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Ask HN: Are you working on a Reddit replacement? What is it?

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Re: Ask HN: Are you working on a Reddit replacement? What is it?

#51

Post by snowwrestler »

Reddit's core problem is that they don't make much money, and all the things they might do to make money are things that will piss off the user base.

It's the exact same problem that Digg had. And if Reddit experiences the same outcome, I don't know why anyone would rush to replicate that model a 3rd time.

Look at the history of 4chan: you can grow a large audience by allowing people to say whatever they want, anonymously. But no one has effectively monetized that yet, because it turns out that such a site collects a lot of objectionable content.

Re: Ask HN: Are you working on a Reddit replacement? What is it?

#52

Post by captn3m0 »

mingus68040 wrote: post #35
ljk wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 2. Accounts cost $1, payable either through Payal or credit card. Accounts are tied to the payment credentials. is that a good idea? If accounts are paid, then "richer" opinions have bigger impact on the site

Alright, let's say 10¢. Everyone with a personal Internet-enabled device can most certainly afford that. You could even refund them the money later, as the goal is to obtain the payment identity -- not the cash.

Not everyone has a way to pay online, especially if you are accepting credit cards.

Re: Ask HN: Are you working on a Reddit replacement? What is it?

#53

Post by c_prompt »

bmh100 wrote: post #24
robotjosh wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone should make a version of reddit where your upvote/downvote record is what shapes the ordering for you. There should be a global rank and an individual rank that is calculated for each user something like the netflix 5 star system. That way the hateful stuff won't appear unless you upvoted hateful stuff. Liberals and conservatives could both get the content they want going to the same politics forum. It should…

What you are essentially describing, also used by Netflix, is a "collaborative filtering" machine learning algorithm [1]. It is a fascinating sparse-matrix problem that could be applied to many situations dependent upon individual preferences. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collaborative_filtering

For my site, I coded a recommendation engine based on cosine similarity. I initially tried Bayes' Theorem and conditional probabilities but abandoned the effort when I didn't see results that made a lot of sense (probably due to a lack of training data). Instead, I used https://github.com/aoiaoi/CosineSimilarity as a base and then modified. If the results prove effective over time, I'm going to make the algorithm an option for users to select for generating their front page instead of upvotes.

Re: Ask HN: Are you working on a Reddit replacement? What is it?

#54

Post by Nemcue »

minimaxir wrote: post #2

Even despite Reddit's troubles, you probably do not want to make a Reddit clone as a business model to capitalize if you don't have one already. One or the reasons for the protest is bad tools.

Not really. Despite tools you'd still want someone to act like an intermediate with the one doing the AMA.

This is about poor communication, and how Reddit treats the ones that actually make it all go around.

Re: Ask HN: Are you working on a Reddit replacement? What is it?

#55

Post by Tenhundfeld »

mingus68040 wrote: post #48
Tenhundfeld wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think MetaFilter tries to accomplish this goal, via #2 ($5 signup fee), right? I don't entirely follow points #1 and #3. Re #1: There are myriad ways to get a temporary phone number, beyond Google Voice, Twilio, etc. For example, I can just use an anonymous pay-as-you-go phone. What would this accomplish beyond creating some slight inconvenience? Re #3: I get the need for strong security. You could require multi-fa…

#1. That's true, but it would still be more of a barrier to creating secondary troll accounts than what reddit has now. #3. The idea is to tie the account a specific device (such as an iPhone), by generating a unique signature in the app. For this to be enforceable, logins outside the app cannot be permitted -- otherwise signatures can be forged.

Fair points.

#1. I still think #2 is a more important barrier, but I don't see a huge downside with this either. You didn't explicitly say this, but I think you're making the point that troll accounts can never be completely eradicated. But you can make it significantly less convenient for them, while minimally inconveniencing most legitimate users.

#3. I get the general idea, but I don't see how it's substantially more secure than requiring 2FA. I mean, GMail, Dropbox, AWS, etc., seem to think 2FA is sufficiently secure for very sensitive data, and they allow interacting through the web browser. Plus, at the end of the day, you'll need some mechanism for adding new devices, which will effectively work like 2FA – I presume.

Re: Ask HN: Are you working on a Reddit replacement? What is it?

#56

Post by starshadowx2 »

gdulli wrote: post #41
mcphage wrote: post #18

My Reddit replacement is Reddit, minus all the people who want to leave because of Reddit closing r/jailbait, r/thefappening, and r/fatpeoplehate. It's a pretty cool site, you should check it out.

Could it also remove the people who strongly feel they're entitled to have a say in reddit's staffing decisions?

The issue isn't as much about Victoria getting fired (although that doesn't mean that's not important) but in how Reddit went about it. It was very sudden and with no warning to any of the people who counted on her, and no transparency afterwards. AMA's were pretty much only working because of her help. Mods have also been having other issues for a while, this latest incident just pushed people over the edge.

Re: Ask HN: Are you working on a Reddit replacement? What is it?

#57

Post by rdwallis »

Built http://www.thealetree.com a few years ago so not related to the current issue. But I'll turn the database on for a few days if people want to try it out.

The source code is at https://github.com/rdwallis/TheAleTree

The idea behind it was that the passionate minority on sites like reddit, hn etc tend to drive the discussion on issues because the less passionate majority isn't as inclined to upvote / downvote.

So say you've got a website where a small minority of the users are racists but the racists are very passionate and always upvote racist content. You'll tend to see a lot of racist posts on the site even if the site as a whole isn't racist. And over time the passionate racists will drive out the rest.

Wanted to see if I could solve the above without moderation, while keeping posts completely anonymous.

Probably doesn't work but the idea is that before users vote you divide them randomly into teams. And then when a user submits a post or a comment the team votes on it and only if certain percent of the team like it does it get an upvote. And the passionate racists would most likely end up on different teams so they'd be less likely to be able to get submissions into the public parts of the site.

Re: Ask HN: Are you working on a Reddit replacement? What is it?

#59

Post by zxcvcxz »

Karunamon wrote: post #22
mcphage wrote: post #18

My Reddit replacement is Reddit, minus all the people who want to leave because of Reddit closing r/jailbait, r/thefappening, and r/fatpeoplehate. It's a pretty cool site, you should check it out.

That's a remarkably unfair characterization of people who have issues with Reddit.

Well how else are they supposed to push their political narrative that everyone is a sexist/racist? Don't you want a PC version of reddit where everyone constantly sits upon a moral high-horse of self righteousness while pushing authoritarian ideology under the guise of social justice?

Re: Ask HN: Are you working on a Reddit replacement? What is it?

#60

Post by starshadowx2 »

13throwaway wrote: post #34

I have been thinking it would be cool to have a Reddit replacement ran by a non profit, similar to Wikipedia. Does anyone here have experience running something like that? I understand non profits are very complex to run.

I was thinking maybe something more along the lines of Ello?

Combining ideas from Ello and Reddit could be pretty interesting.

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