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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?

#111

Post by bacchusracine »

NotSuspicious wrote: post #26

The "Marseyverse" exists. It really only has individual subreddit-websites. Each website is a fork of Ruqqus code (which itself was a failed-reddit clone that forked reddit's code) Examples would be rdrama.net watchpeopledie.tv themotte.org ovarit.com All full-reddit clones that I know of have failed miserably. And many reddit communities have tried establishing off-sites and failed. The factors for success seem to b…

>Ruqqus code (which itself was a failed-reddit clone

Ruqqus was murdered. They decided that it was better to kill the site rather than tolerate those nasty evil Republicans posting there.

Were there a bunch of stormmers and Reichtards posting there too? Yes, there were. But most of the rest of the site's userbase did their best to drown them out with communication. The site's developers decided that wasn't enough.

Any site that claims to be dedicated to freedom of speech but won't allow their userbase to exercise that freedom of speech is worthless. Ruqqus was worthless.

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

#112

Post by that_guy_iain »

RhodesianHunter wrote: post #102
that_guy_iain wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there is a much bigger problem and capital cost. Servers. 7 billion API requests per month from a third party app that's just one of them. There would be several. Then the much larger traffic from official sources. If you can't afford the servers moderation isn't even worth thinking about. Who is going to pay for all of those?

No startup goes from zero to 7 billion API requests immediately. That's a problem that can be scaled in to over time.

We're talking about a Reddit replacement. It's realistic to think a half decent one would get a 1 million or so users straight away within weeks. That's 7 billion requests.

BlueSky had to be invite only to stop getting too much traffic straight away. 1.5 million joined Mastodon when Twitter got bought. The numbers for a feasible replacement are still skyhigh at the start.

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

#113

Post by EA-3167 »

vhcr wrote: post #108
EA-3167 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Considering how many people use Old.Reddit I doubt that you're right in this case.

I'm a mod at a >100k subscribers subreddit, and old reddit represents 2% of pageviews and 6% of uniques.

It isn't that simple, for example I don't use old.reddit as a URL, but I use RES or another program to force it into the old configuration regardless of the URL.

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

#114

Post by m3kw9 »

giarc wrote: post #19
m3kw9 wrote: post #18

Also I wouldn’t be surprised investors are currently talking to Apollo about just this

I'd be surprised. Making (a few billion) API calls to someone else's database is much different than hosting and storing all that info (not to mention managing all the mods etc).

Good point

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

#115

Post by l72 »

pwpw wrote: post #98
phpisthebest wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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

Perhaps we need a sort of jury duty for content moderation where you are somehow held accountable for your actions and decisions. 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.

I always thought Slashdot's meta-moderators was an interesting idea. Before you could ever moderate (vote up/down), you first had to get enough points via meta-moderating.

Meta-moderating consisted of being shown a single comment and how an unknown moderator scored it. If enough meta-moderators disagreed with how a moderator was scoring, then that moderator would eventually lose all their moderation points.

Those that meta-moderate would slowly gain points they could use to moderate (no one had unlimited moderation points)

Granted, slashdot was different in that it only applied to comments. Post on the front page were done by slashdot employees. Reddit would still need a different level of moderators to remove inappropriate posts all together.

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

#116

Post by stcroixx »

ed_elliott_asc wrote: post #12
phpisthebest wrote: post #4

Earlier 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.

It can’t be subjective like that. Nobody will ever agree on the definition or trust whoever is making the judgment call.

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

#118

Post by DANmode »

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…

> what are you going to do to solve Reddit's income problem?

Spend way less, in almost every category.

Not every business needs to do a billion dollars, or a billion users, or a billion x.

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

#119

Post by raydev »

EA-3167 wrote: post #95
this_user wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Considering how many people use Old.Reddit I doubt that you're right in this case.

What source do you have for this metric?

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

#120

Post by temporal828 »

RealStickman_ wrote: post #66
kornhole wrote: post #53

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.

The original Lemmy developers are hardline Marxist-Leninists, they make no secret of this.

https://dessalines.github.io/essays/dessalines_marxism_study...

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