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Ask HN: Anyone Building a Competitor to Reddit?

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Ask HN: Anyone Building a Competitor to Reddit?

#1
With the recent rumblings over on reddit, I do wonder if reddit will experience its own “Digg moment”.

Is anyone here working on their own reddit-like site?

I feel part of what they are fundamentally missing is decent embedded search functionality as most people are still using google to search and find a relevant discussion of interest e.g “topic x reddit”

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

#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.

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

#3

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 users choose your platform over their entrenched one.

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

#4

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 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 beyond personal tools to control your own overton window will be a problem. Reddit is a prime example of this where by countless issues with power tripping mods who over censor communities exist.

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

#6
post #3

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…

>> Content moderation not being automated is not a problem. People like to do it for free.

The old classic saying is "Anyone that wants to be a politician is not someone you want as a politician"

Well that is true for reddit mods as well, people that like to moderate subreddits are drawn to the action because they like to have power over the others, this is generally not someone you want in charge of anything

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

#7

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.

'AI' seems to be approaching a point where automated moderation (or at least AI assisted moderation with a human in the loop) is feasible.

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

#10

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 sentence you give it is racist or not.

Of course, AI can't be the only moderator, but it may help to filter out most of the obvious cases.

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