Missed Connections admin breaks up with USC
As current account owner Will Domke leaves in May, he looks to pass the torch.
By MAX RUBENSTEIN
Delivered
In October 2020, Will Domke, a senior majoring in theatre with an emphasis in acting, began the Instagram account @usc.missedconnections. The account allows students to submit anonymous messages to campus crushes through a Google Form. With the user’s permission, those messages may then be posted for the account’s 11,300 followers to see and react to.
On Feb. 25, Domke posted a series of Instagram stories announcing that, as he prepares for graduation this May, he is ready to pass on the account’s ownership.
Will Domke, via Instagram @usc.missedconnections
When considering what he wanted in his successor, Domke wrote that anyone is welcome to apply, but that the account is his “baby,” so there will be an “interview process/vibe check.”
In an interview with the Daily Trojan, Domke said he is passing the account to Maya Zingaro, a junior majoring in business administration, as well as another admin. He also said the search is now over.
Domke said the idea for the account started between him and a friend in their freshman year.
“We didn’t anticipate it would get any traction … so the first 20 submissions were just lies that we made up,” Domke said. “Almost immediately people started submitting, which was really crazy.”
Domke said he thinks the instant success of the account was because people were feeling isolated and lonely during the coronavirus pandemic.
Will Domke
Domke said he doesn’t care about his anonymity as the owner of the account, and the larger challenge has been maintaining a regular posting schedule.
“It is really fun, but it also is 20, 30 minutes out of my day,” Domke said. “It’s cool to see all the submissions, and the ones that we’re not able to post are often really funny. I feel like I’m Gossip Girl.”
When deciding which submissions get posted, Domke said he sometimes has to delete submissions en masse, and other times has to set certain boundaries about what is appropriate to share with the public.
Will Domke, a senior majoring in theater, began the Instagram account @usc. missedconnections in October 2020.
“If they’re weird, I won’t post them,” Domke said. “I have various metrics that I set for myself like ‘Oh, I don’t want to post these things if they’re talking about someone’s body in a weird way, if they’re talking about race in a weird way.’ All these things that I think would make me uncomfortable if they were said about me.”
Domke also said whenever someone sends the account a direct message complaining about being mentioned in a post, which typically happens once or twice a month, he will take it down. Typically, though, after four years of running the account, he said he has pretty good intuition about which messages will make for good posts.
Although the account is anonymous, Domke said he has received numerous messages about success stories of relationships that originated from a Missed Connections post.
“We get messages that [say]
Domke said. “We’ve gotten a few that [say]
Alia Chand, a freshman majoring in art, said she once submitted a Missed Connection to help her start up a conversation with a guy in one of her classes.
“I didn’t know him very well, and I honestly couldn’t even tell he was single, but I didn’t want to ask,” Chand said.
Her message didn’t get posted for a few weeks, and Chand said she got to know the guy as a friend in person during that time.
“It did get posted and it was very obvious it was me, and so I ended up telling him it was me,” Chand said. “He also told me that three other people had asked him out that day because they had seen the Missed Connection, so I would definitely say it works.”
Zingaro said she and Domke met through mutual friends. As she knew he was graduating, she thought it would be funny to take over the position of the account’s owner.
Zingaro said she wants to ensure the account stays true to Domke’s vision even after he is gone, although she already has some ideas about slight alterations.
“I know that he’s not the biggest fan of mentioning Greek life. My personal boundaries on that are that I don’t really care,” Zingaro said. “I definitely think that there are more things that could be implicated since it is a really large platform, but also, I definitely think that since I’d only be running it for another year, I would still probably run stuff by him, just because it’s still not really my account.”
She also said she has ideas for how to grow the account’s current scope, including pictures of blurred faces and polls.
“I just think it’d be really funny to have polls done … like ‘Who’s someone to avoid at USC and why?’” Zingaro said. “Obviously, you have to filter through those responses … but if someone’s like, ‘Oh, I got an STI from this person [and] they didn’t tell me,’ that would be doing good for the community.”
Zingaro also provided an idea for a poll asking “Who is the best sex you’ve had?” but said she wants to be cautious of people’s boundaries.
“These are all things that are, to an extent, probably invasions of privacy, so you just have to be careful not to cross that line,” Zingaro said.
As she prepares to take over the account, Zingaro said she credits the account’s current success to two factors: USC’s tight-knit community and a shared interest for individuals to see whether they have been posted.
Maya Zingaro