About RecPals

Somebody asks a friend whether they have read anything good lately. The friend names three things, and two weeks later nobody remembers any of them. The conversation was the good part; the forgetting was the only problem with it.

RecPals is that conversation written down. It is not trying to replace it, and it is not trying to become a place you spend time.

Everything anyone posts here is a rating out of ten, with an optional line about why. The line is optional because most of what people actually say is one sentence long, and the number is required because a wall of enthusiasm tells you nothing.

A four out of ten is an ordinary thing to post. The app says so: it will tell you a friend rated something rather than pretending they recommended it. A feed where everything is a nine is a feed you learn to skim.

There is nothing here recommending things to you. Every entry in your feed is there because a specific person you added chose to tell you about it, and their name is on it. Nothing is ranked by engagement, nothing is inserted, and nothing is promoted.

That also means an empty feed is a real state, and the fix is to add a friend rather than to wait for the app to fill it.

You see what your friends post. You do not see what their friends post. Two hops sounds like a small widening and is not: it turns a rule anybody can hold in their head into a question about a graph, and it puts your ratings in front of people you have never agreed to.

Friendship is mutual and has to be accepted. There is no following, no follower count, and nothing that rewards having more of either.

No public profiles. No shareable pages. No comment threads, no likes, no streaks, no notifications begging you to come back. What you save for later is yours alone, and not visible to the friend who suggested it.

See the privacy page for what that means concretely, and for how it is enforced.