With the recent rumblings over on reddit, I do wonder if reddit will experience its own “Digg moment”.<p>Is anyone here working on their own reddit-like site?<p>I feel part of what they are fundamentally missing is decent embedded search functionality as most people are still using google to search and find a relevant discussion of interest e.g “topic x reddit”
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.<p>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.<p>You could pull off something smaller, maybe by being distributed or whatnot, but you'll probably never operate at the scale of Reddit. The killer feature of Reddit is that everyone goes to Reddit because Reddit is Reddit.<p>Maybe my pessimistic brain can't see the opportunity. I'd be happy to be proven wrong.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot.<p>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.<p>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 PHPBB) so I’m sure some value added cloud provider could do something similar (I think Digital Ocean already has this with their App Marketplace.)<p>For one, there’s no check on mods. So if someone spins up a Reddit specifically for [TOPIC] they’re the God of that server basically. Like old school IRC.<p>Second, there’s no built in user base. Third, any app would be subject to inconsistently applied restrictions on things like porn that Reddit gets a pass on because of its size.<p>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…<p>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.<p>It’d preserve what I feel is the real value of Reddit which is smaller communities. And I would be willing to pay $2 a month knowing it’s helping sustain a platform I get value from.
I think the problem with Reddit, is it doesn't know what it wants to be.<p>I think for many of us here, we treat it as a forum. We go an find specific subreddits in our interests, and interact with it similar to how we interact with hacker news. Interesting Articles and/or Discussion Questions are posted, and then there is a conversation about it.<p>But that is not how a lot of people use Reddit. To many people, it is social media, in the same vein as TikTok or Instagram. You just scroll through a bunch of quick photos, videos, or rage inducing headlines. There is no actual forum there. It is quick dopamine hits.<p>I bet if you asked Reddit who their competition is, they'd say TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, and Facebook (and maybe even Youtube), indicating that they don't think it is their forums that are important, but more so their social media aspect.<p>So, what is it you want to build? If you just want forums, then I think that is straight forward, and the hacker news crowd would probably be happy with it. But, I don't think that is where most of Reddit audience is anymore, so you aren't building a competitor to Reddit, you are building a competitor to TikTok and Instagram.
Overcoming reddit as a startup has a massive obstacle, moderation and removal of unwanted content.<p>It's something that's not well automated, and thus requires an enormous amount of labor (ie capital)<p>This is why those who have tried have turned into racist pornography filled shit holes.<p>Want to start a billion dollar startup? Figure out how to automate this problem.
Lemmy is a federated attempt at being a Reddit competitor but I think it has quite a bit of work to do before it’s viable.<p><a href="https://lemmy.ml/" rel="nofollow">https://lemmy.ml/</a>
Not a competitor to Reddit but something for smaller private communities. It's called Micro Chat - <a href="https://micro.mu" rel="nofollow">https://micro.mu</a><p>Previously on HN <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36135683" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36135683</a><p>I think the public community thing is interesting but it's now been done do death and people's solution for smaller subreddits is federation or self hosting which I don't really agree with. I'm leaning towards even smaller "micro" communities that are entirely private. Talk to 20 people you know and get on with. Create separate groups/communities for things you care about. That's it. I don't want to have the discussion in public, I don't want upvoting/downvoting. I don't even want karma.<p>If you're looking for something entirely public like HN here's a thing I built last year <a href="https://home.m3o.com" rel="nofollow">https://home.m3o.com</a>. no search though.
I have come up with a plan that might get a Reddit competitor up and running. I have also started to implement it.<p>Step 1. Create an alternative API for Reddit (I've created an MVP for this here: <a href="https://api.reddiw.com" rel="nofollow">https://api.reddiw.com</a>)<p>Step 2. Set up an alternative front-end for Reddit built on top of the alternative API (my plan is to host it at reddiw.com)<p>Step 3. Start implementing a custom back-end, with submissions showing up interspersed with existing Reddit content, perhaps on the very same alternative front-end to drive adoption or one on a separate URL.<p>How will I deal with costs/moderation? Same way as Reddit did at the beginning: text only. With images/videos hosted by imgur etc. and each thread linking directly to a separate host for images/videos.<p>While I do have step 1 complete and it has got some traction on Reddit I don't think any third-party app has adopted it yet. It would be nice to get that to show the demand is there. Otherwise I might not pursue the next steps.
