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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?

#81

Post by dingledork69 »

taylodl wrote: post #61
eugeniub wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit used to have pretty low overhead. You couldn't upload/host videos directly on Reddit, you could only share links or create self-posts. They didn't have all these superfluous features that they have now like live chat, push notifications, cryptocurrency wallets, first-party mobile apps, etc. A "classical" version of Reddit would be a fraction of the development and hosting cost compared to modern Reddit, especi…

Think this all the way through - why did Reddit do these things? To attract more users and to generate revenue. As the OP said, what are you going to do to solve Reddit's income problem? This isn't a technical issue, the technical piece is straightforward and well-known. They can't really push for advertising until they eliminate 3rd party API access to the content. That or they have to start charging a usage fee. Wh…

Because the suits want more money, while we just want a functional reddit alternative. I know this is difficult for you MBA types but not everything exists to maximize profits.

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

#82

Post by dingledork69 »

that_guy_iain wrote: post #78
Capricorn2481 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Everyone involved with awful decisions, yes.

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

#83

Post by dingledork69 »

tjpnz wrote: post #76
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.

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…

Accounts on HN do not start shadow banned, but it's very easy for established users to flag their posts which hides them from most. I assume the flag threshold goes up over time.

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

#84

Post by Capricorn2481 »

dom96 wrote: post #51

I have come up with a plan that might get a Reddit competitor up and running. I have also started to implement it. Step 1. Create an alternative API for Reddit (I've created an MVP for this here: https://api.reddiw.com ) Step 2. Set up an alternative front-end for Reddit built on top of the alternative API (my plan is to host it at reddiw.com) Step 3. Start implementing a custom back-end, with submissions showing up…

> Step 1. Create an alternative API for Reddit (I've created an MVP for this here: https://api.reddiw.com)

How is this working, exactly? Are you just caching API responses from the official one?

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

#85

Post by mariusor »

A competitor, no.

A similar link aggregator and discussion platform, yes.

Reddit is far too large for anyone to build a competitor from scratch, nobody (unless they're a major player that doesn't mind sinking exorbitant costs into hosting) will be able to afford hosting discussions for the number of accounts that reddit has. The best we can hope for as users is that various communities from reddit migrate to some of the open-source options that already exist (lemmy seems to get the most mindshare at the moment) but hopefully the one I work on, brutalinks, also.

In my opinion offloading individual communities to their own instance that hosts content for hundreds to (maybe)thousands of users is the way to go for hobbyist level platforms.

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

#86

Post by mariusor »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #14
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.

Splitting might help: * Open source reddit-like clone designed for a single sub. * Hosting company specialising in hosting this clone for a small fee.

I'm working on the first. :D

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

#87

Post by ctvo »

I'd be down to help with a decentralized Reddit with decentralized aggregation.

Each subreddit is hosted by someone. They manage the moderators, the rules, the users. This gets us away from the bottomless pit of moderation. They can write custom plugins to extend their subreddit in interesting ways. The level of effort and resources required to run a subreddit is minimal. This is made much easier to setup via a CLI to deploy to various cloud platforms, hosting providers provided by us. Think ~5 dollars a month in costs.

Decentralized aggregators allow searching these subreddits, aggregating their content to see trending, popular, worthwhile posts for discovery. This is decentralized in theory, but to start out, there's probably a single aggregator. The resources required is high, and curation also involves some human judgement. For example: denylist an entire subreddit, no adult content, etc.. Verifying authenticity of upvotes or whatever the heck is interesting too. This can be a for profit company. Is it going to be worth billions? Probably not, but it can be sustainable and provide a service.

Some affordance in the protocol to allow for users to cross subreddit boundaries so registration isn't required, etc. are all interesting to think about.

I'm sure mastodon, Bluesky, or another protocol has interesting ideas to steal that are applicable to a Reddit like experience vs. a full blown social network.

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

#89

Post by this_user »

eugeniub wrote: post #54
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,…

Reddit used to have pretty low overhead. You couldn't upload/host videos directly on Reddit, you could only share links or create self-posts. They didn't have all these superfluous features that they have now like live chat, push notifications, cryptocurrency wallets, first-party mobile apps, etc. A "classical" version of Reddit would be a fraction of the development and hosting cost compared to modern Reddit, especi…

That version of reddit was created in 2005. The world has changed a lot since, and users are expecting certain features. If you don't have them, you are going to struggle to grow nowadays. For instance, the majority of users are on mobile now, so you need to offer them a proper UX.

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

#90

Post by mariusor »

ctvo wrote: post #87

I'd be down to help with a decentralized Reddit with decentralized aggregation. Each subreddit is hosted by someone. They manage the moderators, the rules, the users. This gets us away from the bottomless pit of moderation. They can write custom plugins to extend their subreddit in interesting ways. The level of effort and resources required to run a subreddit is minimal. This is made much easier to setup via a CLI t…

If you're interested in Go, I develop such a project and the plumbing required for it.

The code is at https://github.com/mariusor/go-littr and you can check it out at https://brutalinks.tech

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