Vent - Express your feelings 17+

I’ve been with this app since 2015 after a friend showed it to me (funny that I haven’t seen her use it in years).I’ve seen this place grow and change and develop over time. I really enjoy this app not only for it being a diary of sorts, but also the amount of people I’ve met. I’ve made a lot of friends here and I am grateful to be able to connect to people through here.

With that being said this app still needs work. Lately I’ve noticed that it’s more broken than it has ever been in the past. This app has errors that appear when it doesn’t process something. More often than not I feel that I get more errors, my posts don’t want to send, my interactions with peoples posts will undo itself, and sometimes the app will shut down for hours. I’m not a developer and I will never claim to be, but for the years I’ve been on I would expect this app to get better not worse.

I don’t hate the app and I don’t mean to come off as nitpicking. I consider this app to be my virtual home and have a ton of loyalty to it. I just want to see this things fixed.

A while ago vent switched owners and to keep the app running they changed a lot about it to match their existing apps. That’s all fine and dandy, but lately the #1 issue is moderation, with communication being a close second. The owner has recently released a new set of guidelines, meant to supposedly be more specific and clear up the communication issues between users and moderators, but it’s done probably the exact opposite. Now, non triggering posts are getting automatically tagged with a warning, presumably without giving any notice to the poster. Not to mention, these moderators have a clear misunderstanding of how mental health issues present themselves and what classifies as an actual crisis, leading to a lot of users feeling as if they can’t even ‘vent’ anymore.
The unfortunate thing is that these are problems that can be fixed, however the owner likes to brush of a lot of the community’s concerns and acting like him running the app poorly is somehow better than nothing just because he ‘doesn’t make money off of this app’ and it’s supposedly a passion project. There would be less issues if they were properly specific about their guidelines and actually have their moderators do their jobs consistently. I’d happily give a better review if they would just stop acting like us mentally ill folks don’t know how to keep ourselves safe or understand our own experiences better than the folks running the app.

I had lots of complications just getting my account set up on this app and initially deleted it on my iPad, but it remained unused on my iPhone. I stared at the little icon after a pivotal moment in my life where I had to stay strong, but all I wanted to do was scream as loud as I could on the highest mountain top... Or I guess a pillow would suffice. Either way, I tried to log in after an iOS update one last time and suddenly I was in.

Right now this is one of the most exciting new apps I’ve seen since GetGlue or TVTime. No, ‘Vent’ doesn’t center around media... But there’s a closeness in the community that echoes the strength of the original GetGlue, but with the supportive feel of TVTime. ‘Vent’ allows me to connect with people going through similar issues, and even narrows that lot down with similar interests. Groups are great, the users are there to build you up, and if you have something tough going on in your life; if you’re battling personal demons; or you just need an outlet to react off that pesky first emotion that hits you in the gut... This is the best kept secret in the App Store. Shhhhhh, lets keep it that way by putting our all into making the vision the developers came up with a reality... TOGETHER.