The Wall
A social network built on one premise: people lie online because they're afraid. Remove the identity — and the wall shows what people actually think. I designed the product logic, built the first version with AI-generated code, survived a public attack on launch day, and shipped a rebuilt v2 with a developer who fixed it for free because he believed in the idea.
Why
Social networks optimise for performance. People post what gets engagement, not what they actually think. In Russia especially — where political tension makes honest public speech risky — the gap between what people feel and what they say online is enormous. I wanted to build the opposite: a space with no profiles, no followers, no reputation to protect. Just thoughts, appearing and disappearing like chalk on a wall. The anonymity isn't a feature — it's the entire product premise. No identity means no incentive to lie.
What
I designed the full product logic before writing a single line of code: the ephemeral timeline, the mood system, the reaction mechanics, the moderation threshold. The UI followed from the logic — a blank canvas with text cards, each carrying a mood colour, an emoji, a 24-hour lifespan. When the first version launched publicly via a YouTube video, it was attacked within hours: DDoS, spam flooding, explicit image injections. I took the server down. A developer in the comments — one of those who'd broken in — reached out and offered to rebuild it properly. He rewrote the entire codebase in React. The Wall v2 launched. Nobody broke it again.
How
The 24-hour lifespan was a product decision I iterated on deliberately. First version: everything deleted at midnight Moscow time. Problem: unfair to users who posted at 23:50. Solution: each post lives its own 24 hours from publication. Later, as organic traffic slowed and the wall risked going empty, I extended it to one week — preserving the FOMO mechanic without letting the product feel dead. Every one of these was a product call, not a technical one. The mood system — colour-coded emotional tags that make the wall visually readable at a glance — came from thinking about what makes an anonymous space feel human rather than chaotic. 1,084 unique users wrote 1,269 thoughts. Purely organic, all from one YouTube video.
What it looks like
What we delivered
100% organic — one YouTube video, zero paid distribution
Active engagement across the full lifetime of the product
v1 built and launched; v2 rebuilt after public attack — stronger architecture
Designed, built, and relaunched without spending a dollar
ourwall.ru is live. The product is on pause pending investment for continued development and distribution. The next phase is clear: private walls for communities, geo-tagged mood mapping, and a monetisation layer for analytics access. The core mechanic works — the question is scale.
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