Hello folks!
If you were a Replit user in its beginning times, those times when it was Repl.it, you probably remember an easy-to-use workspace and a community where you could share your work and get feedback for it. Recently, however, things have abruptly and drastically changed. I don’t want to spread hate or get people away from Replit, I want the Replit devs to see this and consider their future choices because I feel that the platform is becoming more and more a sort of mainstream hosting service instead of the web editor it used to be.
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Options
The old Repl.it navigation bar looked like this: Home, My Repls, Community, and Tutorials. There were also some other options, but these were the essential ones, and the ones everyone uses most. Today, the navigation bar highlights Deployments (which are also on the home page), Usage (which is just a new way to grind money), and Teams (which is being deprecated, at least for education). Community and Tutorials have been moved down and are less visible, and the Forums have been hidden away in the help menu. This is a dark pattern: New users won’t notice the community, but they will eventually pay to deploy their repls because they think that’s the only way to make other people see them. Hosting, which was free in the past, is now paid (I’ve already made another post about that). -
Repls
After a recent update, you can’t run HTML repls on the web anymore. You need to fork them first, which requires an account. The reason’s clear: It’s to convince people to deploy repls, as otherwise only Replit users would be able to see them.
Comments have been nuked away from the spotlight page, which makes it impossible to gather feedback and to communicate in general. -
Staff
Not a big deal, but there used to be a newsletter with fun content, which showed a sort of warm relationship between Replit’s staff and users. Now, Replit only contacts people to tell them that there’s more to pay. -
AI
AI, AI, AI: Everyone can only talk about that. It’s a big hype right now, but is it necessary to change an entire platform only for that? All this machine-learning stuff that is being published on Replit is making the platform only more complicated and less interesting for newbies.
Conclusion: Replit has shifted from being a sort of friendly place to easily code online to an average web service provider. What was unique and simple, now became complicated mainstream. Don’t get me wrong, Replit is still a good site for making small projects on the web with others, but I feel that this approach is more and more being pushed away in favor of the concept of a big web platform for enterprises. Just, we already have a lot of these: AWS Studio has the same and more, and Microsoft and Google also have their solutions.
But no platform other than Replit has such a great community working on such a nice online IDE. Please make this concept great again.
Greetings,
A Repl.it user
Related: Replit feels silent