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Alexis P.

4
Level 4 Contributor
Australia

Contributor Level

Total Points
4,524

33 Reviews by Alexis

  • YouTube

7/22/18

YouTube is the biggest and most ubiquitous video sharing site on the internet available today. It's gotten to the point where there's no real way to compete with the site simply because it has enough money behind itself to always be improving itself.

The downside of YouTube being so ubiquitous is that it's almost impossible for there to be anyone competing with the site. It's just too expensive for anyone to really be doing that unless a major corporation decides to throw endless amounts of money at them.

Because of this and because there's always been issues with YouTube having to negotiate its way through the corporate hell of finding advertisers, the relationship between YouTube and the people who make a living from making content for the site has always seemed fraught. There's regularly some new scandal about a new YouTube policy or because they're enforcing the terms of service in a way people perceive as inconsistent, or because there's some issue with ad revenue.

I think YouTube's ubiquity kinda hurts it as well. Really the site's only recourse if an advertiser says there's too much offensive content on the site is to essentially say, "Sure, but at least we're not 4chan or a porn site." There's no option for them to say, "Yeah, but look at the company practices of this other site; this kind of thing is industry standard."

In terms of usability, YouTube is the gold standard of video hosting. There's probably never going to be another site that's quite as good as this one when it comes to ease of use. As much as people like to complain about the site being worse than ever before, I think in a lot of ways, it's much easier to use than it was in '08 or '09.

While the standards for what's considered monetisable content on YouTube has seemed to get stricter as the years have gone on, I think this is mostly because the site has grown more concerned over what's going to fly with advertisers as the years have gone on. As it stands right now though, there's still plenty of channels who are doing content about anything you can imagine and many are still able to find an audience.

  • InterPals.net

7/15/18

I've read through a lot of the reviews on here and there seem to be a lot of people who don't like the site. While I can understand some of these gripes, here's the rub: Interpals is one of the best sites for penpals, epals, and online friends that you're going to find.

While sometimes the response rate can be less-than-spectacular, you can say that about most sites like this. Of course people are less likely to respond to you if there's no clear, obvious common ground between the two of you, or if half your message and/or profile is lamenting how nobody ever responds to you, or if you send a message that's only a few words long and your profile is basically blank.

While this might seem like I (and a lot of people who use Interpals) are basically raging narcissists who get off on being rude to people, you have to understand that the internet isn't always like places in the physical world. A lot more people will be trying to talk to you, so sometimes you just have to be a lot more selective about who you respond to, and you have to put a little bit of effort into making yourself stand out.

I mean, it's not too uncommon for me to get four or five messages from people I haven't spoken to before on a day when I've been on Interpals all day. This isn't a huge amount compared to the numbers other people get, but it's enough that you do have to make some decisions regarding who you respond to and who you don't. In my case, the people who just say "Hi, how are you?" and show no indication that they've read more than two or three words of my profile are the people who aren't getting a response.

I think there's a good chance that a lot of the people who want to complain about how Interpals is a haven for narcissists just aren't thinking about that aspect of things. Sometimes the case just is that you're going to have to decide between two people, and a lot of people are going to err on the side of responding to the person who sends a message that asks them a couple of questions about themselves and their interests rather than the person who just says hello.

I don't think that's indicative of people on the site generally being stuck up; it's indicative that people appreciate it when others put a bit of effort into getting to know them. It's not like people on the site are expecting a 2,000 word essay straight off the bat; most will be satisfied with a couple of lines about you and a couple of questions that you wanted to ask them based on their profile.

I think that's what a lot of the people here who are complaining about the bad response rate are failing to realise. You don't have to be writing long messages to people straight off the bat or resort to only saying hello--there a lot of middle ground between these two extremes, and that's what most people are hoping for.

Really, I think most people who complain about a bad response rate tend to be people who can't handle the fact that they're not always the kind of person people want to talk to, or they're people who don't realise that people online don't owe you their time.

There are some good, interesting people on Interpals who I've enjoyed talking to a great deal. While some of these conversations haven't lasted as long as I would have hoped, neither do some conversations I've had in real life; and neither do some of the friendships I've had in real life.

While as I said, the response rate may not always be as good as you hoped, that's true of a lot of places on the internet. Generally speaking, I've found that as long as you're willing to put some effort into your introductory message, you'll be able to find at least a few people who would like to be friends with you.

