Imagine an app where people anonymously vote for others. If questions like, “who is the prettiest girl in the room” or “who has the most embarrassing victory dance” surfaced among your peers’ phones and they got to vote, or not to vote for you, how would you feel? Imagine being able to see how many votes others have and then seeing yours. Well, you don’t have to imagine with the help of the new app Gas.

Because of the anonymity of Gas, it can give people a false sense of confidence. Sophomores Miyah Allison and Alex Rosenthall both admit that one of the things they like about this app is that they can tease their friends. For example, choosing one of your friends as “future mathematician”, when you know they are really bad at math. While messing with your friends is one thing, some people may take this too far. It could crush someone if they get voted “someone I want to take to prom”, and then find out from word of mouth that it was a joke. Confidence can be built than knocked down all through the anonymity of this app. Gas could also cause people to rely on the things they are voted on for confidence and adds pressure to maintain their image. Allison explains, “I get excited to see what other people think of me.” And many people can probably relate. As teens, we often rely on people’s compliments and critiques to have self confidence. Seeing votes for being attractive or smart or funny will cause people to want to try harder to stay that way and want to keep getting votes which could substantially affect their mental health. 

So if this app can hurt people’s feelings, why did it become so popular in the first place? “I saw it on my friends’ stories and they told me to download it,” says sophomore Miyah Allison. “It seemed like a fun idea and lot’s of people I know have it,” agrees sophomore Alex Rosenthall. And for a while everyone would be enjoying this app and having fun voting on their friends. But after using this app for some time, many people have developed new opinions. Allison predicts Gas will quickly end its trend because “it will get boring and they will eventually run out of good questions.” And this makes sense because no one will want to answer the same silly questions for months. Let’s face it, unless they add new features to prevent the repetitiveness or make it less hurtful, Gas will not be staying on teens phones for much longer.