Introducing the Social Diary: Why I made Poplar
Welcome to my first blog post in this series exploring the benefits of diary keeping. In this post, I want to introduce myself and share what inspired me to create Poplar.
To be honest, it just came to me one day. I have a wild imagination and am sometimes struck with inspiration. I have no experience in app development or coding, but I decided this was something I was excited enough about to actually make it a priority.
What I do have is over ten years' worth of experience in digital marketing, particularly in SaaS. What I'm making here is very different to sales and PDF tools, but I am using what I know to help me in this journey.
I've also felt a great sense of dissatisfaction with social media. It feels like there's so much more space and loneliness between us all, despite seeing each other's lives through such an invasive lens.
So Much Content, So Little Substance
I initially found much joy in things like Facebook and Instagram, loving to share my life with others and enjoy theirs. But recently, I've had little inspiration to post. It's not that I don't lead a wonderful life; I just don't think it's a good idea to expose our lives online so openly.
And yet I still open Facebook and Instagram several times a day, out of compulsion, to doomscroll through my hundreds of followers' posts.
It feels like sharing images and videos of your life's highlights is done for gratification to get as many likes and comments as possible. It's a sanitised, edited highlight of a rich and varied life.
Life isn't just holidays, big purchases, or new houses. There's a whole lot of difficulty, disappointment, and drama that happens in between the things we show our Instagram followers.
You can share your holiday, but how many people know how much you sacrificed to get there? The long nights spent slaving away at your desk, the doctors' visits, and the scrupulous saving.
And the research backs this up.
Instagram's carefully curated posts create an illusion of perfection that can profoundly impact users' mental well-being.
Leaving out struggles and the mundane realities that make up the majority of a life. A UK survey even ranked Instagram as the worst social network for youth mental health and wellbeing, linking it to feelings of inadequacy, anxiety, and fear of missing out.
We're comparing our worst days to other people's best ones. It was never a fair fight. Especially not against advertising.
The Machine Behind the Feed
Here's the part that doesn't get talked about enough: the comparison you feel scrolling Instagram is a feature.
Social media platforms make their money from advertising; everyone knows that. But the more time you spend on the app, the more ads you see, the more revenue they generate. And the most reliable way to keep you on the app is to keep you feeling just slightly inadequate.
Curious enough to keep scrolling, anxious enough not to put the phone down.
This isn't a conspiracy theory; it's just the business model.
Meta made $164 billion in advertising revenue in 2024. Not from you paying a subscription or selling a product, but from selling your attention to brands. And the most valuable attention is distracted, emotionally activated attention.
The ads themselves are only part of it. The more insidious mechanism is the content that surrounds them. Influencer culture exists precisely because a person flogging a supplement or a skincare routine is more persuasive than a billboard.
The result is a feed that is simultaneously a social network, a highlight reel, a shopping catalogue, and a self-esteem regulation device, all optimised to extract maximum time and emotional investment from you, with your mental health somewhere far down the list of priorities.
A 2023 internal review found that Facebook's own researchers had documented Instagram's harmful effects on teenage girls' body image and mental health, and the platform continued largely unchanged. An app that made you feel genuinely good and then put it down would be a worse business.
Poplar doesn't run ads. It's obviously something quite small at the moment, and that goes without saying. But this is a crucial feature of the experience. There's no algorithm deciding what you see based on what will keep you most agitated. No influencers, sponsored content. No feed optimised for engagement over wellbeing.
Just writing, people, and honesty.
Filling the Gaps You Keep Hidden
Here is Poplar's primary intent:
To provide a safe space where you can tell people, anonymously, what it took to make a life worth sharing.
And yet many people would rather not post on social media but feel compelled to do so as they keep up with the Joneses on a massive scale.
We keep so much to ourselves. Mental health has spiralled out of control across the world. More than 1 billion people are now living with mental health disorders, according to the WHO, but feel compelled to do so as they keep, with anxiety and depression ranking as the second biggest cause of long-term disability globally. Anxiety, depression, and burnout are worse than they've ever been before.
I'm not saying Poplar is a replacement for therapy, but I certainly find it does me a lot of good to share how I'm feeling (without judgment). And there's plenty of evidence to show the benefits of journaling.
A study of 70 adults with elevated anxiety found that journaling for just 12 weeks was an effective intervention for mitigating mental distress, increasing well-being, and enhancing physical functioning.
Clinical research also shows that regular journaling can reduce cortisol (the primary stress hormone) by up to 23%, while over 200 published scientific articles document the impressive impact of expressive writing on long-term emotional health.
Of course, Poplar is a bit different to a private diary you'd never want anyone to read. Although you can share anything you like anonymously, it still takes courage to put your private thoughts and feelings out there.
Connecting With Others, Anonymously
Posting anonymously isn't anything new. The term "Anonymous" is synonymous with websites like 4chan, where there are no usernames, and its visitors can share almost anything they like without fear of discovery.
I want people to have a similar level of freedom on Poplar, just without anything hateful or needlessly offensive.
But there's a second layer to Poplar beyond intimate expression: connecting with others.
Faceless Intimacy through Connected Journals
My hope for Poplar is that people will empathise, resonate, and connect with each other through their posts.
Although you can make this experience entirely your own, the real magic happens when someone reads your entry and thinks: Me too.
That's the thing about vulnerability: it's contagious in the best possible way. When one person is honest, it gives others permission to be honest too. Anonymity removes the social performance that makes real honesty so difficult in the first place.
On Poplar, you can:
- Follow people whose words resonate with you
- "Root" entries (bookmarking them) that speak to something true
- "Echo" entries, creating follow-up ones that build on initial thoughts and ideas
You can build a little digital family out of people you've never met and might never meet. Sometimes it's more than enough.
According to psychologist James Pennebaker's Emotional Disclosure Theory, writing about emotional experiences helps process difficult events by organising chaotic thoughts and releasing pent-up emotions, thereby improving mental clarity and resilience.
Poplar just takes that one step further, adding the human element: someone out there reading your words and feeling a little less alone because of them.
If any of this resonates with you, Poplar is free to join. Come and plant something.
