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Comment by slickdork | Hacker News Reader

I'm glad someone's making this! I've been wanting an alternative for a while. I do have two questions:

1) Why can't I browse the site without an account? Is this temporary for the beta phase or a persistent design choice?

2) Do reviews allow GIFs? (I'm not willing to make an account just to see if existing reviews have gifs, and oddly enough, gifs would be a deal breaker for me).

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After using it a few minutes, it's apparent that it's a very social site. There are no public reviews. You can write reviews and share them with specific friends or post them to your wall, but they're only ever visible to your friends. Presumably this is a privacy-focused design decision intended to increase sociability, but it would make an anonymous account useless.

There are no GIFs.

1). Persistent design choice, as its built to be primarily a social platform. We felt like an account with your name was bare minimum for something like this to function correctly.

2). No GIFs. But, noted that GIFs could be a fun add.

I actually wanted to make sure there were no gifs. I feel like gifs ruin reviews and make low quality reviews get the most 'engagement'.

If you add gifs, please allow an option to turn them off. That's one of my biggest pet peeves about Goodreads, a lot of reviewers put a gif after every sentence or two and it drives me up a wall. I want to read a review, not watch a series of tangentially-related short video snippets.

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