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Voten.co, a Real-Time Reddit Alternative Launches Public Beta

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Re: Voten.co, a Real-Time Reddit Alternative Launches Public Beta

#11

Post by macey »

emodendroket wrote: post #3

Anyone can create a forum; the question is why people would actually visit this one instead of the existing alternatives. "Real-time" features don't seem like that much of a draw and Reddit et al could easily implement them if they were.

A lot of people feel that Reddit is overmoderated - there was that controversy recently where one of the employees admitted manually altering a bunch of content (removing pro-Trump submissions and comments).

Also I imagine any general forum like Reddit wouldn't retain its power users for more than a few years at most. At a given time, most users are either at the point where they don't get any of the inside jokes, or where all of them are getting old. So it might make sense to have a new one of these every once in a while.

Re: Voten.co, a Real-Time Reddit Alternative Launches Public Beta

#13

Post by kevingrahl »

Aaand yet another reddit "alternative" and they all seem to fail or have troubles gaining traction. I can recall voat.co, hubski.com and imzy.com (my favorite so far) and now one more. I'd really like to know why devs think they can rival Reddit, it's just too big.

Re: Voten.co, a Real-Time Reddit Alternative Launches Public Beta

#14

Post by emodendroket »

macey wrote: post #11
emodendroket wrote: post #3

Anyone can create a forum; the question is why people would actually visit this one instead of the existing alternatives. "Real-time" features don't seem like that much of a draw and Reddit et al could easily implement them if they were.

A lot of people feel that Reddit is overmoderated - there was that controversy recently where one of the employees admitted manually altering a bunch of content (removing pro-Trump submissions and comments). Also I imagine any general forum like Reddit wouldn't retain its power users for more than a few years at most. At a given time, most users are either at the point where they don't get any of the inside jokes, or…

There have been a number of Reddit controversies, but let's be honest: most people don't know or care that much about them. I think that'll blow over just like firing the community manager and the whole Ellen Pao thing did. I'm not even sure that the average person would agree that Reddit is "overmoderated," since their biggest scandals seemed to come from the opposite direction, like having subreddits devoted to hate speech and photos of underage girls.

Re: Voten.co, a Real-Time Reddit Alternative Launches Public Beta

#15

Post by dkhenry »

imran3740 wrote: post #9

As with voat.co, who's gonna switch to this? Really the only people who switched over to Voat are the people who felt reddit was restricting their rights by posting controversial/hateful material on reddit. So it tends to be full of /pol-like MRAs/extreme right/alt-right users. Voten seems like it's trying to implement a more democratic system, but who will be pushed into switching over to that?

I dunno, with the recent changes reddit has been rolling out it is no longer a nice place to visit. There is so much hate and anger on the front page and so little good content. I could make an account, but it seems like they shadow ban everyone except for bots ( and not just for content, the last two times I was shadow banned it was because I logged in from my office IP address which they deemed was "gaming" votes )

Re: Voten.co, a Real-Time Reddit Alternative Launches Public Beta

#16

Post by zzzzz_ »

Reddit is technology wise pretty simple - it's just one step up from a forum. So these guys have re-implemented a forum and added a stack of features that only a bunch of devs could come up with. Markdown support is mentioned twice at the top of the features list!

Anyway this is a site by actual guys that used to work at Reddit so you'd expect them to be pretty smart business orientated chaps right? Well they launch, pull a few strings and get to the the first page on HN ... then they immediately blunder by making you login to browse! Thankfully I was bored enough to do so and as expected it's just a barren 'seed user' populated scaled down version of reddit.

The biggest USP is real time and there's actually only me on there right now. Last story was posted 35 mins ago. I logged in not expecting my favorite reddits to be there, but for an exciting proof of concept. If I was in charge of this company, me and my entire team including the tea lady would be logged into at least 5 different accounts and we'd be creating a frenzy of real time activity so that AT LEAST we give people an glimpse of what we're trying to create.

Poorly executed - you'd really expect more from people with the resources to self finance a start up like this, the connections to drive users to the app and the experience of working for a top notch start up like Reddit for a number of years.

Re: Voten.co, a Real-Time Reddit Alternative Launches Public Beta

#17

Post by Alex3917 »

imran3740 wrote: post #9

As with voat.co, who's gonna switch to this? Really the only people who switched over to Voat are the people who felt reddit was restricting their rights by posting controversial/hateful material on reddit. So it tends to be full of /pol-like MRAs/extreme right/alt-right users. Voten seems like it's trying to implement a more democratic system, but who will be pushed into switching over to that?

> who's gonna switch to this?

Probably no one. But you also need to keep in mind that most HN readers probably have a very skewed perception of what Reddit is. E.g. basically my entire 11+ year experience with Reddit is reading and commenting on subreddits that aggregate articles about various topics. But the vast majority of subreddits either allow only self-posts, or else only allow links to one or two whitelisted domains like imgur or youtube. Sometimes this is the stated policy, but many times that's just the de facto state of the subreddit.

I only point this out because it's easy to think that Reddit is mostly about finding and discussing content, which it used to be, when today it's much more about community building.

Re: Voten.co, a Real-Time Reddit Alternative Launches Public Beta

#18

Post by arjie »

macey wrote: post #11
emodendroket wrote: post #3

Anyone can create a forum; the question is why people would actually visit this one instead of the existing alternatives. "Real-time" features don't seem like that much of a draw and Reddit et al could easily implement them if they were.

A lot of people feel that Reddit is overmoderated - there was that controversy recently where one of the employees admitted manually altering a bunch of content (removing pro-Trump submissions and comments). Also I imagine any general forum like Reddit wouldn't retain its power users for more than a few years at most. At a given time, most users are either at the point where they don't get any of the inside jokes, or…

Haha, but any website whose audience is mostly that group rapidly becomes exclusively that group because normal people don't like them.

Re: Voten.co, a Real-Time Reddit Alternative Launches Public Beta

#19

Post by icebraining »

rprime wrote: post #6
tyingq wrote: post #2

"The app itself is powered by Laravel, Vue.js, Socket.io, and Node" Is there another Laravel other than the php one? Seems odd to roll out with both php and node.js. I don't know why you would need both. Edit: Yes, I see each has it's strengths. But that has to drive a lot of doing the same thing twice, in two languages...they both interact with the same data. I would guess time-to-market is important at launch to re…

I assume NodeJS is used just as a WebSocket server for their real-time events, doing that in PHP would be a bit uncomfortable.

doing that in PHP would be a bit uncomfortable.

Why? PHP works fine as a daemon, there are many servers written in pure PHP, as well as frameworks for "async" programming.

Re: Voten.co, a Real-Time Reddit Alternative Launches Public Beta

#20

Post by KirinDave »

Has anyone signed up?

It's very interesting what the first topics are. There is a #conservatism with 8 members already, but you can't make #liberalism, #communism or #leftists. "The_Donald" is "coming soon".

(Edit: I must have hit a bug because I tried with a few names and my attempts just didn't do anything, but someone else did it immediately).

I wonder if this is like Gab, an attempt to make a more single-issue-politics-friendly variant of a popular site.

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