What inspired you to make this page?
‘We were super bored in lecture a couple of months ago. We started out as a joke when one of us came up with the idea. The universities of Leiden, Groningen, Maastricht and even Saxion all had confession accounts and that’s where we drew our inspiration from. As a whole, we were also quite curious to see what happens on campus and what our peers are up to.’
How would you describe the design of the account?
‘The other university confession accounts all have memes as their icons which is where we took our inspiration to have Pepe the frog. As you can see, he is wearing sunglasses which makes him a sneaky Pepe, as confessions are a thing you don’t normally share openly. Moreover, we have admins that are experienced with starting up Instagram pages and they know that a layout and feed is very important, which is why we post three confessions a day to keep our borders intact.’
Did you ever imagine it to get this popular?
‘We never imagined this at all. Like I said, it started as a joke. We did discuss our success but we think that it is due to the outbreak and lockdown and that fact that everyone is online a lot more. Also, we mentioned @vrijhofutwente in one post where they also reposted us. That day is where we got the most following and the most likes and we were like “yo, that’s pretty lit”.’
What is the goal of this account?
‘We were quite curious to see what is happening on campus and what our peers are doing. Our goal is to provide entertainment and laughs, but also to let people see what shenanigans their fellow students get up to in this corona time.’
How do you differentiate between what gets published and what doesn’t?
‘We try our best to post every single confession that is submitted, as we consider our page to be a free platform. We try to filter out similar submissions to have some variations in the posts. We also try to interact with our following with polls to see what kind of posts they would like, and adapt our content accordingly. We also don’t want to censor submissions as it is an open student platform, just with spacing between posts.’
Do you have a favourite confession?
‘I don’t, but the beef between (mechanical) engineering and psychology is very, very entertaining to see, especially when you see the unfiltered submissions. The ones we get are much beefier that what we post, there is a lot going on.’
Why do you want to stay anonymous?
‘We are a student-run platform and we don’t do this for any other reason than to let students say what they really want and to share their stories in an unfiltered and uncensored way. Besides, staying anonymous lets us remain as a body of students rather than individuals that people know have read their confessions. We also made a deal within the group that if any of us tells any other person that they are a part of utconfession, they owe every member of the group €100 which altogether is a €400 fine.’
