Alexis P.

Let's say you're somebody suffering from depression or a similar mood disorder. That's fine, it's more common than most people realise, and it's nothing to be ashamed of. You should see a therapist for it, though.

This is advice that most of the users on Take This Life are receptive to. Of the people I interacted with on the site, the overwhelming majority of them were seeing a therapist and had been prescribed medication. For them, these forums were a support group rather than anything else.

However, Take This Life should probably be taken as evidence that mental health support groups should probably have some kind of mental health professional or social worker heading things to keep them on track. Without it, the group will eventually plummet into a perpetual feedback loop of negativity.

That's essentially what's happened with Take This Life. While intended as a support group, many threads plummet into perpetual negativity. Everyone's situation is completely hopeless; everyone's fighting a war they're doomed to lose. It's a defeatist mindset that I'm not entirely sure is helping anybody on the site.

Perhaps this line of thought is completely accurate for some of these people. Perhaps for some, it really is this bad. However, one of the common symptoms of depression and other similar mood disorders is a sense of hopelessness. Of course any support group that is overwhelmingly populated by those suffering from this kind of mindset is going to end up like this if there isn't someone there dedicated to guiding some group discussions.

While sites that attempt to provide a more productive approach to the online mental health support group exist, to my knowledge many of them are sites like ReachOut which are aimed at a very specific demographic. There really isn't anything that can fill the gap for a depression support group that is guided by a mental health professional of some description.

The more cynical part of me suspects that this is impossible. With Take This Life in particular, there's over 32,000 registered users and about 130 active users. This is according to the analytics at the bottom of the site's home page. Unless there was a very strong, concerted, well funded effort to make a more productive counterpart to this site work, it probably wouldn't work.

Plus, let's not forget that a number of the people who'd be drawn to a site like this are drawn there because they don't want to have to deal with professional therapists for a while. Maybe that's fair enough.

I don't think that Take This Life stands alone in the criticism that there needs to be some kind of guiding force to support groups like this. Certainly the mental health subreddits are prone to the same sort of issues that you see on this site.

While the intentions of Take This Life are inarguably noble, I feel like there's a better way of doing this. Perhaps I'm being overly optimistic in thinking that could ever be the case, however.

(If you or anyone you know are contemplating suicide, please consider calling a suicide hotline.)

A long time ago, this site tried to cover the same kind of niche that Students of the World covers. It was the e-pal site where the ads would let people contact you via email without having to put your email address up for anybody to see. The difference was that E-pal World was open to everybody while Students of the World was mostly catering to students.

In 2013 or 2014, the owners of the site made the decision to make the site more like a social networking platform. The new design of the site was something of an Interpals knock-off, if Interpals was done on even more of a shoestring budget.

This was a decision that made sense to some extent. The old design, much like the design Students of the World has almost always had, was perpetually stuck in the nineties.

However, the decision was a mistake. The new design wasn't much to look at, and it wasn't necessarily as user friendly as the previous iteration. It wasn't as user friendly as Interpals either, a site which I'd generally consider to be the gold standard for a site like this.

While the site was nothing special, I wanted to give it another try today. It seems like the site is down now, though there is still a listing for it on Google. Their Facebook page is still up as well, with a single status update from February 2014. That status is a simple description of what the site is, and seems pretty similar to the description of the service that was present on the site itself for a long time.

I think the mistake they made was that they wanted for the site to be more of a social media type thing. This wasn't necessarily why the people signing up for E-pal World wanted to use the service, though: some, especially Baby Boomers it seemed, were using the site because it gave them an excuse to use their email address. These aren't the same people who were hoping for a social media website--those people mostly go to Interpals, which was the case in 2013-2014 when the change was made as well.

I can understand the appeal of a decision like that, though. To some extent, you would hope that a huge change like that would help the site make money. However, I doubt even Interpals, with all of its regular users, would be making that much money in a year. With an epal/pen palling website, you're probably never going to be making huge amounts of money because it's such a niche interest.

Disney+ is one of the cheaper options among the popular streaming services at the moment, with its monthly fee only costing ~$12 a month (in Australia). The only one I can think of that's currently cheaper than Disney+ is Amazon Prime.

