Replit is Broken

General
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TL;DR: Replit and Replit Ask are broken due to staff not listening to feedback, making users pay more for less, mods abusing their power, botting activity, and repl.co going down frequently. This topic aims to share my opinions on these issues.

Dear fellow Replit users,

I wanted to take a moment to express my thoughts and feelings about the state of Replit and Replit Ask. Unfortunately, I have to say that the platform is broken, and there are multiple issues that are making the user experience less enjoyable than it should be.

First of all, the staff’s lack of response to user feedback is extremely disappointing. Many of us have voiced our concerns and suggestions for improvement, but it seems that most of the staff members are not interested in listening to us. It is essential to have an open and transparent dialogue between the users and the staff to ensure that the platform is meeting the needs of the community.

Another significant problem is that Replit seems to be making users pay more for less. We’ve seen egress restrictions and talk about canceling free deployments, which was the entire point of making Replit. This is not what we signed up for, and it’s a shame to see the platform heading in this direction.

The issue of mods abusing their power is another topic that needs to be addressed. While some mods are doing an excellent job (@not-ethan!!!), there are others who seem to take pleasure in flexing their authority and imposing their own rules. This kind of behavior is unacceptable, and it undermines the integrity of the platform.

Furthermore, there’s been an increase in botting activity on Replit, which is evident from the number of likes and runs repls are getting. Then, those botted repls get on the trending page, kicking quality repl that people worked hard on out.

Lastly, we can’t ignore the frequent downtimes of repl.co, which is happening 3-5 times (including RIGHT NOW) a week. This not only affects the user experience but also affects those who use Replit for educational and professional purposes.

I understand that I have only touched upon small parts of my opinion on different topics, but I wanted to make a post sharing how I feel about everything. Replit has the potential to be a fantastic platform, but it’s up to the staff to listen to feedback and make the necessary changes. I hope that this post has shed some light on the issues at hand and that we can work together to make Replit a better place for everyone. Thank you for listening.

I would love to get some more feedback and opinions from @bigminiboss, @anon40284853, @Firepup650, @MiloCat, @GiggaPoggers, @youngchief, @9pfs1, @backjump, @prisems, and anyone else who wants to share and feels like they haven’t been heard.

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I would like to clarify this statement. @not-ethan is a really good moderator and deserves our respect. I haven’t had as much interaction with the others, but I want it made clear that Ethan is one of the good moderators.

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It seems like they keep throwing our emotions around when they bump up egress but then cut back on everything else. They seem to want to please us and then slide the bad things into the equation without us noticing, like the missing Hacker plan. I’ve made my position clear on the Hacker plan before. Make it $10, not $7, that price makes no sense.

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I have been seeing a big surge in these downtimes, I’ll hop on Replit ask and see many topics about it every 2 or so days! I wonder why this is happening and would like to know.

This is a big factor for me, my plan decreased in value and more units are being out on my account. “Bring the next billion coders online” more like “bring the next billionaires online”.

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The entirety of the hate on the new UI.

We have still haven’t even gotten an offical staff response on these, and this is the first time we get a status post about it on status.replit.com! (Current outage post)

One of a few reasons I haven’t even tried to publish anything recently.

We’re looking at you pro plan.

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Hacker is dead. You must have missed that. You can’t buy it anymore.

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I didn’t miss it; the point was that it was the perfect balance between the Free and Pro plans.

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Yes, the only fair botting boosts is PikaBot. That project worked hard to get to trending, with thousands and thousands of legit comments. It now has over 40K, which must be at least close to a record.

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you guys being brave so Imma just say it: I don’t like the way moderation is run because a lot of people are very cold and proud and I wish that more of them would be down to earth and with the community. :frowning: otherwise, I also don’t like the monetary scheme :frowning:

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Oh wait, I just realized I also don’t like all the people who like bot//and apparently impersonate; replit is too focused on the wrongs things that they let people do actually illegal acts and then have 0 consequence (someone tried to impersonate me – since rules I can’t even say who but they can commit illegal acts – and then denied it) while they don’t let people I don’t know use their API freely ;-; (also the way API regulated be like if I don’t think about my problem’s, they’ll go away)

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I feel like one issue replit has is how Replit moderators have actively abused the trending algorithm to get their own content on trending.

