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Ask HN: Anyone Building a Competitor to Reddit?

news.ycombinator.com

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

#21

Post by skilled »

It's a lot harder than it sounds. Moderation is hard, and these days I don't think it's free either, unless you have a very, very niche community with people who are passionate. This wasn't a problem back in phpBB days. You could have a forum with 100k users, and 500 people on at any given time, and moderation was extremely easy because people wanted to do it - it made the community better.

Reddit also has many users who are suffering from the familiarity syndrome. They don't care some API price is going up, they just want an endless feed of content and gazillion comments to mindlessly gaze through. This part of Reddit's audience is pretty much impossible to convert.

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

#22

Post by philip1209 »

I seek for more small communities, similar to niche subreddits. So, I'm building a community software called Booklet: https://www.booklet.community

It's forum software, but with the polish of Notion/Slack. Everything is threaded and real-time. I put a lot of effort into the automated email newsletter - so you can stay up-to-date with what's happening, without ever logging in. It's mostly whitelabeled and supports custom domains.

It's in early testing with some users - ranging from an MBA class to a members community that switched off of google groups. If you're trying it out, email me!

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

#23

Post by tyingq »

Posted recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36203610

The p2p backend makes it fairly slow to load, but it's an interesting approach. They seem to have put in a lot of effort to make the UI an almost-clone. Which is sort of interesting since the reddit UI gets a lot of negative feedback. Probably lots anyone could learn from the source code though.

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

#24

Post by dimmke »

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 PHPBB) so I’m sure some value added cloud provider could do something similar (I think Digital Ocean already has this with their App Marketplace.)

For one, there’s no check on mods. So if someone spins up a Reddit specifically for [TOPIC] they’re the God of that server basically. Like old school IRC.

Second, there’s no built in user base. Third, any app would be subject to inconsistently applied restrictions on things like porn that Reddit gets a pass on because of its size.

I think a compelling alternative to Reddit would be a non venture capital backed company that is small headcount wise (think 50 people) and very straightforward about how it earns a profit, is sustainable, and focused on direct pay. No blockchain, no fediverse, etc…

That means no worrying about advertisers (or headcount associated with wooing them, managing them, etc…), creating a “subreddit” would cost a flat monthly fee and then being a user of the site might also incur a fee. Like $2 a month.

It’d preserve what I feel is the real value of Reddit which is smaller communities. And I would be willing to pay $2 a month knowing it’s helping sustain a platform I get value from.

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

#25

Post by 0x445442 »

mach1ne wrote: post #3
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.

That’s not even close to being the main problem in launching a Reddit competitor. Reddit moderators are unpaid. Content moderation not being automated is not a problem. People like to do it for free. The problem is the user base. Biggest obstacle for any social media site is attaining critical mass. In order to do that, you need to be an order of magnitude better than your competitors on some metric which makes the u…

Moderation is really not the problem if you just remove comments. I’ve thought for a while that crowd sourced link ranking with a good search mechanism would be more useful than google. For tech related topics I often find HN search to be more useful than google.

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

#26

Post by NotSuspicious »

The "Marseyverse" exists. It really only has individual subreddit-websites. Each website is a fork of Ruqqus code (which itself was a failed-reddit clone that forked reddit's code) Examples would be

rdrama.net watchpeopledie.tv themotte.org ovarit.com

All full-reddit clones that I know of have failed miserably. And many reddit communities have tried establishing off-sites and failed. The factors for success seem to be:

1. The communities were banned or hampered on reddit 2. The communities have a unique culture 3. Some people in the community take on the responsibility for developing/maintaining the offsite 4. The users of the community donate money to keep everything running (a la SomethingAwful)

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

#27

Post by SkipperCat »

My question is why would you want to do that? You're just going to come against the same issues and problems that Reddit has, especially if you want to achieve anything close to Reddit's scale.

You'll need staff, money, legal and tech folks (not cheap). And to get the funds, you'll prob have to make the same decisions about ads and API fees.

You could pull off something smaller, maybe by being distributed or whatnot, but you'll probably never operate at the scale of Reddit. The killer feature of Reddit is that everyone goes to Reddit because Reddit is Reddit.

Maybe my pessimistic brain can't see the opportunity. I'd be happy to be proven wrong.

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

#29

Post by gwbas1c »

Not a competitor; but I was thinking yesterday about what the next big thing in forums like Reddit needs to be: Non-profit Democracies.

The big problem with social networks today is that there is little recourse when the parties that are in charge make decisions that aren't in the best interest of the users.

What if the CEO, product manager, and other key roles in Redit, Facebook, Twitter, ect, were elected by the users?

What if the there was something like a constitution that dictated that all source code be open source?

What if funding was mostly donation-based, like how people support their church or similar civic organizations? (For example, in order to vote you need to pay $15 / year?)

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