The flipside to this is that its content choice is often very limited: most of what's currently available on the site is stuff from the last twenty or thirty years. While the choices have expanded recently because of Disney's acquisition of Twentieth Century Fox having been finalised, there's still a pretty wide range of stuff that Disney had in its own backlog that they could have put on the site. This stuff might not have done as well with the current generation of kids, but it's stuff that'd go down well with most of the adults that are, y'know, paying for the service.

I think Disney has shot itself in the foot in this regard. One of the big selling points of Disney+ that they tend to include in a lot of the advertisements for the service has been that it's stuff from Disney, Pixar, LucasFilms, Marvel, National Geographic, and Twentieth Century Fox. Outside of Star Wars, the MCU stuff, and the more recently released Disney stuff, it's not really taking full advantage of this.

Still, the biggest benefit Disney+ has over other popular streaming services isn't actually anything to do with its selection. It's that it has some parental control features that other streaming services lack. In the profile settings page, you have the option of setting the highest content rating a person using that profile can watch. This makes a lot of intuitive sense because while it makes sense that an adult might want to see a slightly edgier movie on the site like one of the Alien movies, you might not want your eight-year-old to watch it unsupervised.

While I am totally aware that this was a measure taken just so Disney could protect its family friendly image, it's such an easy, intuitive thing to add that I have to wonder why other streaming services haven't added it. Netflix might have a kids' section, but its kids' section is mostly stuff for preschoolers and isn't stuff that'd necessarily be suitable for primary school kids. Disney+'s parental controls allows for that extra nuance that comes when dealing with older kids.

Still, I do think Disney+ would greatly benefit from adding to its selection. There's a lot of stuff National Geographic was coming out with when I was in high school that seems to mostly only be available online because of grainy bootlegged copies uploaded to YouTube, for example. While there might not be a huge audience for a show like Taboo, Disney's certainly getting less money for it now that it's mostly only available through YouTube uploads than they would if they gave it an official release on their streaming service.

OK Cupid is one of those sites I've used at various points in the last ten years or so. There's been times when I've gone out with people on there (though those relationships have been short lived), had hookups from there, and I'm reasonably familiar with some of the major changes on the site over the years.

One of the bigger transitions in recent years has been that more and more of the site has been hidden away behind a paywall. When I first used the site in 2014 or so, most of the site's major features were free to use. There were a few things that you had to buy a premium account for (stuff like being able to see who'd liked you account and so on), but enough of the site was free to use that it didn't really matter. A premium account might have more stuff, but the free accounts were easily used as well.

Ever since I think 2017-ish, the site has increasingly transitioned to being a more premium heavy service. This makes business sense for the company because they have to make their money somehow, and I guess it is a little difficult to be making money consistently when the service is optimally based around a revolving door of users. I'm not really sure it makes as much sense for consumers, because social media isn't a thing most people think of as being a thing you should pay for.

I think that's ultimately the story of a lot of the changes OK Cupid has made over the last three or four years. There's a lot of stuff that makes a lot of sense on a surface level, but the execution doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

The best example of this is the like feature. While five years ago, this was mostly just a premium thing that didn't necessarily affect the free user experience, now it's a central part of the site's design. Before you can message someone, you have to have liked their profile.

This makes sense on a surface level because that kind of easy proof that you liked each other's profiles can help with a match. It can also help cut down on some of the outright harassment you might expect to see on a site like this, given that there are people who would harass others if they didn't get a date. However, because you have to pay to see who's liked you, you end up missing out on a lot of potential matches if you're only using a free account.

The search function also leaves a lot to be desired. While once you could potentially search through all accounts, narrowing down the results based on your personal preferences, now you basically only get to see maybe five or ten accounts at a time, and you have to either like or pass on profiles if you want to see others. I think this is a silly design feature because it makes it more difficult to see how many people are currently active in your area, and how many people are just being recommended just because they happen to live in the same state as you.

You're also now unable to see who's viewed your profile and who hasn't. This used to be a fairly major feature of the site that was available with free accounts, but now it doesn't exist anymore. I think it'd make even more sense to have this kind of feature now that so much of the site is based around the like feature, because even if you didn't have a premium account, you might still be able to make an educated guess about who'd liked your profile and who hadn't.

The one good change OK Cupid has made has been to ask for text message verification when you sign up for a new account, similar to what you might go through to secure an email address. This can potentially limit the number of catfish overall on the site, especially over the long term, because less people will be willing to hand over their mobile phone number to an internet company just so they can screw around with other people for a little bit.

