You can think of WeSearch as Hacker News meets a real RSS reader meets a community Discord, with the surface of an editorial press magazine. Every news headline we pull becomes a stable landing page at /s/<slug> with its own threaded discussion. Comments persist across the hub feed and the story page, so jumping in at any point lands you in the same conversation.
What the discussion layer includes
- Threaded replies — reply to a specific comment and the thread indents up to a few levels.
- GIF picker — drop in a GIF from the GIF library at any point in a thread. Renders inline for everyone.
- Comment likes — "condone" a take you appreciate. Likes are visible on the comment, anonymous on the back end.
- Reactions on the headline — separately from comments, every story has 5 reactions: like, love, fire, laugh, think. Counts merge across the hub and the story page.
- Sort order — newest, most-liked, or most-replied — your call, not an algorithm's.
- Anonymous handles — you appear as a generated handle. Read more about anonymity here.
- Hot badge — when a thread crosses an engagement threshold, the headline gets a marker. Not an algorithm — just a count.
- Mute, delete, follow — delete your own comments anytime, follow voices you appreciate, mute the rest.
The Pulse tab
The Pulse tab surfaces the live community signal: 24-hour reaction totals, comment totals across the platform, hot stories, and an emoji-economy bar showing what people are feeling. Pulse is also where "Latest chatter" lives — a real-time stream of comments as they post.
How threading works under the hood
Each comment row stores an optional parent_id pointing to the comment it's replying to. Replies render indented up to depth-3 (deeper threads still work but flatten visually so the thread doesn't slide off the screen). Likes and replies are aggregated and surfaced in the comment header — no separate notification count to manage.
Discussion that doesn't poison itself
The combination of anonymous handles + no follower counts + no algorithm reward creates a discussion environment where the loudest takes don't win by default. People reply to specific points, GIFs serve as humor not aggression, and the thread tends to stabilize on substance. We moderate when something crosses a hard line, but most threads don't need it.