Interpals is an easy-to-use site that has a great mod team. While there have been obviously fake profiles that have been up for a surprisingly long time, the mod team will generally crack down on them fairly quickly once they've been reported. Usually the case is more that nobody's reported a problem rather than the mods are intentionally ignoring it.

Plus the mod team is just great in general, and rarely have I ever seen a mod team that's more even handed. Sometimes there have been cases where I've seen them make decisions I've disagreed with, but those tend to be the exception rather than the rule and I can usually at least see where they're coming from with the decision.

In terms of overall usability, Interpals is probably the easiest-to-use epal/pen pal website you're going to find, especially if you're like me and you don't want to pay to sign up. The site design is about as intuitive as you'd hope for. Plus, for the most part, Interpals doesn't really have the glaring on-site cultural issues that a lot of other sites of this nature tend to have.

Interpals is just overall a good site, and as I said, as long as you're okay with putting the effort into giving yourself a good introduction, you'll find some people who'll have a good conversation with you.

  • Sbs.com.au

3/6/22

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.

  • Kids in mind

3/26/19

When I first heard about this site, I was expecting it to be the kind of site where they're passing some kind of moral judgement against every movie. This was not the case.

Instead they give each movie a score out of ten for each of three categories: one for sex and nudity, one for violence, and one for coarse language. So, essentially the three things that might make a parent reluctant to show a movie to their child.

They'll also give a list of every incident of these things happening on screen in fairly dry language. Consider this from their page on Kill Bill Volume One: "A woman bites a man's lip (or tongue, it's not clear) and pulls, he screams and falls onto the floor motionless, his face and chest are covered with blood, and she is covered with blood. We hear panting and moaning, pan onto a woman with a very bloody and bruised face and see her shot in the head. A woman cuts a woman's arm off: blood sprays and pours and the woman flails and screams..."

This is the kind of language used when they describe the violence they see on screen. It's dry, and it doesn't pass judgement on whether or not these things should be shown to children. It's left up to the parents to decide whether or not it's okay to show their kids this stuff.

At the end of these sometimes monotonous lists of every single violent, sexual, or foul mouthed incident, they'll provide a list of discussion topics related to the movie (presumably so a parent can talk to their kids about what they've just seen), and the general message of the movie. The discussion topic list for Kill Bill Volume One reads, "Respect, murder, mercy, revenge, changing one's life, death of parents."

So while this site could have quite easily have become just a shoehorn for someone to moralise about what a child should and shouldn't see, they seem to have largely avoided this. Instead, they've taken a much more common sense approach to what they're doing: they advise parents that a movie might be violent, sexual, and profane, but they also give a list of discussion topics so that parents can have the opportunity to use any movie as a learning tool to discuss serious issues with their kids.

  • Netflix

11/15/18

If you sign up for Netflix wanting it to essentially be pay T. V. but without the hassle of having to sign up for a dozen expensive packages just to get access to the four or five shows you actually want to watch, you're going to get what you pay for.

Here's the rub though. If you live outside of the United States, quite often the selection of shows that aren't produced by Netflix will seem to be fairly limited. While it's great that Netflix is producing quality content such as Orange Is The New Black, Stranger Things, and The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, it can come as an incredible disappointment that the shows you were a huge fan of ten or fifteen years ago aren't there.

So the actual content can be a bit of a mixed bag. It seems like a lot of the not-produced-by-Netflix content is just Bollywood movies and Korean dramas. Sure, that stuff has its audience, but how many people in Australia are actually watching that stuff?

But this is a fairly minor gripe against an otherwise good service. Netflix does provide a good range of original shows, many of which are of pretty good quality. And, unlike some of the shows on YouTube Red, you know that there's some quality control people around instead of the decisions being made solely based on who's currently popular.

  • NationStates

9/12/18

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.

  • IMDb

7/19/18

I think this site was a lot better when the forums were there. Now, it's difficult to tell if a movie has any sort of cult following even if the score's a bit low (like with Drop Dead Fred) unless it's a movie that's notoriously bad (like Troll 2, The Room, or Sharknado). While there still are the reviews, it can be difficult to gauge how much of a following there is for a movie based entirely on IMDb reviews.

Beyond this though, the site is incredibly helpful. It's definitely been a good guide for me to find new movies I hadn't considered watching before in the past, and it continues to be this way for me to the present day. Generally though I think the best way to treat the user scores is as a general guide to whether or not people like the movie rather than as a factual reflection of the movie's quality, as it's quite easy for a movie to get onto the Top 250 within a couple of weeks of being released.

