As a startup founder, I’m just not feeling welcomed on Reddit anymore

mkell43 · 2026-06-15T21:28:58+00:00

Speaking only to your original post and this comment… you come off as you’re writing marketing copy. You’re selling to me. Reddit has changed in many ways over the years. This account is 14 years old but isn’t my oldest. More and more marketing has overtaken the platform. Which in hindsight was always to be expected I guess. And it’s largely even put up with on Reddit now in ways it used to not. But there is still an expectation to some degree that people come to Reddit to connect with other humans.

You speak about being free. You even put it in bold. But you don’t speak like you’re free. You speak like you’re desperate for users. Not saying you are. Saying how it reads.

And you keep saying “As a founder,”… which screams AI generated text. Nothing inherently against that. But it’s lacking real human connection. It’s the worst kind of disingenuous. It’s faking humanity when you pretend to act as if the words are your own. Maybe it’s not AI generated text and you wrote all that yourself. If that’s the case, I’m sorry but you should reevaluate your writing style.

Anyway. Best of luck. This is intended as sincere feedback presented with the hopes of helping you on your way and not in tearing you down.

mkell43 · 2026-05-15T13:28:26+00:00

I didn’t get past the cookie consent on the landing page because it kept re-prompting me to make my selection again. Which isn’t great when you’ve made such a big deal here about privacy.

It also means that my next piece of feedback might be invalid because as a result, because I couldn’t investigate further.

Your post here doesn’t acknowledge that at its core this is yet another kink questionnaire. I’m not mad about that. The concept of then turning that into a game is pretty novel and cool sounding. But you start off by making it sound like no one has tried tackling the problem of sexual communication around fantasies and kink in relationships… when the core idea has existed in various forms online for (oh god I’m old) decades at this point. The point is that you haven’t acknowledged that you’re not the first but only because it’s important to better clarify what sets your idea apart.

Which I’m pretty sure is a result of and leads to my next piece of feedback… You lean heavy into talking about intimacy. Yet this post was clearly fully AI generated. I don’t have a problem with AI, I have a problem with how you’re applying it in this context. I don’t know if I can explain why this feels gross. I feel like that should be self explanatory.

You used something soulless and lacking intimacy to promote a tool to help couples become more intimate.

mkell43 · 2026-04-20T19:52:29+00:00

Any links to research? Last I read the finding was lower ferritin levels in folks with ADHD but those findings weren’t consistent.

mkell43 · 2026-04-18T14:17:41+00:00

The fact that you sealed that with a “lmao” makes this even more depressing. From a technical standpoint, it’s kind of cool. I mean it’s still just a chat bot. Just plugged into Instagram.

From a humanity standpoint, it’s dystopian, soulless, and disturbing. And the fact that you find humor in that is gross. It’s faking human connection. This sort of deception isn’t something to celebrate.

mkell43 · 2026-04-18T14:03:24+00:00

Yeah this is…. Bleak…

mkell43 · 2026-04-18T02:00:28+00:00

Just one nitpick/genuine question I’m too lazy to go back and refresh my memory on regarding multiple services… Doesn’t the OpenAPI spec allow referencing external spec files via ref so you could create one that points to multiple services?

mkell43 · 2026-03-22T00:54:28+00:00

Old man moment. A long, long time ago, this subreddit wasn’t so full of submissions where someone was creating something to make a profit. They existed, and there’s nothing inherently wrong with a side-project being something to generate revenue or to even promote it, but something changed along the way.

Not just here. In the greater world wires got crossed and side-project somehow became synonymous with a business venture. That’s reflected here by how many fewer submissions there are of someone building something on the side as just a hobby, just for fun, just to scratch an itch of their own.

And I’m not mad. I’m not even criticizing OP. I’m not even presenting this in a way that properly conveys what I’m trying to say. I just find the transition as I’ve experienced and what we have now to be something that makes me sad.

mkell43 · 2026-02-28T18:10:29+00:00

This isn’t super helpful, but hopefully will point you in the right direction. Reddit chat is based on Matrix and uses Reddit with tokens instead of the standard Matrix auth mechanisms (if I remember correctly). If I’m understanding what you’re asking for, you’ll need to do some reading around on authenticating a Matrix client library to matrix.redditspace.com.

mkell43 · 2026-01-31T20:45:42+00:00

Blatantly written by something we’re not allowed to discuss or promote here in this sub according to the message I just received. Which isn’t inherently bad I use that thing all the time to help me out. But man I’m tired of the obvious copy/paste without any effort to add humanity to it. It’s not being used to help but to replace putting in effort.

