look at the GSI. So maybe I'm like, oh, I didn't that sense. It's actually crazy how many confessions I've gotten in that exact vein where people are staring at their GSI during their midterm, which seems like a waste of time. But apparently people are definitely doing that.
They're definitely out here. So has there ever been a particular confession that's just been so ridiculous or funny or just giving gross that it's stuck in your mind? Because as someone who just is part of a page, I have a couple that like haunt me. Oh, yeah, no, I definitely have some.
I got one, I think it was like 15, 75 or something. Back in the day. Back in the day. Back in the day.
That was a while ago. But it was one, no it was 175 actually. It was really long ago. But it was one, there was like, there's nothing that I like more than to just go to MLK and moffit and just shit on the floor in the bathroom.
And I do it all the time. And I, it was in such like gross detail. Like, it was almost poetic. It really paints a picture.
It was almost like a piece of postmodern art in how poetic it was. And I liked it so much. It stuck in my brain so much that I actually made it a promotion for the page. And I like, I did a funny edit of it where I did it in all different fonts and it was like crazy.
And I made that a promotional post on Facebook and I like paid money to have Facebook show that to people all day. Would you put this experience with founding the Confessions page on your resume in the future? Yeah, I think so. I definitely already have, I think, my membership on the Team for the memes page on my resume, on my LinkedIn, if you go to my LinkedIn right now.
I don't know if I, yeah, go to my LinkedIn. It's cool. Do you ever get like, just hate mail from people saying like, why did you post this? This is terrible.
Yeah, all the time. So much, so much hate mail. It's actually crazy. I get so many confessions that are about me or addressed to me or like have my name in them.
Like, I think at 1.1% of all confessions were about me, like, sent in, which is a crazy number. Yeah. You know, like 60 out of 6,000. That's a lot.
One time I got a series of confessions that were, they just said Spencer, Keke, and Uzoma, and those are two of my mods, are massive salty cucks, which is a harsh criticism. And that one was submitted 993 times in a row, which I only assume, well, it was like seven times per second. So I can only assume they wrote like a bot. They wrote a program to send me this confession 993 times in a row, which is pretty crazy.
And so I get that, I get more detailed hate mail that's like, you know, you're a bad person for posting this, or like, you know, this page sucks. MIT conversions is better. It's not, it's not better. I've seen the data.
Mine's better. Yeah, T, throw in shade. I'm sorry. I know the MIT guy and he's cool, but we're better.
Shout out to it. Shout to Brandon. But yeah, I do get a lot of hate mail. And I got to kind of, you know, sometimes it does get to me a little bit, you know, when you get just criticism every day, every week about what you spend so much time, you know, honestly, in doing and perfecting.
It does wear you down, but you got to just, you know, look at the success that the page has had and the positive response that people have given, and you know, feel good about that. And people do submit also ones that compliment me sometimes, like, wow, you did a good job, admins, you know, good for you. Okay, well, I think we got a lot of T out. We answered a lot of questions.
I feel like people have like a better understanding of the confession's page now. So thank you so much for joining us. This was such a pleasure. I really enjoyed the tea.
It was burning, piping hot. It's all I needed for this Tuesday evening. Well, thank you very much for having me on. I'm really happy to be on.
I do have so many thoughts all the time about the confession's page, but I just want to share with people. And so, you know, really cool to be here. Great. Well, thank you all for listening to the second episode of BearPod.
Have a great day. Tune in next time. Tune in next time.