Welcome to Roastidio.us

Where we roast everyone and share our opinions. For help on usage, see also the FAQ

At Roastidio.us, we believe in good-hearted criticisms, AKA roasts. People typically have a lot to say, but they’ll volunteer little, mostly because of the lack of a proper venue. Roastidio.us is our attempt to provide such a place to the general public. You can roast anything here: a blog post, a news article, a video posted somewhere. All you need to provide is an URL. It will only get more interesting when more people join the party.

Rule No. 1: You must give in order to take

Roastidio.us is only open to members: Annonymous browsing (lurking) is not allowed. However, memberships are free and open to everyone; All you need to give is an email address to register. We take privacy very seriously and will not share your email address with anyone, including other members. We only use the email address to communicate with you about the roasts you directly made or received.

As a member, you only have access to the roasting parties that you actively join. We encourage you to share your thought before you see other people’s comments, and to roast not just the topics (the URL), but also the roasts from other people, so on and so forth. The visibility rules are:

You see your comments
You see replies to your comments
You see pinned sibling comments

We also understand that sometimes you have nothing of value to add yet, but want to see what others have said. Instead of writing something useless, you can click the “speechless” button to gain the same visibility as a real comment, with a much shorter time limit.

It is also possible to send a “private” comment if you have a pinned reply on the same node already. No other visitor can see private messages. Your email address would be exposed to the node owner and you can use the private message to exchange additional contact information.

Rule No. 2: All members are created equal

There is no privileged member in Roastidio.us. Everyone has the same rights, and everyone’s word carries the same weight. We do not know who you are, and we do not judge you by who you are. We intentionally blur your identity; other members can only see your Gravatar in the comments so that only your friends can recognize you. We don’t show the Gravatar for the unpinned comments to avoid bias in judgments.

However, by posting here, you take on more powers together with more responsibilities. The comments you made are yours, so you are the only one who can interpret. If anyone replies to you, you and you alone have the power and responsibility to censor the reply by pinning or not pinning it. Without being pinned, no one besides you and the author can see the comment.

We wish the node owners to exert this power on the merit of the reply itself, and in a timely fashion, so his or her node will grow. We wish the comments to be civil, on-topic, and with substance, so they can be pinned and attract replies. Once pinned, a node is entirely autonomous; its parent node has no further influence.

If you feel that you have said something improper, or are receiving too much spam from one comment, you can always “withdraw” your comment. The comment would either degrade into a “speechless” reply or appears to be made by nobody. The latter case happens when the comment has its replies.

You can also claim a webspace, so all topics become yours automatically. As an example, roastidio.us’s own blog is claimed by me.

Rule No. 3: All things fade away in the end

Nothing lasts forever on the Internet. Likewise, Every comment you made will eventually disappear in Roastidio.us. We have no interest in archiving the past and obsolete comments and discussions. We emailed you a copy of your comments and all replies already; those are yours to keep. Over here, though, old and irrelevant comments will be pruned to reduce the clutter for everyone.

Something does live longer than others. A comment has one month by default, and after that, as long as its replies. Therefore, the more insightful a comment is, the longer it should live. The power to extend the life of a comment is entirely in the community members.

Don’t pin or reply to SPAMs, trolls, or abuses. They can only annoy one person without being pinned and will disappear in a month without a reply. To further limit the power of spammers, we forbid anyone to reply to themselves and reply again until the earlier reply is pinned. Think carefully before hitting the submit button; You don’t want to be a spammer!

On the other hand, don’t be afraid to say what you truly believe. We do not know you, and we do not track you. At worst, people ignore you. The standard of right or wrong may change, the community may change, and you may change. If you want to hear and to be heard, there is no better way than being honest and keeping an open mind:

Share your own opinions, don’t just copy/paste someone else’s
Share fact only with a source
Anticipate, accept, and acclaim differences

Ready to roast?

That’s all for the rules. To roast something you can copy/paste the link into the roast box in your home page, or use one of the following tricks:

Desktop browser users

Install the bookmarklet: Roast it on Roastidio.us by dragging it to your bookmarks. Then, whenever you come across something you want to roast, you can click the bookmarklet to send the link here to roast.

Android browser users

Both Chrome and Firfox on mobile have some quirks that prevent the bookmarklet from working 100%. Luckly, there is an APP: URL Forwarder You can add a filter in the APP as:

https://roastidio.us/roast?url=@url

Then name it as Roast it on Roastidio.us. Now, You can share the link that you want to roast via URL Forwarder, which in turn will send the link here to roast.

iOS browser users

I couldn’t find an easy APP for iOS but the bookmarklet works in mobile Safari. The best way to get the bookmarklet into your device is to sync it from your Mac. Alternatively, copy/paste the bookmarklet string here:

javascript:location.href='https://roastidio.us/roast?url='+encodeURIComponent(window.location.href)

You will need to bookmark any page, such as this one, then manually change the link target to the above string and the link title too.

Some additional helpful questions and answers are here.