Still, overall, I feel like OK Cupid has gotten to the point where so much of the site's basic functions are hidden away behind a paywall for it to really be feasible to be using a free account anymore. I think the company would be better off just switching to a paid service at this point.

I think the biggest issue with Outlook is that they try to roll a little bit too much into it. There's no particular reason why they should be trying to integrate elements of Skype into Outook other than the same company owns both products.

Of course, you might be inclined to make the argument that some people want these things, but I don't think there'd be too many people like that. Just about everyone who wants a Skype account already has a Skype account. Really the only reason they might be inclined to do this would be to compete with the gmail IM system--a service that I doubt many people use.

Honestly, if it weren't for this and the constant promotional offers, I'd probably think it'd be fine to use Outlook as your primary email address. Other than these two issues, an Outlook account functions well, and you don't get an excessive amount of spam.

Mibba is a very user-friendly site. It's easy to work out how to use it, which makes it pretty easy to post content there. That's pretty much what you want for a site that was primarily aimed at teenagers (or at least was when I was using it).

From a design perspective, Mibba's interface looks fine. It certainly looks a lot better than sites like fanfiction.net and AO3. There's a part of me that thinks the site looked a lot better in 2010 when you could essentially do up your profile like you could with a MySpace profile, but I think that's a more nostalgic part of me that's romanticising my teenage years. God knows that some of the profiles on both MySpace and Mibba were an eyesore when you had the option of doing that.

While marketed as a site for aspiring authors, there definitely are certain genres of fiction that will typically go down well. The number one genre I ever wrote was smutty fan fiction. No matter how much praise I got for my other (admittedly quite lackluster) stories, it was typically my smutty Harry Potter fan fiction that got the most views.

That kind of thing is great if what you really want to do is write fan fiction. However, if you want to write anything else, you have to either be really good at gaming the social networking aspects of the site or you have to be posting at just the right time for a lot of people to see your work.

So while Mibba is easy to use and it certainly looks a lot better than some comporable sites, there's no denying that there's an aspect of it that's essentially a glorified fan fiction website. But you can quite easily turn that around and say that about any site like this: even places like Wattpad that tried to be the "serious" writing website for "serious" writers essentially became just another fan fiction site after a while.

Mibba is fine for what it's trying to be. It may not be the best site like this--I don't know; I haven't really used any sites other than this--but it's pretty easy to use and parts of the community weren't too bad.

A long time ago, I thought Facebook was great. This was in 2008-2011 when it was mostly just kids in high school and in university who were using it (I was 14 in 2008). But as it became more popular and more baby boomers and Gen Xers starting to use it, it started to go downhill as it slowly became more and more inundated with the most mind-numbing political memes and personal drama imaginable.

From a business perspective, having the site be as open and as accessible as possible makes sense. It's no secret that Facebook makes a whole lot of money from knowing everything about everyone. But from a personal level, I don't think it's worked out so great.

Social networking sites are often at their best when they have some kind of niche that they're geared towards. Reddit is a forum site that's geared towards having a lot of different communities talking about the things related to the theme of the subreddit. Tumblr is a social network made up of various fan communities and special interests as well, but in a microblogging/photo blogging kind of format.

But what does Facebook have going for it? It's the site for keeping up with old friends and with family members who live a long way away. It's a great idea on paper, and for the most part it has been a profitable one, but in reality, it turns out that if you let these people connect with each other in an online environment, they're mostly going to be sharing the most inane stuff imaginable. The people I thought were great once upon a time turn out to be the most annoying people.

Unfortunately, it's also socially required to have an account. Our culture assumes you're trying to hide something if you don't have a Facebook profile now, even if the reality is that you just don't want to know every passing thought of everyone you've met.

So I think it's one of those sites that would work better if it was mostly geared towards people who are/were still in school. Once the scope of the site expanded beyond that, the site began to spiral downhill.

How it works is that you're in control of a nation. Your nation will get issues every so often (once every couple of hours early on; but once or twice a day later). You decide what the right choice is based on the options given to you and you get some consequences based on that.

For most issues, there's no clear-cut right or wrong answer. Many of the options are designed to have both positive and negative effects. While some issues will have one answer that'll clearly be disastrous, the other two or three will usually be at least somewhat reasonable choices.

The issues are written to be humourous. The results are usually written to be that way, too.

