ask.rip, the anonymous question.

ask.rip is the tiniest possible product: you create a page, people send you anonymous questions, you answer them publicly. that's it. no DMs. no follower graph. no ranking algorithm. no monetisation.

the design constraint was that nothing about the receiver should be exposed beyond what they choose to publish. no email, no IP log, no linked account. the only persistent identity is the slug you picked when you signed up — and you can change it.

the part that's still interesting

the product is built around one technical claim: a person who sends an anonymous question should not be identifiable, to anyone, after the fact. that means no IP logs, no fingerprinting, no shadow analytics. the receiver gets the question and a creation timestamp. nothing else exists in the database.

it has been live for over five years. the postgres database is small enough to fit on a free tier and has somehow not been migrated to anything more serious. it runs because it does not break. that is, in my experience, the most underrated form of software.

why it's still here

i don't market it. i don't add features. it has roughly the same user count it had eighteen months ago, which is fine, because the cost of running it is roughly zero. it's the kind of project that justifies its existence by simply continuing to exist.