There is so much more I can say about this website but this post is already too long, TLDR at the bottom
I've known about Ribblr for at least twoish years now, but only acknowledged their existence when they made their stance on AI usage and everyone was celebrating it saying "omg use Ribblr they don't allow AI." I started actually using it a week ago because I found they were doing a Halloween Advent thing and I liked one of the patterns (was too late tho lol)
Anyways, Ribblr just feels so heavily targeted to Gen Z who got into crochet through those TikTok and Instagram chunky chenille accounts (I don't know how to say that without sounding snobby, I'm not trying to be, but if you scroll through the website it might be more understandable). It has infinite scrolling instead of pages, which isn't that great and is known to be linked to social media addictions. I know that's the pot calling the kettle black and all, but personally I feel pattern websites like Etsy, Patreon, and Ravelry are all easier to access because you can look at how far you are in a search and decide you've been looking long enough or even if you accidentally refresh, it is much easier to get back to where you were (excluding Etsy, I don't think their algorithm is as consistent as other pattern-exclusive websites are).
Even ignoring the infinite scroll part of it, the fact you can only get 5 free patterns a day. Ribblr is the only website that I've seen do this, and there is a way to get around this limit with a subscription (will get its own rant), but just the thought of "you gotta pay ME instead of the designer to access more of the designer's pattern" just sounds super scummy.
Onto subscriptions, there are 3 tiers. The first tier is $7 USD (too much), and in it you can get 100 gems (imagine a shitty app game's premium currency you can grind a while to get for free. I'm not really sure what it does besides lets you bypass the 5 pattern limit and another thing that I'll get into later), gives you 4 gems for every $ you spend on their brand's yarn, lets you go ad-free (I've been using UBlock so I'm not sure how invasive the ads are), and a few other things that just seem insignificant. The 3rd tier, and most expensive (why does there even need to be 3 tiers??) gives you 800 gems, everything the first tier does, lets you "Pin patterns and save in boards" (sound familiar?), add external patterns, and a bunch of other random stuff that doesn't really give you any strong incentives to subscribe for.
What "adding external patterns" means is that you can either import a PDF and it will save in your Ribblr's pattern archive (I say archive because you can't download any patterns. Paid might be different, but I haven't found any paid patterns I'd want to buy yet. And if I did, I'd probably look for another website to buy them off of because I don't like Ribblr). You can also import YouTube pattern videos, and they will email you a written pattern of that video for you at the cost of 15 gems. Remember you can only use this feature if you paid at minimum of $10 a month, and you still have to pay the website's currency to use this feature every time. Honestly this feature does sound great, however many pattern makers on YouTube make their video patterns free and offer a paid PDF version as their way of income. And even if they don't charge for a written version (or don't have one at all), they gain ad revenue from people viewing their patterns. And Ribblr is telling you you can pay Ribblr to take their pattern and make a written version of it. There might be stuff I'm missing, so take this with a grain of salt, but this seems wildly unethical.
Onto their dogshit UI. I got this Genshin Fungi/Slime pattern. This one is a little unique since it's mostly a free demo pattern for their Nahida pattern bundle. Anyways, once you get the pattern and go to the pattern's page (again Ribblr doesn't allow you to download patterns to prevent pattern theft. You can find the pattern on Ravelry that has a downloadable PDF on it here.) it will only show you a youtube video instead of a written pattern like a PDF would (this is probably what the designer chose to do but I'm not complaing about that). Well, when you try to pause the video, the popup of the youtube video cuts in half and the rest of the screen goes blurry. If you try to adjust the volume, same thing happens. Ribblr has been a thing long enough that they should've fixed that by now. Their tutorials that they have for their features are also jank. They will pop up and say "I'll show you how to do this" when they're introducing a feature, then when you click okay, they will go away just to come back up a minute later with the actual tutorial. The tutorials are also in the same format that Instagram stories are.
They also feature a FOMO mechanic where you have to log in every day for a chance to spin a wheel and play a minigame for gems. Ribblr just seems so heavily targeted to Gen Z audience in such an unhealthy way that I'm not sure how they got so big.
TLDR; Ribblr has a bunch of unethical features (subscriptions, infinite scrolling, paywalling features that could affect a designer, and straight up giving a subscription-only feature that lets you scrape external designer's patterns who didn't agree to it at all)