While some other users have said the game is designed to frustrate conservatives, I don't think that's necessarily the case. Everyone understands that in the real world, whatever policy choices politicians make are going to have benefits and they're going to have drawbacks, regardless of which side of the political spectrum they're on.

It's the same with Nation States. If you think otherwise, you're probably not very good at nuanced thinking. You're probably also bad at knowing the difference between a fictional game (which Nation States absolutely is) and reality.

But generally, the game's pretty good. I'd definitely recommend it to people.

As other reviewers have noted, Reddit is very much the kind of site where it's as good as you want it to be, so long as you do the legwork of curating your front page properly.

One of the bigger criticisms I see of the site is that a lot of people feel like their speech is being censored. I don't see a whole lot of censorship happening on the main subreddits, to be honest. The times I have noticed comments being deleted have tended to be times when one or two users have been presenting their viewpoints in ways that simply weren't contributing to the overall discussion rather than which end of the political spectrum they were on.

While there are a lot of liberal subreddits, there's also subreddits that are very conservative leaning. Plus for the most part, the furthest left a lot of the former default subreddits like r/AskReddit tend to go as a whole is centre-left. There's generally enough conservatives on the site to keep it from going further left than that for the most part, regardless of what some critics have to say about it.

Generally, I tend to think that the people who complain about their speech being censored are probably people who need to learn to present their ideas in a more constructive manner. No particular subreddit is guaranteed to safeguard your free speech rights beyond giving you the opportunity to present them in a way that benefits the conversation, which is what happens for the most part, with the exception of a few subreddits here and there. Ironically, r/The_Donald is one subreddit notorious for banning people who disagree with them.

While I generally like the site and think it's easy to waste a lot of time there, a lot of the userbase is made up of some of people so whiny, they make the stereotypes of Tumblr users seem reasonable by comparison.

This site was developed by the same people who developed Chat Hour. While this site has tended to be a little less notorious than Chat Hour, they still have an advertisement for it whenever you log in to the desktop version of the site. Just because of that, I suspect that if I dig too deep, I'll end up seeing a lot of the same issues with this site that Chat Hour is notorious for.

Despite presumably being developed by the same people who developed Chat Hour, 111 Dating is somehow even uglier. It really leans into that kind of '90s website design look; presumably because the people making the site have a tiny budget and no skills to work with.

Some of the features of the site are decent, but I feel like for every good thing this site does, there's some kind of downside to it. It's simple enough to scroll through the profiles, but there's no way to narrow them down based on your preferences. Writing your profile is simple and intuitive, but there's no way to add a small bio--something that you can do on their other site, Chat Hour.

The good news is that the user base is small enough that you'd probably be able to find someone you'd want to talk to fairly quickly. The flipside to that is that there probably is only gonna be a few people like that, and if things don't work out between you and them, you're out of luck. Depending on where you live, the only people in your area might be outside of your desired age range as well.

There's also only a limited number of places you can choose from as well. While you can choose any country of the world, the site also requires you choose which city you're closest to. That's fine if you live in a place small enough that picking one of two or three major cities is a pretty good indicator of where you live or there's enough cities in your state or province that the site lists that you probably live close to one of them, but what happens if you live in a place where it's feasible to not live particularly close to any of the cities listed?

The other good news is that none of this is hidden away behind a paywall. All the available features are free. The bad news is that there's enough issues with the site that the creators would probably need some extra money to fix all of it, and the userbase is small enough that they're probably never gonna make that money through ad revenue.

Stan is an Australian streaming service. It's actually pretty popular here, too; apparently it's subscriber count is second only to Netflix's.

In terms of user interface, it's pretty similar to Netflix, which is fair enough, because there's only so many different interfaces you can have for a streaming service like this. Broadly speaking, if you're a fan of Netflix's interface, you'll probably be a fan of how this site is laid out as well.

I think Stan's biggest issue is that it doesn't really have much of a niche. It's more like an aggregate site more than it is its own thing. Most of its exclusive shows tend to be stuff like Looking For Alaska, which were originally made for different services in the United States, or they're Australian-made stuff that maybe two people total have watched. At least with other popular streaming services, the people running them can make an argument about what the niche is--Disney+ is focusing on being family friendly, Netflix has increasingly focused on its original content in the last few years, and Amazon Prime focuses on being the worst overly monetised nightmare imaginable.