  • Stan

6/15/21

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.

Tip for consumers:
If you're looking to stream Breaking Bad, this is the service that has it in Australia

  • Disney+

6/15/21

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.

Products used:
I mostly stream television shows and films. Recently, I've streamed content such as The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, and the film Broken Arrow.

Service
Value
Quality
  • Outlook

3/27/19

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.

  • Take This Life

3/22/19

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.)

  • Mibba

3/22/19

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.

  • GoodReads

12/29/18

Goodreads is like a counterpart to IMDb--while IMDb is mostly geared towards movies and T. V. shows, Goodreads is all about books.

However, in terms of actual usability, Goodreads suffers. While the base functions that make up the site--the ability to rate, review, and list the books you've read--are intuitive enough, a lot of the other functions can be difficult and decidedly less intuitive if you don't already know what you're looking for.

There's also the issue that the mobile app version of the site is even less intuitive, and makes some of those base functions that make the site desirable at all difficult. This isn't the kind of thing that you want from your site, especially when there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of viable alternatives.

In terms of the culture on the site, a lot of the reviews are essentially trash that don't tell you a whole lot about the actual quality of the book. They tend to either be quite shallow one-paragraph reviews that read more like a blurb a publisher would write for the book, or they're so. Gif heavy that it's difficult to get through them at all.

While Goodreads is a good concept, it needs a bit of work to make it everything it could be.

  • Reddit

7/19/18

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.

  • Kiwi Farms

7/19/18

Kiwifarms is a set of forums that was originally based around Christian Weston Chandler (a. K. a. Chris Chan), but has since expanded to be about pretty much every unfortunate individual who constantly makes a fool of themselves online.

Because of this premise, the site can be seen as being a part of that weird underbelly of the internet. It's not necessarily as horrible as you might think, though--most people there no longer believe it's funny to troll Chris Chan, and a lot of the time they're protective of him in a way. As I write this, many users there are currently mad that a couple of people have been extorting money out of Chris.

The site is pretty intuitive for anyone who's ever used a forum before, so as long as you know a little bit about lolcows, you should be able to use them just fine. Just spend a little bit of time getting to know the culture on there before you post because otherwise you might end up looking like a fool.

While this is arguably one of the weirder parts of the internet, I think most of the people on there understand that in a perfect world, their forums wouldn't exist. I think for the most part, it's better to have these forums so someone can chronicle the bat$#*! crazy antics of the people they focus on.

I think as long as you're willing to accept the culture there, you'll be fine. Otherwise you'll never really fit in and probably should give the site a wide birth.

  • Tumblr

7/19/18

From a usability standpoint, Tumblr is very good. It's one of the most user-friendly blogging sites currently available, and it's intuitive enough to use that most people should be able to work out how to use it within a week or two of signing up.

This comes with a flipside, though. Because of its ease-of-use, it's gathered enough of a young user base that Tumblr could be described as the Twitter of the blogging world. There's not always a great market for lengthy text posts like there is on Wordpress, so you'd better learn to be succinct if you want to gather any kind of real following on the site.

Having said this, the ease-of-use also makes it one of the better sites if you want to have a good place to find stuff related to your main fandoms or if you're into photography and stuff like that. Plus there's actually a pretty active writing side of Tumblr, so if you're looking for resources to improve your writing, there's stuff on Tumblr to help you with this as well.

The place where this usability falls apart is that while the interface is simple and easy to use, it's not always the best. Because of this, it's often necessary to use the X-Kit extension, which gives you the option of using a number of features that makes the site better.

Unfortunately, Tumblr has garnered a reputation for being a site with a toxic culture. This is absolutely true to some extent--some of the controversies that occur are things that would never be controversial in ordinary, reasonable circles. Sometimes people get crucified on Tumblr for nothing more than unfounded rumours (which is what happened to the original XKit guy), or because they produced some fan-art somebody was unhappy with (which has also happened).

I think it is starting to get to the point where a lot of Tumblr users frown upon people being like this, though. You'll sometimes see posts with tens of thousands of notes where people tell teens not to be like this, or not to base their entire worldview on what happens on Tumblr. I think part of this is because of the huge backlash against the more insane elements of the Tumblr culture that's happened in recent years, and another part simply because a lot of the users that were teenagers in 2011-2014 are now in their twenties.

While the main chunk of Tumblr is left wing, there are large chunks of the site that are pretty conservative. Unfortunately, some of the more conservative users on the site are just as bad for lacking any real nuance in their thought and arguments as the left-wingers they so often criticise for being whiny snowflakes.

