91–100 of 148 posts
Apollo 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.
How are these type of statements not anathema for anyone doing any actual tech work, or any work at all?
It'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...
Not a competitor; but I was thinking yesterday about what the next big thing in forums like Reddit needs to be: Non-profit Democracies. The big problem with social networks today is that there is little recourse when the parties that are in charge make decisions that aren't in the best interest of the users. What if the CEO, product manager, and other key roles in Redit, Facebook, Twitter, ect, were elected by the us…
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…
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.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot. Every year for the last 12+ years there has been some alternative to Reddit. The code to the old version of Reddit is even open source. The problem is most solutions want to go back to decentralized, which is problematic. I do think that the technical problem could be solved. Point and click solutions for installing open source software has been around forever (like cPanel and PHP…
I actually took an hour to look through the old reddit source code to see what it would take to spin up an alternative and add features quickly.
From what I can tell, Reddit open source code is very tightly bound into Pylons and Cassandra (and Python 2.7), so if you don't like those choices... too bad. It relies on global in-process locking of data store transactions. There are no allowances to separate queries/reads from commands/writes, or specify which models reside in which data store. No good way to make DTOs for lower network overhead. The whole thing is also an untyped mass of code (due to it being Python 2.7), so making any modification requires reading and mentally executing anything you're modifying.
Granted, to start out, all of this is fine. But feels like it will fall over as soon as it gets big.
It would be a large undertaking to even get the old Reddit source to a state where a dev could get up to speed and make changes without a month of study. I'm not saying it's not worth it, but I suspect that's the reason nobody's ever just forked Reddit and made their own.
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?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
I would be fine occasionally contributing some moderation to a community I am an active member of. I find I already have to do some of that on my workplace Slack when people get aggressive with the @here tag reaching the entire company when they really want one of 5 people.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That is just one instance. I believe the .ML stands for Marxist Leninist if that is the community you want to join. There are many other instances sprouting up, and you can spin up your own pretty easily. Like any fediverse instance, the amount of work to maintain and moderate it is dependent on the number of people on it. https://join-lemmy.org/instances
> I believe the .ML stands for Marxist Leninist According to the link you posted, I think you're talkong about lemmygrad.ml. lemmy.ml is hosted by the original Lemmy developers.
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…
Moderators won't exist without users.
Users won't join a shit filled platform.
The thing you're claiming as the biggest problem is dependent on the thing I'm claiming is the biggest problem.