but i what i really wanted to know is if ripple is a rip off. there's a site that says that it is.
Yup that's an old site that was made by someone who had a competing business model, so he didn't like ripple at all.
Some information on that site is blatantly wrong (or incomplete to the point of being misleading), some is outdated.
The author of that site (TradeFortress) had another site where quite a number of people lost their bitcoins to a hack. He has since then basically disappeared from the forum. I won't make any accusations, but you might come to your own conclusions...
Onkel Paul