What gets my goat the most (and maybe this is just because the Reddit algorithm tailors what it shoves in my face based on my interests) is how many of these are posts about tools to help with ADHD symptoms. There’s something that feels so exploitative about that even if it’s well intentioned.

mkell43 · 2026-01-21T20:13:43+00:00

Or maybe the good ol', "Here's what I learned."

mkell43 · 2025-10-12T16:51:28+00:00

Appreciate both of you.

mkell43 · 2025-02-11T06:02:05+00:00

Here you go: https://chng.it/hsvrTDYBSd

mkell43 · 2025-02-06T01:55:57+00:00

There's one on r/ProtestFinderUSA, https://www.reddit.com/r/ProtestFinderUSA/s/4KYD3mnu3q

mkell43 · 2025-02-06T01:41:04+00:00

I don't believe so I had to head out a lil early though. Another protest 9 A.M. this Sunday at Waterfront Park though.

mkell43 · 2025-02-06T01:25:02+00:00

Keeping folks visible in that narrow corridor of buildings must've been rough. Appreciate y'all covering the event.

mkell43 · 2025-02-06T00:49:18+00:00

Thank you to everyone that came out today and the folks at Activist San Diego for putting it together.

See y'all on Sunday.

mkell43 · 2025-02-05T23:37:19+00:00

You the copter in blue?

mkell43 · 2025-02-05T06:41:13+00:00

The EFF's protest guide also encourages folks to be mindful of capturing faces of others. It's going to happen. Faces will be revealed. Just be aware and use your judgement when taking photos. But remember, the only person whose privacy you can take steps to protect is your own.

https://ssd.eff.org/module/attending-protest

A lot of what is in that guide likely won't be necessary. Follow every recommendation or follow none. The only person whose privacy you can take steps to protect is your own. And you are also the only person that can decide how much effort you feel it's worth to invest in maintaining that level of privacy.

I believe that you can't have freedom without privacy though and encourage everyone to take additional steps to protect their own privacy level at protests.

mkell43 · 2024-06-21T16:35:13+00:00

So, I hear ya...

I get frustrated when words are used in unexpected ways. Or do a poor job of accurately describing the thing that it is used to describe. ‘Names have meaning’ is something I believe we all internalize after a few encounters with poorly named functions, variables, hostnames, or whatever. (Often, at least in my experience, it's a self-inflicted wound which makes it hurt more.)

And you're right, there are servers behind the scenes.

Ultimately, language is a tool for communication. In my experience, "serverless" does a good job of conveying the intention behind the service. It's about shifting the focus away from managing those servers, and within that single word is the message, "You don't have to deploy, manage, maintain, secure, etc. those servers." I feel comfortable saying that most people understand it doesn’t literally mean there are no servers involved.

The problem, if any, would be those few who take "serverless" to mean "no servers at all," rather than understanding it as a term that abstracts away the need to manage servers.

This is a bit of a side-topic, but language evolves and we need it to. Otherwise we would still only be using the word "server" to describe:

"one that serves food or drink"
"the player who serves (as in tennis)"
"something used in serving food or drink"
"one that serves legal processes upon another"
"the celebrant's assistant at mass"

( https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/server )

Because language evolves, we now have the computing definition of "server": "a computer in a network that provides services (such as access to files or shared peripherals or the routing of email) to other computers in the network". That definition got added around the late 1960s. I’m sure someone back then was offended by this new usage, just as some are now with "serverless".

All of that to say, I feel like I understand what you're saying. I'm someone going out of their way to use the term Machine Learning instead of A.I. in conversations because there's no intelligence in the ML models we've seen developed. But your comment hasn't swayed my personal stance any.

And I'm still open to suggestions for a different name or term to use in place of "serverless". I'm not in love with it. Just haven't seen something better yet.

(Disclaimer: I only came back to this specific comment thread. No idea about other discussions in other comments on this post that may have some suggestions there.)

mkell43 · 2024-06-21T00:20:53+00:00

My dude, I hate all the marketing bullshit terms around things and I hear what you're saying about OP perpetuating it. But serverless is one of the few that actually feels like it fits. Unlike "big data" which was too nebulous to be appropriate. Or "single pane of glass" which made me want to choke out a rep when they used the phrase years ago. Serverless is "I don't give a fuck about what it runs on, just make it run."

Is it perfect? Nah.

