https://tildes.net/
It’s a small community that has been up since 2018. It’s open source as well.
Note: I’m not affiliated just a user of both Reddit and tildes.
Ask HN: Anyone Building a Competitor to Reddit?
71–80 of 148 posts
Re: Ask HN: Anyone Building a Competitor to Reddit?
#72Apollo seems like a natural, they already have a bunch of users and a well loved FE and an API spec. It seems like they could just build their own BE to work with what they already have.
Apollo is not even available on Android
Re: Ask HN: Anyone Building a Competitor to Reddit?
#73It'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…
If the comments move somewhere else, they are easy to convert...
Re: Ask HN: Anyone Building a Competitor to Reddit?
#74I think the problem with Reddit, is it doesn't know what it wants to be.
I think for many of us here, we treat it as a forum. We go an find specific subreddits in our interests, and interact with it similar to how we interact with hacker news. Interesting Articles and/or Discussion Questions are posted, and then there is a conversation about it.
But that is not how a lot of people use Reddit. To many people, it is social media, in the same vein as TikTok or Instagram. You just scroll through a bunch of quick photos, videos, or rage inducing headlines. There is no actual forum there. It is quick dopamine hits.
I bet if you asked Reddit who their competition is, they'd say TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, and Facebook (and maybe even Youtube), indicating that they don't think it is their forums that are important, but more so their social media aspect.
So, what is it you want to build? If you just want forums, then I think that is straight forward, and the hacker news crowd would probably be happy with it. But, I don't think that is where most of Reddit audience is anymore, so you aren't building a competitor to Reddit, you are building a competitor to TikTok and Instagram.
Re: Ask HN: Anyone Building a Competitor to Reddit?
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
> So who gets fired? Everybody involved with the NFTs, with this API decision, with everything about New Reddit, the dumb crypto currencies, do we need to go on? It's a long list.
So basically you're firing everyone? I bet you called Musk stupid for firing so many people at Twitter too.
Firing people who manage the ethics and technical specs of your site is different from shutting down a superfluous NFT division. That is a gold rush for stupid people.
Re: Ask HN: Anyone Building a Competitor to Reddit?
#76Overcoming 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.
Why not apply some commonsense to onboarding? Accounts on HN start their lives shadowbanned, once you've gained some karma you can downvote comments and some point after that the ability to vouch for dead posts. I don't have any data on to what degree it works, but it would make the lives of those seeking instant "gratification" somewhat harder. Alternatively you could apply rate limits. Maybe new users could create a small number of posts on their first day and it gradually increases over time before the training wheels are kicked off entirely. Obviously neither option eliminates the need for moderators, but in theory you should be able to get by with less of them.
Re: Ask HN: Anyone Building a Competitor to Reddit?
#77I am. I've been working on it for 3.5 years. It's open source and it's called Comment Castles [0]. I am currently in the process of changing the name to Comment Castles, the main instance is currently at the old name [1].
All the features work with front-end JavaScript turned off.
I am currently wrapping up the OAuth 2 server implementation so that we can have third party apps (no API fees!).
After I wrap up some remaining features I am going to move everything to commentcastles.org and forward the old site there.
It's currently text only (emojis allowed).
I do want to build good custom search but haven't really started on that task yet.
Re: Ask HN: Anyone Building a Competitor to Reddit?
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
So basically you're firing everyone? I bet you called Musk stupid for firing so many people at Twitter too.
Firing people who manage the ethics and technical specs of your site is different from shutting down a superfluous NFT division. That is a gold rush for stupid people.
They listed a whole group of people not just the NFT part. And that list was basically everyone.
Re: Ask HN: Anyone Building a Competitor to Reddit?
#79Earlier 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.
Reddit is designed to propagate content to the front page that invokes indecency. Take, for instance, a video of someone jumping turnstiles at a subway station or a homeless person bathing themselves in free hand sanitizer solution. What kind of comments is a video like this going to solicit?
If you want to keep things decent and avoid nastiness, prohibit content that evokes a strong emotional response. This strong emotional response, unfortunately, is what keeps people coming back.
Re: Ask HN: Anyone Building a Competitor to Reddit?
#80My 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,…
Maybe the scale is the problem. What if instead you built the infra and then snatched away the users of one of the less popular subreddits, then federated the code? You'd have the same problems as Mastodon and stuff, but that would allow the concept to scale (you just wouldn't become a millionaire). Leave giant subs like /r/funny and /r/pics alone and nibble around the edges?