Show HN: LeftWrite, a site to slow down and write about what you read

There is no email confirmation so creating a user is all you need to do!

Backstory :) - I am horrible at reading the article first and most of the time on reddit and hn, I go directly to the comments to figure out what my opinion should be. This started bothering me as I was passively consuming content and it wasn't even the content, I was consuming other people's thoughts and pretending they were my own. I originally thought maybe aggregators should gate their comments by having quiz. I wasn't about to make my own aggregator though and I gave up this thought. I instead thought that there should be a notepad feature in the browser that opens on each page that I can write down into. I didn't want to learn a new tech for this so I went the route of creating a site.

The site is pretty simple, it basically gathers up the links on an aggregator site or anywhere really and shows you the article and a notepad. Only once you enter something in the notepad do you get to read the comments. This has worked extremely well for me and I'm pretty happy with how it has turned out. I read far more and I think about things a lot more as well.

HN and specifically the comments is what drives me to get better, there is so much gold here both in the articles submitted and the comments made. By forcing myself to write down my thoughts, there are all sorts of things that I have tried and tested that I would normally skip. I think by adding that writing step, I'm actually processing things instead of pretending to process things.

I'm using the most boring of tech for this site, I use nodejs, express and ejs to do everything as it's what I know. I use nginx as a reverse proxy and postgres for the database. I really optimized for maintainability as I want this to run without me having to do anything. Ideally besides updating packages, I want to do no active work eventually on this.

This site proxies for other sites meaning that the server makes requests for pages on the behalf of the user. Is it worth re-writing the proxy code into rust or is there no real difference between using axios and rust for network requests. How do proxy sites manage this?

It's off putting that I can't do anything without first creating an account. Would love to just jump in.