In January 2026, a new community popped up on Reddit, the online message board site. Called /r/GirlDinnerDiaries, it now has a sizable 6 million members and invites people to post a photo of a meal—whether it’s something you’re eating while you post or another meal that gets at your state of mind—along with an anonymous blurb venting or soliciting advice. “My partner only feels disgust at the idea of me as a mom,” reads one. “I feel like it’s never going to be OK,” says another.
The point is to activate the feeling of sharing over food, but over the internet. The snapshots are messy, yet evocative: French fries consumed in a nightclub, a breakfast burrito in a diner, yesterday’s lunch eaten hastily over a keyboard with a plastic fork. The posts wax poetic about the fate of marriages and the bizarre serendipity of life. Reading these dishy dispatches feels like staying up late with friends you rarely see, working over all that’s gone down in your life in search of some meaning.
Why are millions of people so captivated by these nameless confessionals served with a side of candid, unposed food photography? Scientists who study self-disclosure—the act of sharing personal, sensitive information with others—have some thoughts about why we share our deepest, darkest secrets on the internet.
Revealing ourselves builds trust
Talking about yourself feels pleasurable, and there’s science to back that up, says Leslie John, a professor of business administration at Harvard Business School and author of the book Revealing. She points to experiments conducted by psychologists Diana Tamir and Jason Mitchell, where people having their brains scanned in an fMRI machine answered either normal trivia questions or questions about themselves. “They found that in the ones that got to self-disclose, the pleasure centers of the brain were activated,” says John. “That’s pretty powerful.”
Sharing feels good because it’s necessary for human social interaction, John speculates. “When you self-disclose, when you take the social risk—and it really is a social risk—of sharing something a little bit personal, a little sensitive, you’re modeling that you trust the recipient. That gesture is implicitly saying, ‘Hey, I trust you not to make a fool out of me; otherwise, I wouldn’t be sharing this.’ And when you do that, it causes the other person to trust you back. So trust begets trust,” she says.
In fact, John’s work has found that people are more interested in dating a hypothetical person who admits that they’ve done something terrible than someone who declines to answer the question. “It’s better sometimes to admit the worst possible thing than to conspicuously abstain,” she says.
Posting a photo of a paper plate with yesterday’s messy BBQ and a brownie you ate while processing getting fired is, in the age of the perfectly lit Instagram plate, a similar kind of move. “It’s super relatable,” says John. “Showing things that are unvarnished is kind of paradoxically attractive.”
How the internet changes the equation
Psychologists and sociologists used to think of self-disclosure mainly in the sense of sharing with people you know in real life, says sociologist Tamar Ashuri of Tel Aviv University. “The original studies back in the ’50s and ’60s on self-disclosure focus on face-to-face interactions,” she says. “In intimate relationships, people disclose, and it’s kind of an ultimate goal. You can’t sustain an intimate relationship if you don’t.” Another situation where people might self-disclose is the stranger-on-a-train context. It’s also face-to-face, but there is no lasting link, so the risks of disclosure are lower.
But the arrival of the internet, and social media especially, produced new forms of self-disclosure that scientists are still working to characterize and understand. In the case of /r/GirlDinnerDiaries, says Ashuri, posters are anonymously disclosing intimate thoughts in a public forum, stranger-on-a-train style, with no face-to-face interaction, and yet it is still somehow gratifying.
That combination emerged almost by accident, says the subreddit’s founder, a young woman named Taylor, who asked to be identified only by her first name. She had been posting frequently in another community, called Girl Dinner, and noticed a split: Some people wanted to know the slice-of-life stories behind the meals, while others only wanted to see the food. She created Girl Dinner Diaries as an overflow space for people who wanted both—and it took off almost immediately. “One of my favorite things is going out with the girls for some drinks and some appys and venting, getting it all off my chest,” Taylor says. Girl Dinner Diaries offered a place to do that without leaving the couch.
Not every diary is wrenching. Taylor’s favorite post is a happy one: A woman woke up to discover that her husband had created a scavenger hunt for her, then shared a photo of the pasta with burrata they ate that evening. “It looked quite fancy,” Taylor says. “It looked very delicious.”
Whether the story is heartwarming or devastating, the meal is an essential part of the formula. “Food provides a very positive, ordinary, culturally familiar medium,” Ashuri says. “But in this case, and this is what makes it so special, it allows people to express extraordinary issues…The food makes the extraordinary feel more ordinary.” She gives the example of one recent post, in which a woman posted a birthday cake and revealed that she and her son had celebrated his birthday in a domestic violence shelter. “I think this combination is extremely significant,” she says.
The setup allows posters to reveal what are sometimes extreme experiences to a community gathered around a shared sensibility—with the unifying force of a leftover chimichanga presiding over it all. Food helps make the extreme relatable. The subreddit also tightly controls who can enter the conversation: Only approved commenters are allowed to respond, adding a layer of protection to a forum built around unusually intimate disclosures.
Should we all be self-disclosing more?
There’s a happy medium to everything—don’t, perhaps, take to the web with every mental dip or life hiccup. And sharing online may not bring the same benefits as sharing in real life, cautions John. “Social media in so many ways facilitates self-disclosure,” she says. “But in many ways this medium doesn’t give you the benefit you’re looking for (e.g., real social bonding, connectedness).”
Indeed, research suggests that people who post to social media every day tend to score worse on measures of mental health. Posting online can give easy access to reassurance from others, but this behavior can sometimes become destructive—if we don’t get the reassurance we seek, that’s a big blow, and constant reassurance may not help in solving the larger problems.
But John thinks that in general, offline, we overestimate the harms of oversharing, while underestimating the costs of staying silent.
The impulse to put an experience into words may help even when no one else reads them. Some of social psychologist James Pennebaker’s research suggests that privately writing about traumatic events can provide significant psychological relief, and even boost the immune systems of some patients.
John never really applied her findings about disclosure to her own life, though, until she was working on her book about sharing. “Every time in my life that I could think of where I overshared, where I felt that cringe of TMI, it sucked in the moment. But every single time there was something amazing and redeeming in the long haul about it,” she says. “That made me think, ‘Oh wow, the decision we’re making is systematically biased’…You get immediate negative social feedback, but there are benefits too. People trust you, people like you, people confide in you. Those come down the road.”
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