When we were designing Anertia's prompt system, we spent a lot of time on a question that sounds simple: what do you ask someone when you want them to be honest?
Not "what do you ask when you want them to be interesting?" Not "what do you ask when you want them to be vulnerable?" Those are different questions, and they produce different answers.
Honest answers are specific. They are often uncomfortable. They do not resolve neatly. They contain contradictions. They are the kind of thing you would say to a close friend at midnight, not to an audience of strangers at noon.
The challenge of prompt design for an authenticity-focused platform is figuring out how to create the conditions for that kind of honesty at scale.
The Problem With Most Prompts
Most social platforms that use prompts: journaling apps, reflection tools, community platforms: default to positive framing. "What are you grateful for?" "What is something you are proud of?" "What did you learn this week?"
These prompts are not bad. But they are optimized for a specific kind of content: the kind that makes people feel good about themselves and about the platform. They are designed to produce shareable, feel-good moments.
The problem is that authenticity is not always feel-good. Sometimes the most honest thing you can say is "I made a mistake and I am not sure I have learned from it." Sometimes it is "I am succeeding by someone else's definition of success and I am not sure it is mine." Sometimes it is "I believe something that I am not ready to say out loud."
A prompt system designed for authenticity has to create space for those answers: not just the ones that make people look good.
The Design Principles We Used
We built Anertia's prompt system around four principles.
Specificity over generality. "What is something you believed last year that you no longer believe?" produces more honest answers than "What have you learned recently?" The more specific the prompt, the harder it is to answer with a performance.
Discomfort as a signal. We deliberately included prompts that were slightly uncomfortable to answer: not painful, but requiring genuine reflection. "What is something you are good at that you wish you were not?" "What is a compliment you have received that felt more like a burden than a gift?" These prompts signal that the platform is a safe space for complexity.
Contradiction as a feature. We included prompts that invited people to hold two things at once. "What is something you are proud of that you are also embarrassed by?" "What is a belief you hold that you cannot fully defend?" Authentic self-expression often involves contradiction, and a prompt system that only allows for clean, resolved answers will produce inauthentic content.
Temporal anchoring. Prompts that are anchored in specific time periods: "last year," "five years ago," "when you were twenty-five": tend to produce more specific and honest answers than prompts about the present. The past is safer to be honest about.
What the Data Showed
In the early user testing for Anertia, we ran two versions of the prompt system: a standard positive-framing version and the version built on our four principles. The difference in response quality was striking.
The standard version produced content that looked like a LinkedIn feed: polished, aspirational, professionally appropriate. The authenticity-focused version produced content that felt like a private journal that someone had decided to share.
The second version had lower engagement in the traditional sense: fewer likes, fewer shares. But it had higher resonance scores and higher return rates. People came back more often, not because the content was more entertaining, but because it felt more real.
That is the trade-off at the heart of authenticity-focused product design. You are not optimizing for engagement. You are optimizing for meaning. And meaning, it turns out, is a more durable product value than entertainment.
