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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?

#121

Post by dimmke »

albrewer wrote: post #96
dimmke wrote: post #24

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…

> The code to the old version of Reddit is even open source. 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 tr…

>but I suspect that's the reason nobody's ever just forked Reddit and made their own.

People have absolutely made sites that have been described as "Reddit clones" - I never investigated enough to know if they were actually using a fork of the actual codebase.

But yeah, I wasn't suggesting that people use Reddit's source code to build a new Reddit. My point was, the functionality isn't difficult to build and certainly not a big "moat" - the difficulty in producing a better version of Reddit would almost certainly be in the softer side of things.

Although Reddit's modern interface is really bad. Like, really bad. And I am not one of those people who hates new stuff for being new or thinks SPAs are the devil or whatever. The performance is so bad it legitimately feels like something a coding bootcamp graduate cobbled together as a capstone project than something built by a team of skilled professional developers.

From things not loading. Like you bring up a post and the comments don't load. To the horrendous "video player". It's a complete fucking mess. So while I would say in a macro sense, there isn't a "moat" around the functionality they've done such a poor job that a well built front-end would go a long way.

But yeah, it would be a waste of time to actually try to use their backend code that has been open sourced, beyond referencing some business logic they added around fuzzing votes etc...

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

#123

Post by throw2022110401 »

The painful lesson here is that nothing with the "you are the product" business model escapes enshittification. So I am not really interested in anything that's not community controlled.

Thankfully I've been making my home over at the Fediverse for the past few months so it's a lot easier to leave now than it would have been a year ago.

Yeah, it's not perfect but it's ours.

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

#124

Post by blaise57 »

dimmke wrote: post #57
Maxion wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think a compelling alternative to Reddit would be a non venture capital backed company that is small headcount wise (think 50 people) and very straightforward about how it earns a profit, is sustainable, and focused on direct pay. No blockchain, no fediverse, etc… > That means no worrying about advertisers (or headcount associated with wooing them, managing them, etc…), creating a “subreddit” would cost a flat mo…

Yes I think a co op model could be good. I think because we are software engineers, we think some novel technology will fix this issue. But the real problem is that companies take on too much money and are then distorted by it. There has to be a change in software away from VC funding outside of where it’s actually necessary. You don’t need 30 million dollars to build this idea. You could take out a small business lo…

Funny you say this, I incorporated a worker co-op to build a reddit-esque platform with democracy and data-driven tools for communities late last year. Our team is pretty inexperienced, but conceptually and organizationally we've got a lot lined up.

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

#125

Post by RhodesianHunter »

that_guy_iain wrote: post #112
RhodesianHunter wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You're assuming integrations exist on day one.

Hell you're assuming that an API even exists for people to build integrations against on day one, rather than the company just providing it's own UIs/APPs and scaling into APIs when it's ready.

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

#126

Post by RhodesianHunter »

throw_m239339 wrote: post #106
RhodesianHunter wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point isn't that that content doesn't exist there. The point is that as a Reddit user, you won't see that content unless you disable your NSFW filter and go searching for it. Because the platform is moderated.

> The point is that as a Reddit user, you won't see that content unless you disable your NSFW filter and go searching for it. The point is that people use reddit to hotlink depraved, illegal porn images and videos and spam these media on other forums. That depraved content is not moderated, it should not be possible to hotlink porn material from reddit. The platform is not moderated like you claim, a checkbox in the…

That's completely tangential to the stated problem though.

That sounds like your own personal beef, which as we can see from Reddit would not hamper user growth.

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

#127

Post by furchin »

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…

This is absolutely possible but your numbers are off by a factor of 10, which means it'll be prohibitively expensive for many folks. I worked in advertising once upon a time; do you know the demographic that advertisers are most interested in reaching? It's not women 35-60. It's not men 18-15. It's not college educated minorities in Alabama. It's not any of these. The folks advertisers are dying to reach -- the reason they spend all that sweet, sweet ad money in the first place is to reach people who have the discretionary income to throw away $5/mo on a free website. People who spend money on the internet -- for a site that is free no less -- are going to be a gold-mine. The average ad revenue per user of this demographic is easily 10x higher than the overall per-user ad revenue site-wide; and if you take away these users advertisers will pull back spending and you'll actually get a bigger loss. You need to charge way more in subscription fees to make up for this ad spend loss.

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

#128

Post by Gigachad »

pie420 wrote: post #104
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.

The vast majority of reddit users would pay extra to strip away all of the features and have a barebones 2005 version of reddit.

The vast majority of reddit users have no idea what the 2005 version looked like and have only ever used the mobile app

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

#129

Post by that_guy_iain »

RhodesianHunter wrote: post #125
that_guy_iain wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You're assuming integrations exist on day one. Hell you're assuming that an API even exists for people to build integrations against on day one, rather than the company just providing it's own UIs/APPs and scaling into APIs when it's ready.

It doesn't matter if it's web requests or API requests. Traffic is still traffic and it still needs to be handled by web servers that cost money. And the idea that a start up can go from 0 to 1 million users in a few weeks without a lot of cash for servers isn't realistic. No real competitor for Reddit would slowly grow, they either take advantage of people being unhappy and do so in a quick manner and have an intital surge or they don't even have a chance.

BlueSky has millions of users, people still complain that it's basically dead. Even though lots of people are using it. It's just dead compared to Twitter. That makes adoption harder.

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

#130

Post by Uw7yTcf36gTc »

codingclaws wrote: post #77

I 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 rem…

skip the search engine for now. offload that to site:domain.com "search" on google. focus on your niche and delegate where you can. if you can't see why I am saying this, then you need somebody to help you prioritize cause search is not it when you can delegate it to google in less than a day.
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