On Compend, Everything is Up for Review

There are things you know about your friends because they have told you, and things you only discover when they’re given somewhere to publicly rate the concept of meowing. The latter is arguably more useful and direct. I personally rate meowing five starts out of five. It’s possible to spend years with friends, discussing various topics, without ever discovering their true opinion of a feline’s strangled cries. Now the internet has a website for that, in a very fittingly internet-y fashion.

Compend’s premise is simple: you can review anything with a Wikipedia article. Sometimes the search is a little clunky, and you have to pop in a link yourself manually – but it’s pretty straightforward. You can also make lists, ranked or otherwise, giving your otherwise directionless opinions somewhere to live. Imagine Letterboxd with its perimeter fence removed, with an audience that seems to be fluent in Twitter and Reddit. In a way, it sort of seems to interrogate the pretentiousness that has seemed to follow from the Letterboxd app.

There is something immediately funny about applying the language of customer satisfaction to things nobody sold you. Water, for instance, receives the assessment “all timer”, while a review of Microsoft Teams reads “burn in hell <3”. The joke works because we recognise the format so well: a small box, a place to pop your opinion however long or short, a verdict, maybe there’s an implication that somebody further down the line might actually find your experience helpful. Thank you for your feedback on water. We’ll pass it on.

Having an opinion online can sometimes feel exhausting, especially when you’re expected to defend it against people who seem to have taken annual leave specifically to misunderstand you. Even affection gets put through a strange little interrogation. Why do you like this? Have you considered its implications? Isn’t that a little cringe? There’s been a common wave of think pieces over the last five years discussing this phenomenon of an overly-curated social media, so Compend seems like a pretty direct answer to it.

Of course, an anything-reviewing website could just as easily become another place to perform being interesting. Given enough time, someone will find a way to be condescending about your favourite game, snack; maybe you’ve decided to comment on pancakes wikipedia page, for someone to respond that you must hate waffles. There’s no technical fix for the person who needs you to know they liked rain before it became embarrassing. But broadening the subject matter makes the performance slightly harder to sustain. An immaculate cultural identity starts looking much sillier when it has to accommodate your feelings about soup.

It also makes room for kinds of taste that rarely fit neatly into a profile. Your favourite films might suggest someone austere and difficult to impress; your taste in games, however, isn’t quite as sophisticated as you would like. This is how people tend to exist anyway. The version of yourself assembled through prestigious references is always missing something, usually the thing you would actually cross a room to talk about.

The diary possibility is especially appealing. A review of a cross necklace could easily turn into a story about growing up religious; a review of boredom might become an admission that you’ve finally learnt to enjoy your own company. And it doesn’t necessarily have to announce itself as personal writing, although your personal page is headed with the word ‘Diary’. The subject gives you something to begin with, and a little cover once you get there. That looseness allows sincerity and stupidity to sit comfortably together. There is pleasure in encountering somebody through these sideways disclosures. You don’t necessarily need their whole life story. Doesn’t the internet – or moreso, humanity – need a bit more of that?

It would be tempting to declare this the return of the good internet, then ruin everyone’s afternoon the next week if its user count was to drastically decline. For now, Compend offers a more manageable pleasure: a reason to follow a thought that has no obvious destination. Maybe you’ll write a genuinely moving paragraph; maybe you’ll give a vegetable (peas) an unnecessarily low score. Either way, you’ve found somewhere to put it, and someone else might be pleased you did. If you’d like to follow mine, you can find me at @jxnnyo.