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Show HN: Reddit clone built in no-code in two weeks

reggit.bubbleapps.io

81–90 of 176 posts

Re: Show HN: Reddit clone built in no-code in two weeks

#81
It's not really an exact Reddit-looking clone, but we built a tool called Newsy, which builds content aggregator like Reddit without code.

https://www.newsy.co

We focus on users with un-used domain names and try to spin up a news site like Reddit quickly with various features built in.

Re: Show HN: Reddit clone built in no-code in two weeks

#82
To use a Reddit term, ELI5 what "no code" actually means. As someone who's only ever seen the term in passing on HN, I don't understand if there's a distinction from coding in a very high level and/or visual environment. To try and make it concrete by comparing with things I've personally seen: Is LabVIEW "no code"? Is Max/MSP "no code"? Was Dreamweaver "no code"? Is building an FX pipeline in Houdini "no code"?

Re: Show HN: Reddit clone built in no-code in two weeks

#83
post #72

Nice! Pretty easy to compose a new post. Video, photos, text links just like Reddit. It was a bit slow but getting things loaded but choosing to log in as a test user I was able to load things to desktop and post a great video. Kinda took me back a few years. Very nostalgic. I like it. Reddit is like your sink drain sometimes, clogged with all the hairy goo that no one wants to see or deal with. This feels like a new…

Thank you! I appreciate the positive feedback :)

You're welcome.

I tried to view the video link but received an error. I posted the error contents in another post for you. I couldn't find a way to post a screenshot of the error bubble so I just posted all the text from the message.

I also think that while logged in as testuser I was able to upvote my own post. Is that allowed? Perhaps there are a few others also logged in as testuser and one of them upvoted it.

Anyway, I like this. With faster load times this could be as fun as Reddit used to be.

Re: Show HN: Reddit clone built in no-code in two weeks

#84
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very cool that you built this in such a short time! It makes me wonder if there will be a new segment of programmers that specialize in superfast no-code app creation.

Would they be programmers? Shouldn't we call them no-programmers?

the thing with most no-code is that ultimately its exactly the same thing as coding only not typing letters into an ide and instead dragging around logical blocks that have the same functionality as keywords or libraries in a given language. It's removing the most surface-level features of programming but not the actual work or skill that goes into it

Re: Show HN: Reddit clone built in no-code in two weeks

#85
post #80

Timeout. I think this shows one problem of no-code. The underlying code and data structures are probably horribly bad. Every $5/month box should handle HN traffic easily for a reddit style application. With the right indexes on the DB tables, an out of the box Debian LAMP stack is insanely fast for this type of use case.

While I think a $5 VPS is under kill for something like HN due to the traffic, that actually sounds like a fun challenge. Especially if you don't show point values, you can cache the majority of the page (everything but the username and points) until a new comment is made. That would require only doing a query and template completion once per comment, which is probably tiny compared to the number of reads. I imagine that if you had an extra GB of ram for Redis, you'd be in a great spot.

Sounds like a fun hackday to me.

Re: Show HN: Reddit clone built in no-code in two weeks

#86

To use a Reddit term, ELI5 what "no code" actually means. As someone who's only ever seen the term in passing on HN, I don't understand if there's a distinction from coding in a very high level and/or visual environment. To try and make it concrete by comparing with things I've personally seen: Is LabVIEW "no code"? Is Max/MSP "no code"? Was Dreamweaver "no code"? Is building an FX pipeline in Houdini "no code"?

it seems to be built using this, but that's all I can tell you:

https://bubble.io/

Re: Show HN: Reddit clone built in no-code in two weeks

#87
post #55
post #13

One of the problems with examples like this is that it gives an unrealistic expectation to non-technical people that large & complex sites are actually quite basic. There is a lot of functionality that a typical user never sees and is often where the complexity lies. And as the "app too busy" error message proves, there is a lot more to a site than it's front end alone and cloning a front end does not clone performan…

Great point. There's certainly much more that goes into building a site like Reddit than what goes into building a clone in two weeks. The purpose of this is to show the potential of what can be done in no-code. No-code is still in it's very early days, and I think that a lot of its capabilities will improve over time. Also, it's very possible that a lot of the inefficiencies in no-code apps are a result of the build…

Isn’t no code and GUI software builders an idea that has been tried for decades? Wasn’t Adobe dream weaver one of the early tools?

Re: Show HN: Reddit clone built in no-code in two weeks

#88
post #13

One of the problems with examples like this is that it gives an unrealistic expectation to non-technical people that large & complex sites are actually quite basic. There is a lot of functionality that a typical user never sees and is often where the complexity lies. And as the "app too busy" error message proves, there is a lot more to a site than it's front end alone and cloning a front end does not clone performan…

Of course, the only reason Reddit has value at all is also its user community providing and ranking curated information. It's not the frontend, but it's also not the reliability or scalability or whatever else they have going on in the backend. Just as no one ever bought Encyclopedia Britannica back in the day because of the technical quality of the binding, though I'm sure it was top notch.

Reddit’s reliability is a major point and it’s something that has actually gone better. As horrible as the new UI is, back when the old ui was the main one, the site would go down almost daily and often for hours at a time.

Re: Show HN: Reddit clone built in no-code in two weeks

#89
post #43

I love no code! Wait. Wait. Hear me out... Building software is easy. Changing people's minds is damned near impossible. As an engineer: - I'm constantly handed shitty (or a complete lack thereof) requirements from non-technical people. No code lets people figure out that they haven't thought something out nearly as much as they think they have. I no longer am the bearer of bad news. - I constantly see business peopl…

Can you elaborate on the list of problems with no-code? Of course I'm not denying there are problems with no-code, I'd like to learn about other developers' issues, particularly with larger, longer-term projects.

No-code eventually becomes so complex that it becomes a bad programming language eventually, or lacks the expressiveness of a programming language to do what the business wants.

The imagined problem no-code addresses is business people thinking that their requirements are simple, and the source of their problems are expensive software developers and programming languages. Just get a junior business analyst to drag some boxes around, and job done. They are wrong.

This pattern has been repeated for decades now.

Re: Show HN: Reddit clone built in no-code in two weeks

#90
post #37

Worth pointing out that bubble.io has different tiers. So, while this app is obviously overloaded, you have the (somewhat expensive) option of adding dedicated hardware to your server pool.

True, I've got some Bubble credits so I've upgraded the plan (for the short term only). Will see how that helps
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