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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?

#31

Post by [deleted] »

ed_elliott_asc wrote: post #12
phpisthebest wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is not a technological problem, as what is one persons "hate speech" is another persons political speech, and no one can agree on where the line is For me the line is no line... All Speech should be allowed, the problem with moderation is attempting to do it in the first place at the platform level Give people their own personal controls to see or not see, to block, mute, or otherwise disassociate. Anything beyo…

Probably the line is decency, is what you are saying decent or nasty. Keep it simple, keep the nastiness to yourself (I’m not saying you, I’m saying everyone). The world would be a kinder place.

[deleted]

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

#32

Post by that_guy_iain »

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?

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

#35

Post by bigdict »

SkipperCat wrote: post #27

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,…

I think the answer in cases like that is there needs to be a public Reddit. We all benefit from it and we all want its operation to not be warped by profit-seeking… so we all should just pitch in a dollar a year (?) of our taxes.

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

#36

Post by tomstockmail »

m3kw9 wrote: post #16

Maybe mastodoon type system would suit a Reddit competitor

That's Lemmy:

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy

List of instances to join: https://join-lemmy.org/

List of communities ("subreddits"): https://lemmy.one/communities/listing_type/All/page/1 or https://browse.feddit.de/ - this is not an exhaustive list.

Some subreddits have experimented with re-creating over there: https://old.reddit.com/r/PrivacyGuides/comments/13x7oe3/who_...

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

#37

Post by incomingpain »

When you look up 'reddit alternatives' you find hackernews often at the top of the list. There are MANY live alternatives.

The "digg moment" won't happen over some pricing of api stuff. It's not a serious problem which doesnt come even close to Yishan Wong or Ellen Pao levels of censorship. Reddit should by all metrics have had a digg moment after both of those people.

If you do go back in time before Musk bought twitter. Yishan had made some very odd unsubstantiated absolutely absurd comments. After the twitter files we found out the US government was behind this. The US government is keeping Reddit in power and you'll be banned to prevent migration.

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

#38

Post by SkipperCat »

bigdict wrote: post #35
SkipperCat wrote: post #27

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,…

I think the answer in cases like that is there needs to be a public Reddit. We all benefit from it and we all want its operation to not be warped by profit-seeking… so we all should just pitch in a dollar a year (?) of our taxes.

You could make the argument that some web sites are part of the "public good" and could get funding from government. Think of NEA grants of PBS/NPR funding (small amount of their budget but not chump-change).

Of course, it would be a pretty hard sell, and how the country would choose which web sites to fund would be a shit-show, but still, its an interesting idea.

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

#39

Post by jjice »

bigdict wrote: post #35
SkipperCat wrote: post #27

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,…

I think the answer in cases like that is there needs to be a public Reddit. We all benefit from it and we all want its operation to not be warped by profit-seeking… so we all should just pitch in a dollar a year (?) of our taxes.

Moderation would become a nightmare since a private business's right to remove certain content wouldn't apply and now what do you do when a mod or /r/buyitforlife takes down a post that doesn't support the type of coffee maker that like, or whatever a shady reddit mod does these days.

I also would rather not post or log into any government run social media, that's seems like a big no from me.

I really don't know what a fix would be but I would be interested to see how a government ran social media would look, even if I wouldn't use it.

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

#40

Post by smeej »

bigdict wrote: post #35
SkipperCat wrote: post #27

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,…

I think the answer in cases like that is there needs to be a public Reddit. We all benefit from it and we all want its operation to not be warped by profit-seeking… so we all should just pitch in a dollar a year (?) of our taxes.

"The government should do it" is (almost?) never the answer.

If people are willing to pitch in a buck a year, just charge them for it. Either you can find enough people to support it voluntarily or you can't. If you can, you don't need government, and if you can't, it's not enough of a benefit to force people to pay for it.

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