Identity, Musings

The ask.fm conspiracy

by stickysituation

Story-time post incoming: I’ve decided to share a weird thing that has been happening for the last three months.

It all started one day when I was bored out of my mind and decided to see if I could still remember my log-in to ask.fm. For those of you who have never heard of Ask, it’s basically a social platform which lets users ask each other questions. If you ask a question you can remain anonymous if you wish to. I used to use Ask a lot waaaay back in the day, as it was this new platform everyone was freaking out over. I can’t exactly remember why I stopped using it, all I know is that I have been inactive for years.

Seeing as I use the same five-or-so passwords and usernames for everything, I quickly figured out my log-in data and was in. I browsed on the website for a while, seeing if any of the people I followed were still active (and stalking their answers if they were). I think we can all agree that reading people’s answers to sometimes extremely personal questions is addictive as hell, even more so if you actually know the person in real life.

Anyway, I had been on the site for quite some while when all of a sudden I got a notification that I had received a question. I clicked on it and saw that I had gotten several questions over the years I had been inactive but the most recent one came in just seconds ago. It was almost like someone had sensed that I had logged in again. I thought it strange but forgot about it until… I received a question the next day. And the following day. And the day after that and so on.

Now at first I found the bombarding of questions to be slightly irritating and actually contemplated on whether or not I should delete my account and be done with Ask (again). But the regular questions – or rather, the person behind the questions – started to intrigue me. So much so that I actually debated this for hours with my friends. It sort of became a game after a while; I was actually looking forward to see what question I had gotten this time. Some I answered, some I found either too boring or too prying. Mind you, all of these questions range(d) from questions about my personal life to if I thought aliens existed. Yup, that’s right. My inbox is still flooding with questions. And they come every.single.day.

It was only after a month or so that I started questioning if there was a person behind the questions at all. I started noticing a pattern in the questions, an active friend of mine actually receiving a lot of the same questions. I came up with this theory that Ask.fm was generating automatic questions to its active users to keep them from leaving the site as it had gone down in popularity (with rival platforms like Sarahah now being on the rise). And I still think that this theory holds up in my case – for the most part anyway. It was only when I started to get questions that contained information about myself specifically (the school I went to, my name,…) that I knew that there was also an actual real life person asking me questions from time to time.

I know what you’re all asking yourselves – have I found out who is asking these questions yet? The answer is a sad no. I have my suspicions but nothing has been confirmed yet and I doubt it ever will be. I’m not complaining though, it’s kind of been exciting to read all of these questions, especially when I know that there’s a real person behind them. I wonder if I know the person asking me these questions. I doubt anyone from my immediate circle would feel the need to ask me questions anonymously but maybe it’s someone that I used to know, a person I don’t talk to anymore. I guess this is meant to remain a mystery forever.

24 thoughts on “The ask.fm conspiracy”

  1. I have used ask.fm before.. sometimes you can make out if the question is from some acquaintance or friend or website auto-generated – by the language of the question. Or by noticing changes in the follower count too. It’s been me years since I last logged in but back then they used to give just one Question Of The Day kinda thing.

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    1. I agree! The generated questions all seem to follow a certain pattern which makes it easy to differentiate them with questions asked by real people. It just took me a while to realize that there was a pattern behind it all😂 Thank you for reading!

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  4. omg i read this and did the exact same thing straight away, now i’m just cringing at the asks and responses i have on my profile from back in 2013-14. idk i hope your theory is right about it being automated, that kinda stuff freaks me the hell out haha xx

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    1. Actually, a lot of the generated questions are extremely casual, sometimes even with spelling errors. So not all of them are formal anymore, that’s why it took me a long time to realize that there was a pattern behind the questions. Thanks for stopping by!

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    1. Hahahahha I agree! One creepy thing that did actually happen a few times is that I would get these questions with a specific location and time, along with not so much a question but a statement that whoever wrote the question had seen me there. IT STILL FREAKS ME OUT.

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  7. I used to be obsessed with ask.fm & I’ve just logged in again because of this post – I have 1250 followers & 23.9k questions answered hahaha (I used to get a lot because of my Twitter account) but I think the questions are just generated from ask.fm because they used to send out daily questions all the time, you don’t need to worry about being stalked! xx

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    1. Oh wow, that’s a shit ton of people! I agree, most of them are probably generated (the daily questions are marked differently, so they are distinguishable from the rest). There are however questions that CAN’T be generated because they include specific information only a person who knows me could know. I doubt Ask’s algorithm is sophisticated enough to obtain information about various things (like school/uni or friends of mine including their names). xx

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      1. Very true (unless this is like the whole Facebook data thing again) however, your instinct is usually right – you say you’ve got your suspicions on who it may be and those are usually right .xx

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  8. I have not heard of ask.fm before. When I think of the word ask, I automatically think of ask jeeves. It’s weird going back to old things you use to use online. I would be really curious to see what my old Bebo site looked like. I wasted so many hours on that! xx

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  9. Pingback: The Liebster Award – The Site Of a Confused Teen

  11. I had the same theory that it really is the site that is sending us the questions. Maybe the latter questions you received really came from a real person but the first ones are sent by the site? I have my doubts regarding my ask.fm account since I got an email that someone asked me a question and I got one or two questions everyday after that.

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  12. I actually thought of the same thing, i think also that Ask.Fm not just generating questions but it also like forwarding other’s people questions too, because : 1- i found the same exact questions in Arabic language sent to other people without putting in mind the gender of the person
    2- some questions are sent with typos

    I decided to remove it because it is useless anyway lol

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