The good thing about its content selection has tended to be that it has a lot of older shows from the '90s and '00s that I remember watching in high school (stuff like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Stargate SG-1), along with some older movies from the '50s and '60s like Run Silent, Run Deep, Barbarella, and Rear Window. I feel like it'd probably be a good business strategy for the site to double down on this kind of content going forward because there's not really any other services in Australia that are readily hosting a wide range of older movies and shows.

Still, the user interface is at least usable, and it has a pretty respectable selection, so it's still a decent service. I'm not really sure if it's worth $14 a month, especially at a time when there's so many streaming services that paying for multiple services can cost as much as pay TV did 10-15 years ago, though.

Amazon Prime is a service that I think is torn between having a decent selection and being a honey pot for Amazon. Because of this, it's easily the worst of the streaming services that I'm currently subscribed to.

The site has a decent-ish selection, but half of what it offers is hidden behind a pay wall. Like, there'll be a certain selection that you get just because you've subscribed to the service and you're paying the monthly fee, but then there'll be a bunch of other movies also offered that you're still expected to pay for if you want to watch them on Prime.

Before you watch an episode of a show, you'll also get an ad for other stuff also on Prime. You can skip these ads instantly, but they're still a nuisance. The site also offers no way of skipping recaps or show intros.

None of these things are issues with the other streaming services I'm subscribed to. It's pretty clear that Amazon built this site to be the cheapest possible site they could make while still being as profitable as possible. Unless there's a specific thing you want to see on Prime that's not offered elsewhere, you're better off not paying for Prime.

Okay, so full disclosure: I've mostly been using the on demand viewer of the site for the last couple of days, so that's what I'm going to be focusing on in this review.

The good news is that the On Demand streaming service works fine. Like, it doesn't glitch out when I've been watching a movie or anything like that. It gives you three options for quality (720p, 360p, and 224p) which is admittedly a bit low when compared to Netflix or even YouTube at this point, but by the same token, this is a *free* service.

They literally let you watch movies and shows on the site for free. This is the main selling point of the site, in my opinion. While it does require an email address for sign up, it doesn't require any banking details or anything like that. As far as I can tell, it doesn't even try to validate that you are who you say you are, so if you're a bit shy about giving online companies (or, in this case, a government-owned broadcast company) your real name, you don't need to worry too much.

However, this does provide some major drawbacks for the site. The most noticeable drawback is that there are ads involved when you stream a movie. There's one set just before the movie starts, and then a few more over the duration of the movie.

Thankfully, these ads aren't too intrusive. The ads also seem to be placed towards the end of a scene, so it's not like they're coming up in the middle of a line of dialogue like some of the ads on YouTube are wanton to do.

The flipside to this is that because the movies I've watched on SBS On Demand have been movies I haven't seen previously, I don't actually know if they've been edited for the ad breaks or not. Still, if they are, this may not entirely be the fault of the SBS--a lot of streaming services, premium ones like Netflix included, are paying for the right to host a movie for a certain duration, and pretty much have to host the version the company gives them, regardless of whether or not that cut of the film is the cut you'd get on DVD or Bluray.

The other thing with streaming specifically is that, unlike other streaming services, SBS On Demand doesn't seem to handle going back in the stream as well as other services. If you're forced to go back a bit because you didn't catch some dialogue or you wanted to watch a scene again, you're forced to either hit the back ten seconds button the twenty or so times it takes you to get to the start of the scene. If you click and point at a place on the progress bar like you might on YouTube or Netflix, the player might lag for long enough that you're better off refreshing the page to get the movie going again.

That being said, refreshing the page won't force you to go back to the start of the movie again (an issue I've occasionally had with Stan and Disney+). It'll take you back to where you were in the movie.

The actual range of films and shows is pretty limited, but by the same token, this isn't intended to be a huge expansive thing like other streaming services are. It's mostly supposed to just be stuff that's aired on SBS recently that you might have missed. To that end, the range is pretty good. Plus, y'know, it's a free service; even if it wasn't mostly just stuff the SBS had aired on TV lately, you couldn't reasonably expect it to have a huge range anyway.

The internal search function works pretty well. In fact, the predictive text aspect of it seems to be its best feature, as it's entirely limited to what's already on the site. It's not like on Netflix where you might search for something, seeing that the title is being suggested by the search function, only to find out they don't have it.

So overall, I think SBS On Demand is a good service, and while the drawbacks it does have are easily noticeable, they're pretty minor, all things considered.