I worked on Ripost from November 2014 to September 2015. It was designed to be an internet platform, not a portal. That sounds like semantics until you have watched what the word "portal" does to a media product. A portal is a front page with twelve boxes on it and a newspaper layout underneath. We did not want to build that, and we were not entirely sure what we did want to build, which is why the beta looked the way it did.
Shows, like PunPun. News written short, sometimes three sentences short. Lists. Video news. Whatever else the internet could carry that week. Not a medium in the classical sense but something new that we ourselves never gave a name to, founded by a group of journalists, programmers, artists, philosophers, hustlers, linguists, animators, designers, freeloaders and businesspeople.
I was a founding member. My share of the work was user experience, the web, SEO and optimisation, and producing on the show side. Practically, that meant asking the same question in every room: what does this look like on a phone, six seconds after someone taps it.
The name was also the brief. Ripost means repost, so sharing could not be a row of buttons under the headline. Every unit had to survive being lifted out of context, because that is what happens to content in the wild: a screenshot of two paragraphs, a clip re-uploaded to a bigger page, a quote pasted with no source. We designed for that instead of against it. Copying text stayed easy. Link previews were treated as a primary layout rather than metadata.
The SEO side had the same constraint from the other direction. We invited people to copy everything, which breaks most of the standard publisher playbook. The answer was not to protect: it was to be the fastest, cleanest, most obviously original version of our own work. Publish first, stay crawlable, keep the source signals coherent, and let the copies exist, because they mostly send people back.
The goal underneath all of it was promoting debate and real values inside Kosovar and Albanian society, and bringing the news into the internet era at a point when collaboration, sharing and reposting had stopped being optional.