Useful feedback - thanks. The content you're seeing may be misleading for what the platform really does. Let me explain.
The "hot topic" thing is just chatgpt creating conversation starters. Sometimes, its' leaning left, sometimes right, sometimes it's not political. We're tuning it up (mainly to just be more engaging).
The post you saw about Elon Musk ... Everyone is talking about whatever they feel like talking about. If Musk isn't your cup of tea, mute this anonymous person and you don't see each other for a week. It's only a week because maybe one of you was having a bad day. But with repeated muting, they're completely gone. Also nudges the system to group you with people you're going to like better. After enough respects and mutes, you should see the people you enjoy.
The bigger point is what happens once you bring your friends. You guys can talk about anything without getting angry at each other. If they irritate, mute 'em. If you enjoy the conversation, respect them. Enough mutual respect and you can see real names.
One of the biggest problems in local communities is how social media (usually in Nextdoor or Facebook groups) acts like acid for our social bonds. Your neighbors are looking for pancake breakfasts and kids shoveling driveways. What they get instead is anger over Orange Dictator or The Libs.
This divisiveness hurts across the world, but is painful when it goes local. These are people you see at the grocery store or teachers who can retaliate against your kids.
We just launched a hateless social media platform. People can speak freely on any topic, including politics. But a clever combination of aliases, real names, and respect functionality kills off the nastiness.
If any of this rings true to you, I'd love to help.
I get the wariness thing. The anon functionality is pretty different from what people have seen before and it might take a little time for people to get comfortable. Especially weird when we're saying using real names protects your identity more.
I'll see if there's some wording change on the signup page that can help the next guy get over this hump.
We need to keep user identities safe from exposure. One attack we're preventing: people targeting a particular person by posing as a friend. Part of the defense is making sure people are using real names (when needed, we'll back up this policy with authentication).
Glad you said something - I really want to know where the frictions are.
Text file seems fine for a smallish project, but not beyond that. It's just too difficult to keep track of various thoughts and references on each case as they move from concept to Production.
Switch to something more capable, like Trello (personally have used many systems and found nothing better than Asana). If you also keep the rest of your chores ("drop off dry cleaning") in there, you'll see benefits extending to the rest of your life and find this less onerous.
Bonus points: if you ever expand past working alone, you won't go insane.