Ask HN: Alternatives to Reddit? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Reddit?

#111

Post by birksherty » Thu, Apr 12, 2018, 4:46 PM UTC

bitexploder wrote: post #30

Reddit scrubs the identity out of many communities/topics. I have found much deeper and meaningful discussion on focused forums. For almost any topic with any significant interest there is a non Reddit forum or community that is deeper and more customized. Not always, but usually. Just support those communities and forums. Example, mtgsalvation is by far better to visit for meaningful MTG deck building and discussion…

I use reddit for a single sub-reddit, soccer. I get to know about important news and view spectacular goals without having to go through clickbait news sites and hundreds of tweets. It saves me a lot of time.

If any of you have any good alternative to follow soccer please let me know. I want to get out of reddit too.

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Reddit?

#112

Post by pasabagi » Thu, Apr 12, 2018, 4:55 PM UTC

pmoriarty wrote: post #85

dmix wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't that mostly a result of UI/UX problems? IRC has fostered a good community of tooling. But the content side of Usenet seems to have been completely ignored, outside of file sharing.

What UI/UX problems does Usenet have? My impression was that Usenet was abandoned mostly because it had a ton of spam, and at the time there was no good solution to that. These days, spam is not nearly as much of a problem, so the only obstacles to its adoption of it are most users' ignorance of it, their psychological dependence on their web browsers as their primary online communicaton tool, and most importantly th…

It's also really hard to get into. If you just download a news reader, read the manual, and go onto a random forum, you'll find a lot of weird early-2000's spam, and maybe some (crazy) discussion, and it's really hard to find active communities.

People who live there don't have these problems because they have big kill lists, know which groups are interesting, and only download new stuff, which is pretty spam-free.

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Reddit?

#113

Post by Huhty » Thu, Apr 12, 2018, 5:03 PM UTC

My team and I run Snapzu (http://www.snapzu.com), a which we started several years ago.

First off, the main reason there's no de facto "Reddit alternative" (Like Reddit was to Digg) is because it's nearly impossible to grow a community based around thousands of topics from scratch.

It's a massive "chicken or egg" dilemma where you need a steady flow of users (1000's per day or more) to provide the necessary community "value" to other users. And even then, the users are scattered all over the place with all kinds of different interests, making it hard to keep them around and coming back for more.

I've kept an eye out on all the competition that has come and gone (hundreds of them at this point), and most of them don't make it even one year before throwing in the towel.

Building a link-sharing/discussion platform is one thing (anyone can do it), but populating it with active people is a whole other beast and probably 100x harder, requiring routinely time consuming tasks such as blogging, promoting the blogging, and trying anything and everything to get the word out. This is where most people fail, and the saying "build it and they will come" is utter BS.

It also doesn't help that Reddit has copied (probably unintentionally) many of the things we added over the years to try and differentiate from them. We had their new "cross-posting" feature many years ago, but ours is named "mirroring" where you can add an existing post into other tribes (our version of sub-reddits). We also had the ability to add "related links" for years now, and I've noticed they added that feature to their "mega-thread" topics, and I'm sure they will make it a site wide feature soon enough.

Reddit gets millions of daily visitors from SEO alone, and all of that SEO is dependent on their user-generated content. For MANY search terms, you can find a Reddit link on the first page of the Google results.

At this point we've had to pivot (focusing on bloggers/creators and their audiences) because we understand that we can't directly compete with them.

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Reddit?

#114

Post by skrause » Thu, Apr 12, 2018, 5:49 PM UTC

Huhty wrote: post #113

My team and I run Snapzu ( http://www.snapzu.com ), a which we started several years ago. First off, the main reason there's no de facto "Reddit alternative" (Like Reddit was to Digg) is because it's nearly impossible to grow a community based around thousands of topics from scratch. It's a massive "chicken or egg" dilemma where you need a steady flow of users (1000's per day or more) to provide the necessary communi…

At least pretty much everything that requires an invitation by another user is doomed to fail.

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Reddit?