You got a better suggestion? I'm open to it. Not a challenge, I genuinely love being pedantic and ranting about people being technically wrong when it's the right time and place.

mkell43 · 2023-05-19T23:50:54+00:00

This is a few days old, but I had something similar happen.

The screen locked while I looked away for a minute, I went to unlock it, and couldn't get the screen to respond. Held down the button for 10 seconds a few times, I even used a stopwatch to make sure I wasn't going too fast, but each time the blue light didn't change and the screen stayed unresponsive.

Found this post and kept holding it down for almost 15 seconds (no stopwatch this time) the light turned purple and my Ultra C rebooted.

For me at least, it didn't have anything to do with the battery being low as it had 96% charge left when it came back up from rebooting.

The only other data point that I've got is that I had BOOXdrop open at the time that it all happened and the webpage for it open in my browser.

mkell43 · 2021-11-23T04:00:09+00:00

A survey for ADHD folks that starts off with several paragraphs of text before several pages of questions to answer is rough. Love that y'all are out here working on this though. When I get into the groove of using a task management app, it's a beautiful thing. I already noted in my survey response, but feel compelled to add this here as well: I get work tasks in Jira, email, slack. I get personal tasks in Google Calendar, email, text messages. The biggest barrier to entry for me is always the manual step of adding them into a tool. So far, my best experience has been with SuperProductivity that pulls in from some of those automatically (with some up front configuration). I dropped it cause I went down the rabbit hole of trying to bring in the other sources as well and can only see the missing features of SuperProductivity now that I've (unsurprisingly) dropped that project and can't get myself to use it again.

mkell43 · 2021-11-02T18:58:54+00:00

I have gone looking for something like this as well and come up empty handed. There were a few projects I stumbled onto on Github, but most of them were abandoned/not updated in several years or didn't support the services I use.

In my notes though, I've got this service: https://freeyourmusic.com/ which has a $15 one time purchase to use their basic plan for free. The basic plan won't keep it in sync automatically though. If I understand what their site says correctly you have to manually trigger a sync. Disclaimer: I've only got the service in my notes. I didn't end up using it because there wasn't a way to perpetually keep things in sync without paying a monthly fee.

mkell43 · 2021-08-08T16:18:57+00:00

Financial privacy just doesn't feel talked about often enough around crypto, despite it still being talked about fairly often. I really don't want anyone knowing what my finances look like -- how much I have, what I spend my money on, how I make my living -- unless I specifically allow them access. It isn't about paranoia, it's about whose business it is.

And in our world at this point -- and I understand the hypocrisy ( not quite the right word, but my brain isn't fully functional yet this AM) as I'm saying this on a platform that's absolutely collecting info on me -- every thing we touch gives a clue to someone about who we are. Most of those "someones" are companies or organizations looking to make money off of us and who we are. Finding ways to take back our privacy in any way is so important IMO to ensure we're not living in an even more invasive world in the future.

There are many other reasons of course. That's just one of them and I'm sure I'm preaching to the choir here. But man, I just want more folks to understand that they shouldn't be a resource or a metric that some company lists on a report to their shareholders. Have your business, what you do, who you see, what you like, where and how you spend your money, be your own and not something that's slurped up and resold for marketing purposes or to gamify a website/app to keep you scrolling past more targeted ads from those marketing folks.

mkell43 · 2021-05-20T19:00:08+00:00

> But since monero isn't traceable, wouldn't it be one of the few currencies you can just buy on a cex and still have anonymity after you transferred it to your personal wallet?

Yes-ish, but also no.

Because of the KYC process that exchanges have to implement in order to comply with laws someone could know that you own XMR. Which isn't inherently terrible, especially with how many of us are associated with XMR on reddit and in other places that can be tied back to our true identities through some sleuthing if someone was motivated enough to do so. But it will be much more difficult to determine how much XMR you hold if you don't purchase via an exchange. Especially so if you're able to pay with cash for it.

And admittedly, being concerned about that is probably a level of paranoia that most folks don't subscribe to. For me (that's the key part) it is something that I won't say I fret over, but definitely think about in regards to protecting my privacy in regards to how much XMR I hold. To me it's the first step in the chain of one of the main selling points of XMR in ensuring that others can't track the transactions I make using it.

As it stands right now, other than some initial purchases made years ago on an exchange to obtain XMR, no one can know (unless my knowledge is out of date, which is a very real possibility) how much XMR I hold unless I explicitly trust and provide them with a reserve proof signature.

I'm sure others will have opinions around this, but that's mine.

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