A New Way to Connect with Friends on Saturn

We're continuously evolving our product in response to user feedback. Over the past few months, we have repeatedly heard from thousands of students that our unverified user experience and verification process have made it unduly difficult for legitimate new users to access their school communities and utilize the benefits of Saturn. Today we’re announcing a few updates to help students access the product while maintaining our network’s integrity. We plan to release them to all users over the coming weeks.

Redacted School Directories

To foster a better sense of community, unverified users are now able to see a redacted school directory. This directory displays only their classmates’ first names and avatars, with all profiles appearing as private.

Friending

We’re also allowing unverified users to send and receive friend requests, and then to view their friends’ profiles after friend requests are accepted. Users who receive a friend request from, or send a friend request to, someone who is unverified will see a notice in the app that they should proceed only if they’re interacting with someone they recognize and trust.

Friending as a Verification Signal

Finally, friending will be a pathway for users to get verified and access our full product experience: if a user has friend requests accepted by a certain number of verified others, we will use this as an additional signal in our user verification process and verify them. Verification on Saturn can happen in a variety of ways, including via contact book overlap and school email verification. The steps described in this post will further strengthen our system’s accuracy and should allow more legitimate students to get verified, addressing user feedback.

We are confident that these updates will meaningfully improve the experience of legitimate users on Saturn.

Updates to the user experience for unverified users on Saturn.

For more information about user safety on Saturn, visit www.joinsaturn.com/safety-center