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Ty guys for speaking out! I really appreciate it!!!

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check the ask community pm I talked abt the guy impersonating he’s kinda funny not gonna lie

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This is true on the main site, nut not so much here I think. Dods have warned me because they didn’t pay attention to changes in replit policy and only checked and removed warn since I told them, and mods have also warned me for doing something that other mods say they do regularly (scraping replit js).
I also do find the current downtimes very annoying, I have a repl that hasn’t been loading (I had to harvest code through “view code” as forks also didn’t work) since 5 days, although @ShaneAtReplit is on it (Thanks :blush:) it’s still been 5 days.
A second to last annoyance is all the follow bots. Yes, I am happy that I now get like 1+ follower a day, but i’d rather that they are not all bots.
My final annoyance is that hosting is down. I don’t even need to explain this one.

Edit:
Shane has fixed it! Turns out that as Replit secretly updated to Python 3.10, me trying to install a 3.8 dependency forced the repl to try to rebuild nix, failing to do so - Shane
Thanks Shane!

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Staff aren’t listening because they’re to busy with stuff like new ui changes and replit services they need to stop adding new things and fix what replit already has, quality is better than quantity.

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The only improvement I would like to see is a better support than redirect people to the forum. For the rest, expecting them to be very active is difficult especially considering how crappy Replit has been the last days (for whatever the reason it might be)

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Hey all, thanks for sharing this feedback! I’ve passed it along to our wider team to review and am looping in @soren to provide some more info on deployments.

A couple thoughts off the top of my head:

  • We read and share your feedback with the larger team, but usually will only have one or two staff members replying to a topic so that information isn’t coming from too many channels. For example, you probably saw Soren and Shane in the UI thread. As you can imagine, it’s not easy for us to respond to every comment, especially if there are so many or if they repeat previous comments, but we try to respond to the post in general.
  • Regarding the botting activity. We don’t like it either! This is unfortunately the nature of many online platforms and we are doing our best to mitigate the issue. We warn people as soon as we notice botting and have tools for identifying abuse, but can’t eliminate the problem altogether. You can report abusive users and repls when you see them by clicking the kebab (three dots) and selecting “Report.”
  • If you notice mods abusing their moderator privileges, you can submit an appeal for the mod action or DM me here or on Discord so that I can look into the behavior and address it accordingly.
  • The last item, which many of you probably know, is that while we do review and take your feedback into consideration, it doesn’t always mean that we will apply it or that we will apply it immediately. Replit serves millions of users and we need to balance all of their needs, which means we sometimes get conflicting feedback to weigh, in addition to numerous tickets and features we need to take time to work on.

It means a lot to me that you are so invested in Replit and feel comfortable talking with us, so none of this is intended to dissuade you from sharing feedback, but I do want to set your expectations appropriately and let you know that we hear you!

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When me and a few other members voiced our concerns on here about the pricing changes and deployments, they didn’t just talk to us here occassionally, no. They invited us all to the official discord and asked us to allocate time to speak with members of the Replit team via voice call to discuss everything. Personally, I talked with Soren for about 2 hours and got all of the concerns cleared up and even made a few suggestions for the team.

Public relations is a thing- if you’re talking negatively about many aspects of the product that aren’t entirely true, then the company behind the product won’t go out on a whim, drink 3 bottles of whiskey and reply grudgingly. That’s why they don’t respond to many big issues here immediately - they want to get everything right and cleared up, like a good company should.

So, tl;dr: it might not look like they’re listening, but they definitely are.

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I totally agree that they should take their time replying, especially with big topics like this! I was hoping for some solid answers because we never got to anything about pricing, what they are doing to mitigate bots, or the frequent downtimes of the past few weeks. They definitely don’t have to be listening to the community, and I think it’s great that they are! I think the main frustration with people is that we care so much about the platform that we forget all the good things Replit provides, both as a community and a platform. I think we all want it to head in a positive direction.

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This is what discourages me. Ask is so small compared to Replit. So, my ~97 votes on Ask is huge for Ask, probably a record, but with millions of people on Replit, it’s such a small percentage.

Your positive, encouraging, and well thought-out reaction means a lot. Just tolerating my attack earlier shows your character. I apologize for the overreaction. I do still want concerns addressed, but I made a more peaceful topic expressing our dislikes in an organized fashion.

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