Cyber Culture: Ask.fm's new users may be walking headlong into a stormcloud of anonymous abuse

Sign up to our free weekly IndyTech newsletter delivered straight to your inbox Sign up to our free IndyTech newsletter Sign up to our free IndyTech newsletter SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. For those not familiar with it, it's essentially an "ask me anything" question-and-answer site where you create your own text-based chatshow; you're the guest, the rest of the ask.fm community are the hosts. Having beaten off competition from the now-defunct Formspring and vying strongly with Tumblr's "Ask" feature, ask.fm now has 57 million slightly needy users who revel in the attention it brings them. Ask.fm, almost an anti-Facebook, has an unregulated, slightly transgressive feel that's undoubtedly part of its allure; some of the questions thrown at you when you sign up, like "If you could do anything now, what would you do? But the response of its founders – to say that the site merely reflects the shortcomings of society and lack of education – seems slightly irresponsible, particularly when 200,000 new users each day may be walking headlong into a stormcloud of anonymous abuse that they're simply unable to handle.