Hey, everyone! I’ve been incredibly excited about this project since it was announced, and I joined into the site as a subscriber very soon after launch to get a feel for it. Over the last week, I’ve spent probably FAR too much time browsing around, poking into the corners, and trying out some of the features. Below I want to give my honest review both so that potential subscribers have some perspective to base their choice off of and to hopefully provide some useful feedback for Dr. Crow on how to update the site in the future. I want to note up front that I am not a highly tech savvy individual, so there may be times wherein my comments are formed out of that ignorance.
Singing praises:
•The site is incredibly intuitive to navigate. When you log in you’re immediately met with profiles you can jump right into, there’s a search bar prominently displayed at the top if you have something specific you’re looking for, and a menu of possible pages to jump to above that (such as viewing by specific subreddits, an FAQ, or the page to request users).
•It’s simple to collect and save your favorites. You can tap the star to add any profile or even image to your Favorites page to easily access later. Once inside a profile you can download everything within in a single tap. You can “follow” profiles to get notified when new images are recovered.
•While I have not come across this feature being used yet, the addition of comments on profiles as well as community submissions gives this room to expand beyond just what has been scraped. One could easily link a reddit profile with another site from outside - either another profile of theirs or perhaps a bunkr folder with additional content.
•This has, in my experience, the potential to be the richest library of content in this fashion. Once inside the site, it feels endless and accessible. There’s no ads that pop up everytime you click something. Profiles and pages don’t seem hidden away or hard to reach. It’s just all there. And as the library grows, both in terms of the profiles available and the content within them, it just gets even richer.
•Once a profile is added, new content posted to that profile will be monitored and scraped automatically. I’ve seen examples in real time of content saved which others were scrambling to save on their own. To me this is the best feature. If you know a profile that’s quick to delete photos or one that you expect may dabble with something a little more explicit in the future, adding them to the site is one of the best ways to make sure you don’t miss out.
•This thing is a DEEP search. I’ve got a few profiles I submitted for which it recovered content that every other search I’ve tried has failed. I don’t know how this works, but to my simple brain it feels like magic!
Pain Points:
I want to note first that a pain point is not the same as a problem that needs to be fixed. It can be, but it can also just be a reality that we must live with. If you go to Disney World, you will wait in a line. That is a pain point as opposed to a fixable problem. Some of these I may have suggestions for improvement, others I may just be bringing up something I’ve noticed without a solution in mind.
•Bitcoin is a hurdle for many people. Ten dollar subscriptions are a hurdle for many people. Both are understandable why they exist, but this is a pain point that will inevitably lock some people out.
•It’s very easy to lose track of what you’ve seen and what you haven’t. The site is constantly updating, and if you’re like me and want to see everything (or at least see what profiles have been updated/added), that becomes very difficult very quickly. I check the site multiple times per day, and if I wait even a couple hours between refreshes, I can get lost scrolling through. It automatically sorts by most recent updates, but since some profiles get updated multiple times, you can’t just look for what was at the top of the list last time and use it as your stopping post. Further, since some profiles post the same photos multiple times, you also can’t assume because you’ve seen a picture already that you’ve caught up. Perhaps a date/time could be added to each image when it’s uploaded?
•Daaaaamn, that queue is long! It moves quick, but one night I submitted a request and was number 350 in the queue. The very next night I submitted a request and was number 3,500 in the queue. I just submitted another and am 4,296 in the queue. I’ll almost certainly have to wait quite a bit longer for those results than previous ones which took roughly a day. I do expect as some of the larger and more popular profiles are added that this will gradually come down. Projects like this take a lot more work to get off the ground than to sustain, and we need to build the backlog library before we can sustain current posts.
•I often have no idea who a profile is supposed to be. I don’t know how the site chooses a thumbnail for a profile’s folder, but so many are of someone’s dinner or a meme, and you have to click into the profile to find a picture of the user to see who it is. Or you just have to know the name. Maybe there could be some way that registered users could choose which picture is used as the thumbnail? Perhaps at any given time the photo with the most suggestions would show as the thumbnail?
•Just like browsing your local Blockbuster (showing my age), you may have to wade through a lot of crap to find the good stuff. We all have our own tastes, and there are some profiles I check out and cannot figure out why anyone would want to follow it. Which, to be fair, I’m sure others feel about some profiles I’ve submitted! I would LOVE an option to hide profiles so they don’t show up on our library anymore. Of course we’d need a page that shows all our hidden profiles so we could unhide them if we change our mind or hide one by mistake. But there are dozens upon dozens of profiles that I look at once and know I will never have the desire to open it again, yet I have to keep scrolling past them (and potentially opening them up if I’d forgotten that they were one I didn’t care about).
•Why don’t the numbers match? I’ve noticed a decent number of profiles where the report says it has recovered 75 images, but there are only 20 images in the profile. I cannot figure out why those numbers don’t match up. Have they been removed due to a takedown request? Are they still uploading and so for the time being the numbers won’t match up? I can scroll through the report and see titles and subreddits that register as saved, but they’re clearly not in the folder.
•As great as the tool is, please remember that it is not magic (no matter how much my simple brain may think it is). This is the quintessential “this is not a fixable problem” kind of pain point and exclusively serves as a reminder to the potential user. Sometimes things are just gone and lost. Despite what we were told by our parents (or told our kids depending on your age), sometimes what you put on the internet doesn’t last forever! Hope for the best when you submit a profile, but don’t expect so much that you disappoint yourself when it doesn’t capture everything.
All in all, I think this site is already excellent and has room for even more great improvements. I sadly fall into the category of people from that first pain point and, due to financial reasons, will likely not be able to continue my subscription after this month is up. But godDAMN do I wish I could, and I’m trying to make the most of my month by submitting ten profiles each down and downloading everything that strikes my fancy. If you’re at all interested in the site and have the financials to make it work, I cannot recommend highly enough. Dr. Crow has done some excellent work here, and I can easily see this site becoming a staple resource for years to come.
