You can’t talk about Trinity romantic confessional pages without paying homage to the OG, Trinder. This year, Trinder has come back to grace us all with its tantalisingly spicy presence. But who are the elusive figures behind the platform’s new, shiny Instagram façade? We sat down with the rather charming Trinder team to talk all things lust, love and, of course, that infamous wait-time…
What inspired you to revive the page?
The day before New Year’s Eve I woke up from a weird dream that Trinder was revived and it was on Instagram. I told a few of my friends and we thought ‘Why don’t we do just that?’
Why did you choose to use Instagram rather than Facebook?
Trinder had already been established on Facebook. We didn’t want to redo the page on Facebook in case the original admins decided to revive their page.
How much time does running the page take up in a typical day?
Not much. We have software that posts a new trinder on the hour. The software was designed by this amazing guy who reached out to the page and just gave up his time and knowledge to help us. So, running Trinder literally takes only a few minutes daily.
What are your favourite ‘type’ of Trinders to receive?
We love ones when you can kind of guess who the trinder has been written about, or ones where you think ‘Well, it could be about this person or this person…’ We still do this with our friends – analysing who each trinder is addressed to – even though our friends don’t know we run the page.
Do you have one specific favourite post?
There’s too many to choose just one, and we love a few that are waiting to be posted. We could tell you the people’s favourite, though? Currently, the most popular is number 391:
‘Shout-out to every first years who thought college was gonna be a lot of alcohol fuelled good times.
Instead you get awkward zooms with strangers. If I go to another zoom quiz I think I’ll genuinely contemplate becoming a priest because at least then you get a free house for your lack of sex.’
Do you prefer it when Trinders are specifically addressed to one person, or do you enjoy more general appeals/comments?
Yes definitely! Or, we also love trinders which could apply to quite a few people. We really like to see people tagging their friends in the comments. That’s what’s so great about the page in general – you can really get a lot of people involved and excited.
Are there some Trinders which you refuse to post? Do you have any rules about post content?
There are some we don’t post. In fact, we’re currently looking back on old trinders and checking that there aren’t full names posted. We don’t want to ever make people feel uncomfortable or targeted.
Then, there are trinders which are just one word and we’re like, ‘It’s a waste.’ It’s fine to send in a one-word post once, but we get times where it’s just one single word submission after another.
We also want people to know that they can request to delete their submitted trinders before and after they are posted. So, don’t worry if you send us something late at night that you come to regret in the morning.
How do you keep track of all the Trinders that come in? Do you try and post them consistently (both in terms of time and format)?
Yes. We post all trinders in chronological order because of the software we use.
Do you think that you’ll be able to keep the page’s rate of posting up over the whole term, especially when exams draw near?
The rate will stay consistent if people keep submitting. Actually, even the current backlog should ensure that Trinder continues at the same paste throughout the term. We have about 20 trinders posted a day, and there doesn’t seem to be any indication of that slowing down.
Do you think that you’ve ever received a Trinder about yourself? How did it make you feel?
I don’t think any of us have, except for the one that was about the Trinder admin. The person who submitted that trider was super nice, so it made us all feel good.
Do you think that you’ve ever received a confession about one of your close friends? Did you tell them?
We would never tell them in advance because then they would know who we were, but once they’re posted all of us love to discuss trinders with our friends. We message them like ‘Oooooo this might be about you!’ We love going over who particular trinders might be about.
Do your close friends know that you run the page?
Literally not a single person knows who we all are, and normally most of us are pretty open! (Laughs).
Do you think that you will ever reveal who you are to the student body at large?
We don’t think so. None of us did this with the intention to reveal who we are or anything. We just wanted to revive Trinder because we all really loved the Trinder Facebook page.
Have you ever sent in your own Trinder?
Back when it was on Facebook, a few of us did, yes. None of us have done it now, have we? (Shaking of heads). We’ve helped friends draft them though.
Are you able to see who has sent in each Trinder?
No. It is absolutely and completely confidential.
Do you ever wonder who has sent in a Trinder? What about that particular Trinder made you wonder who wrote it?
Definitely! Especially if we think it’s about someone one of us knows. We tend not to wonder about the vaguer ones. That being said, we do want to know the gossip. We run this page for a reason. (Laughs).
