Someone pass the comically sized scissors. Six months since our Alpha went live, and right on schedule according to our roadmap, we’re cutting the ribbon and declaring that Just About is in Beta! Our tech team has been hard at work on updates to bring us across the threshold we set for ourselves, and we believe we’re there.

Here’s exactly what that means, and what’s coming next.

What Beta is

The final update of our Alpha went live last week. Some of you may have already noticed that ‘alpha’ is gone from our URL; we’re on the world wide web now, and our bounties and curated articles are visible to non-members, helping us to catch the interest of passing internetters. If they want to participate, however, or browse your discussions, they’ll need to join the platform.

This update follows a number of others that have been building the Beta ship over the past few weeks. To recap, these are all the things Just About now does which we consider to be part of Beta, and which show how much progress we’ve made from where we were in June:

• Curated articles and bounties are both viewable on the wider internet

• Speedier signup flow, so new members can get into the platform faster

• Our auto-moderator, JAutoMod, is running on both discussions and replies

• Core rebuild of discussions, replies, and the feed for speed, scale, and reliability

• Organic rewards

• Countless bug fixes, page-speed and stability updates, and other optimisations

What we’ve learned

Besides a more complete product, we’ve got a bigger and wiser team, thanks to lessons learned and colleagues hired during our Alpha.

Alongside our friendly community we’ve tested hundreds of different bounties, gathering and crunching the data from all of them. With our pathfinders in Just About EVE, Video Games, and Content Curators, we’ve got a robust plan for launching new communities and keeping our bounty schedules fresh for the long term.

We’ve hired some brilliant folks into the tech team to keep us building, and Jason and Nicole to manage and grow our communities ahead of the next phase.

What’s next

We have one big goal for 2024: growth. Our membership grows by the day, but with these changes we can shift gears and make a big push. We’ve got Nicole leading the charge - check out her recent departmental deep dive for more on how she’ll do it - and Jason, plus his robot assistant JAutoMod, on hand to maintain the good vibes no matter how big we get.

The fact that bounties and curated content are now publicly visible, and our signup flow so much smoother, will unlock many more tactics on social media and what we can show to potential partners.

As the game industry digests its Christmas and an extremely difficult 2023, we’ll look to deliver on the Beta and 2024 goals set out in our roadmap. Expect more game-specific communities, the handover of more mature communities to the membership, more platform integrations, and, well, everything else.

No matter how long you’ve been with us, we want to thank you for getting involved and helping us reach this stage. And if you’re a new member, welcome! We hope this is a useful recap of how far the platform has come already and what lies ahead.

A little celebration…

But all of that kicks off in January. We’ve got two weeks of end-of-year exhilaraustion to get through first. Expect lots more festive holiday bounties to join the ones that are already live, and we’ve got one more exciting announcement to share: we’re doubling organic rewards for 30 days from today!

Check here for a recap of how these work, but TL;DR: the most engaged-with comments and replies each day will see a little extra cash enter their authors’ Just About wallets. So be extra helpful, funny, or kind, and get a little something back for helping us to make the best community on the internet.

From all of us at Just About, another enormous thank-you to everyone who’s brought the platform this far. Here’s to the next chapter together!