[stub for offtopicness]
replies(7):
I'm the developer of rdx, a mildly popular ad-free, privacy and user friendly Reddit client. This time, I made something for a very specific use case: solving chess puzzles with no internet.
Why? Well, my Wi-Fi is terrible in the bathroom—and that's where I do some of my best thinking. I tried printing out “mate in X” puzzles to solve offline, but they weren’t fun without interaction. So I built OffChess.
OffChess is an iPhone/Android app that contains over 100,000 chess puzzles, fully offline and completely ad-free. You can solve puzzles by category (Mate in 1/2/3/4/5, tactics like pins/forks/skewers, or openings like Sicilian/French, etc). You gain or lose points based on how you perform, so there's a light rating system to keep things engaging.
No accounts, no tracking, no monthly subscriptions, no internet required. Just pure, old-school tactical chess training, wherever you are.
You can check out the iPhone/iPad app at https://apps.apple.com/us/app/chess-puzzles-offchess/id67447... or the Android app at https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.offchess
Would love feedback, bug reports, or suggestions.
Thanks!
It says "stub for offtopicness" but, skimming them, literally all comments are on-topic. Not all substantial ('very nice app', 'whats the tech stack?') but a lot of other comments are a normal amount of substantial and also in there... I don't get it, but note that you can expand that subthread
We've recently had some threads about new product announcements in which the thread quickly fills up with "booster" comments from new accounts or old/dormant accounts that come back to life just to post these comments. The "stub" is a way to hide those comments without penalizing/hiding the main thread and the product it's about.
We were getting some emails and comments suggesting that this was happening here too, so I started trying to address it by moving some comments into the stub, intending to spend more time figuring out which ones were authentic and which ones seemed inorganic, but was slow to get back to it.
I think in this case, most or even all of the comments are actually organic or authentic; people just really love a good chess app!
Sorry for the confusion!
By "booster" comments we just mean comments that are highly positive but low on substance. "Great app!". "Congrats on the launch!". Comments like that are often an indication that a friendship network has been rallied to show public support and create "social proof". But often these kinds of commenters try to get clever and add in Dorothy Dixer questions about the tech stack or something else to make the comment seem more authentic and substantive, and enable more details to be shared.
Often when that happens, it's green (new) accounts or old/dormant accounts posting the comments and upvoting the thread, but there wasn't much of that here (though there was a little, which is what aroused suspicion).
But these comments don't have any effect on the thread's ranking. It's only a vibes effect.