Do you know of any pair who have gotten together/hooked up as a result of your page?
We don’t think so. We certainly haven’t been told about any particular cases. If people want to tell us that they got together as a result of the page though, great! We love success stories and are really glad that the page might be playing a role in making people happy.
Do you hope that each Trinder leads to something more, or are you happy enough just that each Trinder writer got to speak their mind?
We like that Trinder lets people state their mind. When they do speak their minds, it doesn’t mean that they want more. If they do want and get more, then that’s amazing. You can make Trinder what you want to be.
What do you think of posts which are no longer about love and lust?
Some of them are quite entertaining. Most of us do like some of the ones that are just complaining – especially if they’re about our courses. It’s probably the same for other people? Obviously, some people don’t like them, but there must be other people do.
Have you ever thought about categorising posts?
We haven’t discussed it before. Um, we wouldn’t be sure how we could go about that, I guess…
What is your stance on the current lengthy waiting times for submitted Trinders to be posted?
We know the wait time is a pain and wish we could improve it. But, we can’t just spam people’s Instagram feeds. If people are cool with more posts a day, we can do another poll on stories, but we can’t just spam everyone if the majority of people don’t want that. We have over a thousand posts in the queue. We can’t post like a thousand times per day.
Did you think that Trinder would be this popular when you first created the Instagram page?
We didn’t think it would explode so quickly, but we’re really happy that it did. It’s a bit of light hearted fun in difficult times, and the joy it brings people is amazing!
Do you think that your role as page admins has changed as Trinder has become more and more popular?
A little bit. In the beginning, Trinder was basically run all on the Notes app. Whenever one of us posted, we had to be rigorous in insuring there was no personal information in the screenshots. When you’re trying to ensure that a group of you remain anonymous, as you can imagine, it’s no easy feat.
Now everything is more automated. We still have to check through every day. But, no one need worry about any of our sleep schedules. (Vigorous laughter).
Just to add, our software engineer wants to stay anonymous, but he’s a gem and we can’t thank him enough.
What is the inspiration behind your collaborations with various different societies and groups?
They’ve all reached out to us. First was Lawsoc who messaged the page saying that they had an event and would love to work with us on it. In the past few days, a LOT of groups have reached out – especially because of Valentine’s Day. Mostly, we just share events for promotion. It’s not hugely labour intensive, you know?
As you’ll know, there is now a second digital romantic confessional page available to students. What do you think are the main differences between Trinder and Campus Confessions? How did you feel when the new page was created?
Trinder is the OG. (Laughs).
Being serious, we do love Campus Confessions. We have a group chat, and they’re great.
They’re really nice and seem so genuine.
(Showing Trinder a transcript of my interview with ‘campusconfessionstcd’)
(Vigorous laughter). We would like to thank our drunk uncle(s) for joining us on Instagram. We would also like to apologise to him/her/them(?) for our wait times.
Do you hope that the page is mostly used by people who don’t live on campus, or are you happy when campus residents send in confessions?
We’re cool with whoever sends in a trinder. If you’re a Trinity student, or even just fancy a Trinity student, you’re welcome to submit a trinder.
I have to ask because everyone’s aware that we’re in the middle of a global pandemic. Do you worry that your page might encourage people to meet physically during a time when we are encouraged to stay apart?
Whilst we do hope that people feel connected with others through the page, we can’t and don’t encourage people to meet up physically because of the circumstances.
How important do you think that outlets like yours are when we are prevented from all coming together physically?
They’re so important because they’re really fun. We all enjoy reading everyone’s trinders. It’s a bit of a social interaction that you don’t know you need. You can’t just drop something casually into conversation anymore or say something the next time you see things. We give everyone a place to do that in the current environment.
Do you think that you would have revived the page if it weren’t for Covid-19?
We hope so because we’re really enjoying it. So, yes? To make it clear, though, Covid isn’t the sole reason we revived the page. It all started with a dream and us just remembering this amazing thing that was.
Do you have any other questions or comments for students and fans?
We really appreciate everything – your support of the page, your submissions. Keep the trinders coming and we’re really sorry for the wait time! If you want something posting, just slide into the dms and we’ll try and sort something out.
If I, having spent some time chatting to the Trinder team, have anything to say to the page’s fans, it’s that the page’s admins really are just as lovely as you think!
