Skip to content
Vol. VII · Issue 14 · The Submission Desk Filed under: Workplace, Anonymized, Permanent

A first-person account, reproduced verbatim

“By month seven I had stopped bringing my laptop to the office on Fridays. Not because I worked from home. Because the woman who ran the standup had started keeping a list of who answered their camera, and HR was using it in calibration. Nobody told us in writing. We just noticed the Friday invites stopped coming to anyone who declined.”

Anonymous · Verified Submission · 4 min read

Publish what actually happened. Your name stays out of it.

Do-Tell is a publishing desk, not a form. Every submission is a story that gets a cryptographic timestamp the moment it lands, a pass through our anonymization filter, and a permanent home on a company page that 2.1 million readers search before they sign an offer. We don't edit, we don't soften, and we don't know who you are.

Begin the wizard Or read what people ask first →

The Process

How a story gets published

Four steps. Roughly nine minutes. No editorial calls, no approvals, no one at Do-Tell sees your name at any point.

  1. Chapter I 01

    Write

    You write the story in a long-form editor that saves locally as you go. It accepts plain prose, names, dates, dollar figures, screenshots, and the kind of detail a recruiter would never print. There is no character limit worth respecting, but most published stories land between 600 and 1,800 words.

    → What you type is what readers will eventually see, full stop.

  2. Chapter II 02

    Anonymize

    Before anything is uploaded, our filter scans the draft for your name, your email, your manager's name, the names of coworkers you reference, your employee ID, your home address, and the IP address you're submitting from. The submission payload that reaches our servers contains none of it.

    → We strip your name before the page is even rendered.

  3. Chapter III 03

    Timestamp

    The moment the anonymized payload arrives, Do-Tell issues a cryptographic hash and writes it to a public ledger. This hash is a fingerprint of your story, frozen at a specific second. It is how readers know your account was written when you say it was — and how you prove, in a future dispute, that the version on the site is the exact version you sent.

    → The hash is public. Your name is not.

  4. Chapter IV 04

    Publish

    Within 24 hours, the story appears on the relevant company page, fully indexed and searchable. No editor reviews it for tone. No one on our team can delete it once it is live — not you, not us, not an employer who would prefer it gone. It is the same word-for-word submission the timestamp was taken on.

    → Once it ships, it ships. That is the point.

The numbers behind the desk

  • 84,217Stories published to date
  • 6,238Employers represented
  • 3.2Average stories per verified employer
  • ~24hMedian time from submission to live

The Honest Answers

What people ask before they hit publish

Five questions that almost every first-time submitter types into our reply thread, answered the way we would over a beer, not a press release.

“Could my employer find out it was me?”

We do not collect your name, your email, your IP, or your employee ID. The payload that reaches our servers is the payload that ships — and the payload has no author field. Our anonymization filter strips the obvious things (your name, your manager's, your coworkers') and we also run a second pass for indirect identifiers, like the specific dates of a layoff round that only three people in your org would know about. If a passage is too identifying to publish safely, we flag it for you before it goes live. We do not flag it to your employer.

“What if my company asks you to take it down?”

We say no. Do-Tell does not remove verified, lawful submissions, full stop. We have received requests from in-house counsel at Fortune 500s, from startups with PR firms on retainer, and from one notable case involving a threatened defamation suit — and the story in every one of those cases is still on the site. The platform's credibility, and yours as the author, depends on the file staying exactly where you left it.

“Can HR trace this back to me through the system?”

No. There is no log, no IP history, no email confirmation we send from a personal address, and no way to correlate a story with a submitter from inside our infrastructure. The cryptographic hash we publish proves when the story was written. It does not prove who wrote it, and we do not have the data to find out. That is by design, not by accident.

“Is anyone going to edit my words?”

No editor at Do-Tell will rewrite, soften, or “balance” your account. The only thing we do is run the anonymization pass described above, and we will only flag a passage if it is identifying, defamatory toward a named private individual, or in clear violation of U.S. law. If we do flag something, we tell you exactly what we flagged and why, and you decide what to do with it. Readers see exactly what you submitted.

“What if I regret it the morning after?”

Once a story is timestamped and live, it stays live. We tell every submitter this on the final step of the wizard, in plain language, with a confirm box you have to check. If you are on the fence, save the draft locally — the editor lets you export the raw text — and come back when you are sure. There is no penalty for closing the tab.

Press & Awards

Do-Tell's submission process has been written up by The New York Times, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, WIRED, and Vox, and the platform won the 2024 Webby Award for Best Community Website.

Final Notice

If you saw it, someone else is living it. Publish yours.

Nine minutes from now, your account could be on a company page that a stranger is reading at 11pm before their onsite next week. The clock starts when you do.

Submit Your Story Or get the Unfiltered digest instead →

Anonymized on the way in. Timestamped in public. Permanent once it lands.