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Ask HN: Anyone Building a Competitor to Reddit?

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Re: Ask HN: Anyone Building a Competitor to Reddit?

#101

Post by RhodesianHunter »

dmortin wrote: post #10
RhodesianHunter wrote: post #2

Overcoming reddit as a startup has a massive obstacle, moderation and removal of unwanted content. It's something that's not well automated, and thus requires an enormous amount of labor (ie capital) This is why those who have tried have turned into racist pornography filled shit holes. Want to start a billion dollar startup? Figure out how to automate this problem.

> It's something that's not well automated, and thus requires an enormous amount of labor (ie capital) This is why those who have tried have turned into racist pornography filled shit holes. Want to start a billion dollar startup? Figure out how to automate this problem. Can't modern AI help with that? I'd guess GPT is pretty good at determining sentiment like racism. Try it with ChatGpt, ask it determine if a senten…

That's an obscenely expensive solution.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone Building a Competitor to Reddit?

#102

Post by RhodesianHunter »

that_guy_iain wrote: post #32
RhodesianHunter wrote: post #2

Overcoming reddit as a startup has a massive obstacle, moderation and removal of unwanted content. It's something that's not well automated, and thus requires an enormous amount of labor (ie capital) This is why those who have tried have turned into racist pornography filled shit holes. Want to start a billion dollar startup? Figure out how to automate this problem.

I think there is a much bigger problem and capital cost. Servers. 7 billion API requests per month from a third party app that's just one of them. There would be several. Then the much larger traffic from official sources. If you can't afford the servers moderation isn't even worth thinking about. Who is going to pay for all of those?

No startup goes from zero to 7 billion API requests immediately. That's a problem that can be scaled in to over time.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone Building a Competitor to Reddit?

#103

Post by RhodesianHunter »

throw_m239339 wrote: post #65
kkfdkerpoe wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How exactly is Reddit a "porn filled shit hole"? I don't see any porn in the vast majority of subreddits. Nobody forces you to visit the rest, and they are typically even marked adult-only. Besides, are porn and racism really the only questionable things in social media? What about extreme violence, videos where real people get shot or blown up? Somehow messed up American society thinks that violence is quite okay th…

> How exactly is Reddit a "porn filled shit hole"? I don't see any porn in the vast majority of subreddits. Nobody forces you to visit the rest, and they are typically even marked adult-only. My bad, I should have said "reddit is a porn spammer filled shit hole" on top of really being a "porn filled shit hole" /s The fact that you feign being oblivious to all the CSAM, depraved porn and revenge porn hosted on reddit…

The point isn't that that content doesn't exist there.

The point is that as a Reddit user, you won't see that content unless you disable your NSFW filter and go searching for it.

Because the platform is moderated.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone Building a Competitor to Reddit?

#104

Post by pie420 »

this_user wrote: post #89
eugeniub wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit used to have pretty low overhead. You couldn't upload/host videos directly on Reddit, you could only share links or create self-posts. They didn't have all these superfluous features that they have now like live chat, push notifications, cryptocurrency wallets, first-party mobile apps, etc. A "classical" version of Reddit would be a fraction of the development and hosting cost compared to modern Reddit, especi…

That version of reddit was created in 2005. The world has changed a lot since, and users are expecting certain features. If you don't have them, you are going to struggle to grow nowadays. For instance, the majority of users are on mobile now, so you need to offer them a proper UX.

The vast majority of reddit users would pay extra to strip away all of the features and have a barebones 2005 version of reddit.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone Building a Competitor to Reddit?

#105

Post by [deleted] »

dimmke wrote: post #24

I’ve been thinking about this a lot. Every year for the last 12+ years there has been some alternative to Reddit. The code to the old version of Reddit is even open source. The problem is most solutions want to go back to decentralized, which is problematic. I do think that the technical problem could be solved. Point and click solutions for installing open source software has been around forever (like cPanel and PHP…

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Anyone Building a Competitor to Reddit?

