[UPDATED] Glitches & Bad Community

UPDATE: Received Email response from Wishbone

The last paragraph is a summary of my review.

I got Wishbone about maybe seven months ago. I was looking for something simple to do whenever I needed to kill some time, and at first this app satisfied that role. For a while, I just voted on the featured cards. I didnt make my own, I didnt follow anyone, and I didnt post any comments. That was when I most enjoyed the app--when I was the least engaged. Eventually, of course, I tried my hand at making my own cards. I made several at first. None of them were featured, and for at least two months, none of them got any votes whatsoever. I took a break from the app and came back to it after the new year. I made more cards and started participating in the community more. Thats when my experience started to go downhill.

Firstly, the community is mostly comprised of girls younger than thirteen who are interested in becoming "internet famous" or obsessing about their favorite celebrities. The majority of them are fairly shallow, and it is obvious that parental guidance is largely absent among these young users. PARENTS: This is NOT a kid-friendly app. While on its outermost level it is *fairly* innocent (appropriate for maybe ages fourteen and up, as several of the cards feature scantily clad celebrities promoting unrealistic standards of beauty), users are able to comment ANYTHING they want (despite having a "report" button, Wishbones moderators are nonexistent; users rarely utilize the "delete" button), and, as long as two users follow each other, they are able to private message each other. Cards are able to feature just about any picture (even if a card does feature something explicit, its doubtful Wishbone will remove it, as as I previously mentioned, the mods on this app do nothing), and users are able to use their own pictures in cards. The amount of young girls asking you to vote if theyre pretty or not, or "which selfie is better", or "which outfit should I wear", is endless, and quite frankly frightening. Users often offer a "face reveal" and/or "name reveal" as incentive to gain followers. Many of these young girls are using their full names as their username; several are very open about where they live, some even going so far as to talking about what school they go to or what sports team they play for. The deeper into Wishbones several complex social circles one goes, the more alarming it is how much unsupervised freedom these children are allowed. On the one end of the social groups sits several cliques consisting of variously aged girls. These cliques are frequent sources and targets of vicious bullying and harassment, and several accounts fake suicides and other aspects of mental illness in order to gain attention, sympathy, followers, and, invariably, drama. On another end, often the center of the majority of users attentions, is a vast horde of fake celebrity accounts, and a few accounts dedicated to outing these imposters (to varying degrees of success). While many of these accounts do little more than steal pictures from celebrities real social media accounts and attempt to pass them off as original on Wishbone, there are several fake celebrity accounts that bully and threaten users, taking advantage of the power given to them by impersonating popular child idols. On yet another end of the social groups is those pretending to be depressed and suicidal, and those who genuinely are. Regardless of if these accounts are telling the truth about their mental states, their pages consist largely of violent, depressing material, almost all of them going so far as to post graphic pictures of self-harm. Graphic discussions of suicide are also commonly found on these accounts. There are countless other cliques and groups on Wishbone, but the three listed above are the ones I was most heavily involved in and found most alarming. I reported countless graphic pictures and inappropriate comments, but nothing was ever taken down. I should mention that bullies frequently utilize private messaging; screenshots of users activities and messages on Wishbone are often used as blackmail and fuel for fights.

So, aside from being able to post and say anything with little to no consequence, despite being an app mostly used by tweens and children, Wishbone itself is riddled with minor bugs that add up over time. Typing is spastic and jerky; screen freezes happen often after extended use; multiple ads will sometimes play consecutively; load times are usually slow, sometimes taking several minutes for a new card or comment to appear; private messaging is just awful (notifications for new messages dont show unless you restart the app, for one); and occasionally, the app will restart itself, forcing you to log in again, which causes users without passwords to make a new account. I ended up losing my account twice, once to the glitch I just mentioned, and again because of some error that caused my password to be lost. I contacted Wishbone the second time, Emailing them multiple times, but got no response after weeks of waiting. So Ive deleted the app. The only reason I havent given Wishbone a one-star rating is not because of anything the developers have created, but due to the enjoyable content and interactions put out by the few Wishbone users who use the app for its intended purpose.

Wishbone, in its most basic form, is a somewhat enjoyable app good for passing the time. But go any deeper and you will be overwhelmed with twelve year-old drama, glitches, and bad customer support. And parents, unless you plan on monitoring your childs every move on Wishbone, do not let them use this app. It is not for children, despite its innocent premise and cheery appearance. I dont recommend letting anyone younger than sixteen use Wishbone. This app needs a serious overhaul if it wants to correct the countless issues plaguing its community. Promoting common internet safety rules would be a good start.

AnnaDango about Wishbone - Compare Anything, v4.12.0