Apollo seems like a natural, they already have a bunch of users and a well loved FE and an API spec.<p>It seems like they could just build their own BE to work with what they already have.
I'd be down to help with a decentralized Reddit with decentralized aggregation.<p>Each subreddit is hosted by someone. They manage the moderators, the rules, the users. This gets us away from the bottomless pit of moderation. They can write custom plugins to extend their subreddit in interesting ways. The level of effort and resources required to run a subreddit is minimal. This is made much easier to setup via a CLI to deploy to various cloud platforms, hosting providers provided by us. Think ~5 dollars a month in costs.<p>Decentralized aggregators allow searching these subreddits, aggregating their content to see trending, popular, worthwhile posts for discovery. This is decentralized in theory, but to start out, there's probably a single aggregator. The resources required is high, and curation also involves some human judgement. For example: denylist an entire subreddit, no adult content, etc.. Verifying authenticity of upvotes or whatever the heck is interesting too. This can be a for profit company. Is it going to be worth billions? Probably not, but it can be sustainable and provide a service.<p>Some affordance in the protocol to allow for users to cross subreddit boundaries so registration isn't required, etc. are all interesting to think about.<p>I'm sure mastodon, Bluesky, or another protocol has interesting ideas to steal that are applicable to a Reddit like experience vs. a full blown social network.
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].<p>All the features work with front-end JavaScript turned off.<p>I am currently wrapping up the OAuth 2 server implementation so that we can have third party apps (no API fees!).<p>After I wrap up some remaining features I am going to move everything to commentcastles.org and forward the old site there.<p>It's currently text only (emojis allowed).<p>I do want to build good custom search but haven't really started on that task yet.<p>[0] <a href="https://github.com/ferg1e/comment-castles">https://github.com/ferg1e/comment-castles</a><p>[1] <a href="https://www.peachesnstink.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.peachesnstink.com</a>
Posted recently: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36203610" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36203610</a><p>The p2p backend makes it fairly slow to load, but it's an interesting approach. They seem to have put in a lot of effort to make the UI an almost-clone. Which is sort of interesting since the reddit UI gets a lot of negative feedback. Probably lots anyone could learn from the source code though.
I wish. Reddit jumped the shark years ago but I did look into it at one point. There's a lot of factors you wouldn't anticipate that will trip you up. Not the least of which is quality moderation. Your site will either die under the crush of awful free speech, or live long enough to run out of visitors. It's a tough balance Reddit didn't have to face as harshly in a different time.
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.<p>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.<p>Yeah, it's not perfect but it's ours.
I’ve been thinking about doing this myself. I think the problem is the business model. I was thinking of a transparent, share-based and community-owned model had potential.
I wrote a little on the subject of content moderation, or as I think of it as a user... just filtering. How can _I_ take charge of what I see, and how can _I_ deploy tools, features, functionality to improve the signal to noise ratio for my own preference. How can other users with similar tolerance/threshold help me get the most out of social media/forums/etc. It was written after being particularly annoyed with LinkedIn, but it applies to all sorts of user generated content sites. Maybe someone will implement the ideas contained within.<p><a href="https://blog.eutopian.io/building-a-better-linkedin/" rel="nofollow">https://blog.eutopian.io/building-a-better-linkedin/</a>
There are many reddit alternatives, there is even a subreddit for that [1] :p<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.<p>NPR did a good peace on it discussing why these platforms are so hard to be replaced, it is a good read/listen [2]<p>[1] <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/</a><p>[2] <a href="https://www.npr.org/2023/04/12/1168232177/twitter-tik-tok-replaced-network" rel="nofollow">https://www.npr.org/2023/04/12/1168232177/twitter-tik-tok-re...</a>
A competitor, no.<p>A similar link aggregator and discussion platform, yes.<p>Reddit is far too large for anyone to build a competitor from scratch, nobody (unless they're a major player that doesn't mind sinking exorbitant costs into hosting) will be able to afford hosting discussions for the number of accounts that reddit has. The best we can hope for as users is that various communities from reddit migrate to some of the open-source options that already exist (lemmy seems to get the most mindshare at the moment) but hopefully the one I work on, brutalinks, also.<p>In my opinion offloading individual communities to their own instance that hosts content for hundreds to (maybe)thousands of users is the way to go for hobbyist level platforms.