#115

Post by bitexploder » Thu, Apr 12, 2018, 7:08 PM UTC

atwebb wrote: post #51

bitexploder wrote: post #30

Reddit scrubs the identity out of many communities/topics. I have found much deeper and meaningful discussion on focused forums. For almost any topic with any significant interest there is a non Reddit forum or community that is deeper and more customized. Not always, but usually. Just support those communities and forums. Example, mtgsalvation is by far better to visit for meaningful MTG deck building and discussion…

Yep, you need to do your own aggregations, now a place to hold all my forum links and note/save them (similar to bookmarks but way more robust) would be pretty nice. I've been forcing myself off Reddit and to search out specific forums and sites. It's an old (I meant odd) mix out there, some have obviously been using phpBB for years, some are brand new with lots of mechanics, and some are tied into other sites that h…

That is another interesting point. There are threads on some forums that are years old. How to replace thing X on your Subaru. Updates about MTG Deck Z. Whereas Reddit aims much more towards "whats happening". That's great but the forum aspect of having a deep conversation on a single topic over many days, weeks, and months can be really important.

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Reddit?

#116

Post by atwebb » Thu, Apr 12, 2018, 7:32 PM UTC

bitexploder wrote: post #115

atwebb wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, you need to do your own aggregations, now a place to hold all my forum links and note/save them (similar to bookmarks but way more robust) would be pretty nice. I've been forcing myself off Reddit and to search out specific forums and sites. It's an old (I meant odd) mix out there, some have obviously been using phpBB for years, some are brand new with lots of mechanics, and some are tied into other sites that h…

That is another interesting point. There are threads on some forums that are years old. How to replace thing X on your Subaru. Updates about MTG Deck Z. Whereas Reddit aims much more towards "whats happening". That's great but the forum aspect of having a deep conversation on a single topic over many days, weeks, and months can be really important.

It can be, though most forums comment systems could use HN/Reddit like threading. Paging and paging and having to have the reply blocks can be terrible, especially in long ones where they splinter into different conversations.

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Reddit?

#117

Post by bitexploder » Thu, Apr 12, 2018, 9:06 PM UTC

dmix wrote: post #73

bitexploder wrote: post #30

Reddit scrubs the identity out of many communities/topics. I have found much deeper and meaningful discussion on focused forums. For almost any topic with any significant interest there is a non Reddit forum or community that is deeper and more customized. Not always, but usually. Just support those communities and forums. Example, mtgsalvation is by far better to visit for meaningful MTG deck building and discussion…

> Reddit scrubs the identity out of many communities/topics. In my experience Reddit moderators do this, not Reddit. For some reason heavy handed moderation is now the norm across every medium-large sized subreddit. I don't know if it's a cultural thing, there's some top-down pressure, or the nature of the kinds of people who become (and stay) mods. But I'm finding it more and more the case where mods feel the need t…

The touch of moderation on HN is not always obvious right away, but it is definitely something that requires a lot of work to make HN the way it is. There are certainly biases and such here, they just happen to align with our world views usually.

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Reddit?

#118

Post by exelius » Thu, Apr 12, 2018, 10:02 PM UTC

Slansitartop wrote: post #102

exelius wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How long do you think the API will continue to exist? All of Reddit’s recent moves have shown me they finally realized that much of the DNA of the site (no account verification required, “questionable” speech being semi-tolerated, a dense UX that’s hard to cram ads into, portability, etc.) are what’s preventing them from monetizing. And they’re trying to monetize. This is exactly the transformation Twitter went throu…

> Frankly I think the community will hate it but because it’s really hard to move millions of individual communities, Reddit likely won’t lose too many users. Is that really true? Didn't Reddit get big because Digg made some ill-advised changes and its userbase picked up and moved en masse to Reddit?

Reddit is much, much bigger now than Digg ever was; and there’s no viable platform for most to move to. Its communities are decentralized, and moderation is a function of the network, so Reddit as it exists is effectively the only thing holding them together.

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Reddit?

#119

Post by txsh » Thu, Apr 12, 2018, 10:38 PM UTC

spamizbad wrote: post #92

txsh wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

/v/politics is just as obnoxious rightwing as /r/politics is obnoxiously leftwing. Belonging to a side desensitizes you to it.

/r/politics is definitely not leftwing in any real sense. It's more like distilled American centrism: socially permissive but ultimately capitalist.

> Belonging to a side desensitizes you to it.

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Reddit?

#120

Post by mrfusion » Thu, Apr 12, 2018, 11:40 PM UTC

bitexploder wrote: post #30

Reddit scrubs the identity out of many communities/topics. I have found much deeper and meaningful discussion on focused forums. For almost any topic with any significant interest there is a non Reddit forum or community that is deeper and more customized. Not always, but usually. Just support those communities and forums. Example, mtgsalvation is by far better to visit for meaningful MTG deck building and discussion…

They seem so hard to navigate though. You’d have to scroll through hundreds of different threads and there’s no canonical area that says what’s new with x today.