There is this political side to Tumblr, but I don't think it's any more cancerous and lacking in nuance than the political side of Reddit or your typical Facebook political meme page for the most part. Plus, it's not like it was a few years ago--it's now possible to avoid most of the political hubris of the Tumblr culture altogether.

For the most part, Tumblr is what you make of it. If you want it to mostly be photography or aesthetic stuff, you can mostly follow that kind of blog and it'll be fine. Same thing with fandoms (though some are hugely more popular than others, as is the case on every site).

This is the part that I think a lot of people tend to forget about the site, and why a lot of people tend to have a bad time with it. If that as long as you have XKit and you use a bit of editorial caution when it comes to who you follow, you can have a great time on Tumblr. Just don't take anything on there too seriously and you'll be fine for the most part.

  • Retalk

6/17/21

Retalk is the newest iteration of the American right trying to provide an alternative to Reddit. This is due to their incessant (and false) belief that Reddit is stifling conservative speech despite having popular conservative-leaning subs like r/Conservative and r/Libertarian.

I think a lot of the issues with sites like this is that they fundamentally don't understand what the issues with Reddit actually are. While there are times where the moderation on certain Reddit subs is an actual issue, that's not an issue that's exclusive to any particular political ideology. It's an issue that comes up because Reddit won't provide a lot of administrative oversight to what mods are doing or what direction controversial subs are going in until it becomes a big deal in the media.

From what I can tell, Retalk hasn't done a whole lot to deal with that issue. In fact, it's quite possible that the site will eventually do less, given that the kind of people who'll use this site will tend to be people who either won't say the things they want to say on Reddit or they've straight up been banned from it. This kind of community will probably tend to skew much further to the right than the centrist/centre-right ideology the site's advertising espouses.

I'm also not entirely sure how the site plans on keeping the discourse civil when it's also using a very similar upvote/downvote system to Reddit. One of the biggest hindrances to open discussion on Reddit has traditionally been its voting system, because once you've gotten a certain number of downvotes, people will be encouraged to make the least forgiving interpretation of what you've just said. Retalk would benefit from transitioning away from this kind of forum to a more traditional style of forum where there isn't a karma system.

Still, this does bring up one of the better ideas that Retalk has implemented. You don't have the option of downvoting posts until you've hit 250 karma. This makes sense in the short term because there probably will be people who'll sign up just to downvote everything they see on the site. I guess it'll also nominally help reinforce its central idea of civil discourse, but I think in the long term it'll probably turn out to not be that difficult to get to 250-ish karma. Most people who can hold in their more jerkish tendencies would probably be able to get to that point within a day or two.

The other good idea they've introduced for the site is that you have to be at least sixteen to sign up for a Retalk account. A Reddit account only requires you to be thirteen. I don't think there's really any way for Retalk to effectively enforce this because I doubt there's gonna be too many fourteen-year-olds signing up just to immediately espouse being fourteen, but the idea itself is good. I think if they nudged the starting age up to eighteen, they might actually be able to avoid some of the issues with pedophilia that Reddit has had over the years.

Still, I'm not holding out too much hope for this site. It's still early days yet, but there's been a fairly storied history of people on the right starting up a site that's ostensibly a conservative alternative for an already popular site, only for it to either never really catch on, only attract the worst possible users from the already popular site, or both. I think Retalk is really gonna have to work on introducing some other stuff that Reddit either doesn't do so well or just doesn't have at all before this site is anything other than a forgettable Reddit clone.

Tip for consumers:
Don't use it. Even if you're generally a centrist or conservative, you're still better off sticking to Reddit.

  • 111dating

6/15/21

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.

Tip for consumers:
I wouldn't recommend the site. While it's easy enough to use, the user base is small enough that you might not find a match easily. It might be better to use a different site altogether.

  • OkCupid

6/14/21

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.

Tip for consumers:
If you're not willing to pay for a premium account, you might wanna look elsewhere.

Service
Value
Quality
  • Prime Video

5/3/21

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.

Tip for consumers:
The adds can be skipped instantly

Products used:
I streamed Farscape and several movies

Service
Value

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Similar Reviewers on Sitejabber

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chris l. reviewed Retalk
7/13/22

Don't waste your time with this site. You are only allowed to post if you continually get...

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Darrel S. reviewed Retalk
7/5/21

Claims to be center right and conservative. My first and only post was attacked by a couple of...