It's a lot harder than it sounds. Moderation is hard, and these days I don't think it's free either, unless you have a very, very niche community with people who are passionate. This wasn't a problem back in phpBB days. You could have a forum with 100k users, and 500 people on at any given time, and moderation was extremely easy because people wanted to do it - it made the community better.<p>Reddit also has many users who are suffering from the familiarity syndrome. They don't care some API price is going up, they just want an endless feed of content and gazillion comments to mindlessly gaze through. This part of Reddit's audience is pretty much impossible to convert.
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<p>rdrama.net
watchpeopledie.tv
themotte.org
ovarit.com<p>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 be:<p>1. The communities were banned or hampered on reddit
2. The communities have a unique culture
3. Some people in the community take on the responsibility for developing/maintaining the offsite
4. The users of the community donate money to keep everything running (a la SomethingAwful)
I seek for more small communities, similar to niche subreddits. So, I'm building a community software called Booklet: <a href="https://www.booklet.community" rel="nofollow">https://www.booklet.community</a><p>It's forum software, but with the polish of Notion/Slack. Everything is threaded and real-time. I put a lot of effort into the automated email newsletter - so you can stay up-to-date with what's happening, without ever logging in. It's mostly whitelabeled and supports custom domains.<p>It's in early testing with some users - ranging from an MBA class to a members community that switched off of google groups. If you're trying it out, email me!
When you look up 'reddit alternatives' you find hackernews often at the top of the list. There are MANY live alternatives.<p>The "digg moment" won't happen over some pricing of api stuff. It's not a serious problem which doesnt come even close to Yishan Wong or Ellen Pao levels of censorship. Reddit should by all metrics have had a digg moment after both of those people.<p>If you do go back in time before Musk bought twitter. Yishan had made some very odd unsubstantiated absolutely absurd comments. After the twitter files we found out the US government was behind this. The US government is keeping Reddit in power and you'll be banned to prevent migration.
Not a competitor; but I was thinking yesterday about what the next big thing in forums like Reddit needs to be: Non-profit Democracies.<p>The big problem with social networks today is that there is little recourse when the parties that are in charge make decisions that aren't in the best interest of the users.<p>What if the CEO, product manager, and other key roles in Redit, Facebook, Twitter, ect, <i>were elected by the users?</i><p>What if the there was something like a constitution that dictated that all source code be open source?<p>What if funding was mostly donation-based, like how people support their church or similar civic organizations? (For example, in order to vote you need to pay $15 / year?)
We're building a Google searchable communities at Linen.dev (An alternative to Slack/Discord). We're going to support forum views soon :)
I would happily build the discord equivalent of reddit, no general space just requested access spaces. The problem with reddit from a mod perspective is that it is inversely open, anyone can see it, but very few opinions are allowed on most subreddits. I'd rather the inverse as it allows for more range of opinion and less "omg why do i have to see X when i open my laptop".
I hope so.<p>I <i>love</i> the variety of content on Reddit. But many of the subreddits are so toxic and fully of cry-bullies that it's nearly intolerable. I can't wait for the next generation of Reddit to come along, one that will welcome more participation from civil-minded people. (Kudos to Hacker News for somehow achieving that, btw.)
I have ran large community type projects. My learnings: the community <i>always</i> revolts. They want less ads, they want more moderation for free but of course, less over-site.
<a href="https://tildes.net/" rel="nofollow">https://tildes.net/</a><p>It’s a small community that has been up since 2018. It’s open source as well.<p>Note: I’m not affiliated just a user of both Reddit and tildes.