#106

Post by throw_m239339 »

RhodesianHunter wrote: post #103
throw_m239339 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How exactly is Reddit a "porn filled shit hole"? I don't see any porn in the vast majority of subreddits. Nobody forces you to visit the rest, and they are typically even marked adult-only. My bad, I should have said "reddit is a porn spammer filled shit hole" on top of really being a "porn filled shit hole" /s The fact that you feign being oblivious to all the CSAM, depraved porn and revenge porn hosted on reddit…

The point isn't that that content doesn't exist there. The point is that as a Reddit user, you won't see that content unless you disable your NSFW filter and go searching for it. Because the platform is moderated.

> The point is that as a Reddit user, you won't see that content unless you disable your NSFW filter and go searching for it.

The point is that people use reddit to hotlink depraved, illegal porn images and videos and spam these media on other forums. That depraved content is not moderated, it should not be possible to hotlink porn material from reddit. The platform is not moderated like you claim, a checkbox in the preferences is not moderation, if evading "moderation" consist simply in hotlinking porn hosted on reddit.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone Building a Competitor to Reddit?

#107

Post by pasabagi »

taylodl wrote: post #61
eugeniub wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit used to have pretty low overhead. You couldn't upload/host videos directly on Reddit, you could only share links or create self-posts. They didn't have all these superfluous features that they have now like live chat, push notifications, cryptocurrency wallets, first-party mobile apps, etc. A "classical" version of Reddit would be a fraction of the development and hosting cost compared to modern Reddit, especi…

Think this all the way through - why did Reddit do these things? To attract more users and to generate revenue. As the OP said, what are you going to do to solve Reddit's income problem? This isn't a technical issue, the technical piece is straightforward and well-known. They can't really push for advertising until they eliminate 3rd party API access to the content. That or they have to start charging a usage fee. Wh…

The replacement of external links with inferior in-house versions (the reddit video player is particularly egregious) makes sense if you're trying to maximize profit-per-user.

I think there's an alternate timeline where reddit just kept on being a low profit-per-user site, and didn't do the 'monetization-degradation-decline' cycle we've seen so often with other sites over the years. There's no reason why you have to make all the money at once, especially if it's a tried and true method of trashing your platform, just so whoever absorbs all your fleeing users can repeat your mistakes in a few years time.

Why not just stick with what works?

Re: Ask HN: Anyone Building a Competitor to Reddit?

#108

Post by vhcr »

EA-3167 wrote: post #95
this_user wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That version of reddit was created in 2005. The world has changed a lot since, and users are expecting certain features. If you don't have them, you are going to struggle to grow nowadays. For instance, the majority of users are on mobile now, so you need to offer them a proper UX.

Considering how many people use Old.Reddit I doubt that you're right in this case.

I'm a mod at a >100k subscribers subreddit, and old reddit represents 2% of pageviews and 6% of uniques.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone Building a Competitor to Reddit?

#109

Post by [deleted] »

codingclaws wrote: post #77

I am. I've been working on it for 3.5 years. It's open source and it's called Comment Castles [0]. I am currently in the process of changing the name to Comment Castles, the main instance is currently at the old name [1]. All the features work with front-end JavaScript turned off. I am currently wrapping up the OAuth 2 server implementation so that we can have third party apps (no API fees!). After I wrap up some rem…

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Anyone Building a Competitor to Reddit?

#110

Post by rodface »

codingclaws wrote: post #77

I am. I've been working on it for 3.5 years. It's open source and it's called Comment Castles [0]. I am currently in the process of changing the name to Comment Castles, the main instance is currently at the old name [1]. All the features work with front-end JavaScript turned off. I am currently wrapping up the OAuth 2 server implementation so that we can have third party apps (no API fees!). After I wrap up some rem…

This looks promising, I hope it gets some traction. Simple design much like HN.
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