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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?

#41

Post by phpisthebest »

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.

Have you been to reddit? Or other places where political conversations are had?

Also let me ask, is declaring "The US should have strong border security and limited immigration" being "decent" because I have seen people respond to that exact statement with claims that is hate speech...

What about "There are only 2 genders"

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

#42

Post by mdale »

bigdict wrote: post #35
SkipperCat wrote: post #27

My question is why would you want to do that? You're just going to come against the same issues and problems that Reddit has, especially if you want to achieve anything close to Reddit's scale. You'll need staff, money, legal and tech folks (not cheap). And to get the funds, you'll prob have to make the same decisions about ads and API fees. You could pull off something smaller, maybe by being distributed or whatnot,…

I think the answer in cases like that is there needs to be a public Reddit. We all benefit from it and we all want its operation to not be warped by profit-seeking… so we all should just pitch in a dollar a year (?) of our taxes.

There are large scale "public" or non-profit web communities like Wikipedia. They come with a different set of challenges around governance.

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

#43

Post by kredd »

bigdict wrote: post #35
SkipperCat wrote: post #27

My question is why would you want to do that? You're just going to come against the same issues and problems that Reddit has, especially if you want to achieve anything close to Reddit's scale. You'll need staff, money, legal and tech folks (not cheap). And to get the funds, you'll prob have to make the same decisions about ads and API fees. You could pull off something smaller, maybe by being distributed or whatnot,…

I think the answer in cases like that is there needs to be a public Reddit. We all benefit from it and we all want its operation to not be warped by profit-seeking… so we all should just pitch in a dollar a year (?) of our taxes.

Reddit makes a lot of decisions that tax-payer funded entity would never be able to do. It’s one of the unfortunate circumstances where publicly owned social aggregator would be severely lacking.

I’m not even talking about Reddit’s one of the most annoying current problems - AI bots disguised as real people. Make it publicly owned, people will have more skin in the game to make it worse. Sorry for the bot rant, but anything other than hyper-local subreddits are completely useless for getting any opinions at this point. The same points repeated every day to advance one or the other point of view, making it a hell hole. I feel bad for people who take in those opinions at face value thinking these are all real people.

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

#44

Post by krapp »

bigdict wrote: post #35
SkipperCat wrote: post #27

My question is why would you want to do that? You're just going to come against the same issues and problems that Reddit has, especially if you want to achieve anything close to Reddit's scale. You'll need staff, money, legal and tech folks (not cheap). And to get the funds, you'll prob have to make the same decisions about ads and API fees. You could pull off something smaller, maybe by being distributed or whatnot,…

I think the answer in cases like that is there needs to be a public Reddit. We all benefit from it and we all want its operation to not be warped by profit-seeking… so we all should just pitch in a dollar a year (?) of our taxes.

So you want a Reddit that gives intelligence agencies and law enforcement full access, is censored by the FCC or some similar three letter agency, and is infested with propaganda and psyops? Where you'll be required to present your real name and ID to have an account and you can be arrested by the mods?

If you want a "free" Reddit look at federated and distributed solutions. But "public" means "controlled by a government." No thank you. I prefer a Reddit where even a sitting President can be banned for breaking the rules.

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

#46

Post by Maxion »

SkipperCat wrote: post #27

My question is why would you want to do that? You're just going to come against the same issues and problems that Reddit has, especially if you want to achieve anything close to Reddit's scale. You'll need staff, money, legal and tech folks (not cheap). And to get the funds, you'll prob have to make the same decisions about ads and API fees. You could pull off something smaller, maybe by being distributed or whatnot,…

One big issue with Reddit is that it is mismanaged. With the revenue they are generating ($456 million USD), it should be more than enough to run a site like Reddit.

Over the last few years they've invested heavily in things that are very unrelated to the core features of the site, such as NFTs and other odd things that are barely visible, while firing people (Victoria & the death of r/IAMA, and snackexchange) that brought a lot of traffic to the site.

If a Reddit competitor were to surface that treated the company not as a facebook competitor // unicorn but rather than a company that is willing to reach a certain size and then stay there, none of this would be problems.

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

#47

Post by felipesabino »

There are many reddit alternatives, there is even a subreddit for that [1] :p

The problem is not the tech, the problem is community, or even better, the network effect. It is the same discussion people were having when twitter musk downfall started.

NPR did a good peace on it discussing why these platforms are so hard to be replaced, it is a good read/listen [2]

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/

[2] https://www.npr.org/2023/04/12/1168232177/twitter-tik-tok-re...

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

#48

Post by slothtrop »

bigdict wrote: post #35
SkipperCat wrote: post #27

My question is why would you want to do that? You're just going to come against the same issues and problems that Reddit has, especially if you want to achieve anything close to Reddit's scale. You'll need staff, money, legal and tech folks (not cheap). And to get the funds, you'll prob have to make the same decisions about ads and API fees. You could pull off something smaller, maybe by being distributed or whatnot,…

I think the answer in cases like that is there needs to be a public Reddit. We all benefit from it and we all want its operation to not be warped by profit-seeking… so we all should just pitch in a dollar a year (?) of our taxes.

> We all benefit from it

The users do. That represents a small fraction of "we".

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

#49

Post by jimmygrapes »

fooqux wrote: post #13
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

There are technical solutions to that problem though. I remember a Reddit replacement from a couple years ago called Aether. It made all moderation public, allowed clients to ignore a certain mod's actions (basically, personally removing them as a mod as far as their view is concerned), and allowed votes of no confidence for mods. No idea if that model would actually work, as the app itself was one of those cool-on-p…

I really liked Aether from a design and user interface standpoint, and even accepted it as a valid use of blockchain tech, but it was also the blockchain aspect that hampered it. Took too long to do things, and required a desktop client. Plus, of course, the network effect of no users. I hope those can be (or have been) solved some day.

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

#50

Post by Maxion »

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…

> 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 monthly fee and then being a user of the site might also incur a fee. Like $2 a month.

With a business model like .e.g King Arthur flour where the employees own the business.

I would be so down to try to make something like this.

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