The Advice Line solicited advice from strangers as a social experiment

This summer while wandering around San Francisco, you might've noticed some mysterious flyers posted on street poles. The designs on the "Advice Line" flyers ranged from a simple illustration of a rotary phone to more absurd layouts asking questions such as, "Bad at life? Yeah that's what we thought." The flyers implored San Franciscans to call a number, and, as one of the flyers said, "F*ck around and find out."

Upon calling the hotline (which I did, multiple times), a robotic voice greets you and flips the script on the typical advice line format. Instead of offering advice, the operator solicits suggestions from callers on questions ranging from relationship dilemmas to the dangers of being chased by squirrels.

"There were around 15 prompts that I rotated, and it would assign them randomly," said creator Danielle Egan, a 26-year-old born and raised in San Francisco who works as a BizOps associate. "Most of them were pretty silly, so they often elicited silly responses. But it was also funny when it was a silly prompt and people gave very serious, genuine answers." Some of the best answers, in response to a romantic quandary about infidelity, were turned into a song shared on her Substack and presented recently at a salon on the intersection of art and technology that was held at the Internet Archive headquarters.

The flyers resulted in 244 voicemail messages, although Egan suspects countless callers hung up after being caught by surprise with the prompt to record a message. If you stayed on the line after sharing advice, you were funneled through a purposefully confusing phone tree asking callers to push buttons to answer questions such as, "How many fingers am I holding up?"

She presumed that many of the callers who hung up were younger, citing Gen Z's hesitation to talk on the phone (a survey of individuals ages 18-34 found that around 70% preferred texting), but noted that the younger-sounding callers often dialed in as a group.

"People would call with their friends, so I'd hear multiple people yelling over each other ... I thought it was really cute having this slice of little strangers and friend group dynamics that I could hear through these recordings," she said.

Aside from a few aggressive messages and one preachy religious rant, most of the responses were surprisingly normal, and the quality of advice was "pretty good," Egan said. For instance, when asked whether an unfaithful boyfriend deserved a swarm of bees sent to his house, a plurality of respondents said yes (although some suggested less aggressive tactics, like dripping oil from tinned fish inside the house).

Similar to some of her other projects, which ranged from a citywide scavenger hunt to a hoax restaurant, the Advice Line gave her a renewed faith in the spirit of San Francisco. That was thanks partly to the diversity of the callers -- which ranged from full families to raucous screaming teens -- but mostly due to the fact that people were simply curious enough to call a random number and blurt out the first piece of advice that came to mind.

"As a whole, San Francisco is pretty curious and open to whimsical things," Egan said.