How does this all work?
The mechanics, in plain terms.
Communities and posts
One shared front page. Below it, posts live in communities. Tags come from a single site-wide taxonomy curated by Cresset's admins. Some tags apply everywhere; others are scoped to a specific community. Tags are suggested when you submit, and the author can adjust them.
Posts are links, text, or images. Links get a preview when we can fetch one. Images are resized and re-encoded as WebP, which strips EXIF and other embedded metadata before the file is stored.
Voting and ranking
Upvotes and downvotes both count. The score is the difference. Every vote is worth ±1; we don't weight votes by how long you've had an account or anything else. The Hot ranking is a modified Hacker News formula, published at /algorithm with a changelog of any changes.
Comments
Threaded, markdown, sorted by best, new, or old. Best is the default.
Saving, reports, and NSFW
You can save any post for later from its menu; saved posts live at /saved. Anything
that breaks the rules can be reported to the moderators of that community. Posts marked NSFW are
blurred until you opt to see them; that preference is per-device.
Trust tiers and rate limits
Every account is in one of four trust tiers — new, regular, established, or trusted. New accounts start in new and graduate to regular after about a week of low-friction activity (currently: 7 days plus 3 posts or 10 comments, with no active strikes). Higher tiers come with more time and activity.
For rate limits there are two profiles, applied per account on a rolling window:
| Probationary (new tier) | Standard (regular and up) | |
|---|---|---|
| Posts per day | 3 | 30 |
| Comments per day | 30 | 200 |
| Votes per hour | 100 | 1,000 |
| Reports per day | 5 | 20 |
| Image uploads per day | 5 | 50 |
Moderation
Each community has its own moderators, who set the local culture on top of a site-wide floor: no illegal content, no harassment, no hate speech. Mods can remove posts and comments, warn users, and ban from their community. Site admins handle bans that span the whole site.
Automation handles a narrow slice. We watch for sudden vote velocity from a single referrer and dampen rankings when it looks like a brigade. Near-duplicate posts trip a fingerprint and get flagged for review. Spam, slurs, and CSAM detection are not automated today; they rely on user reports.
Your data
Deleting your account leaves your contributions in place under [deleted] so threads
still read; your name comes off, your email is removed, and all your active sessions are
revoked. You can also choose to remove your posts and comments at the same time. The full
details — what we collect, what we share, and what we keep — are at /privacy.