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

As with voat.co, who&#x27;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&#x2F;hateful material on reddit. So it tends to be full of &#x2F;pol-like MRAs&#x2F;extreme right&#x2F;alt-right users.<p>Voten seems like it&#x27;s trying to implement a more democratic system, but who will be pushed into switching over to that?

Signed up, wandered around, here are my impression.<p>* Nothing fancy, nothing new, nothing impressive. I wouldn&#x27;t spend time on this site.<p>* The graphical design wasters most of my screen estate.<p>* The side panel overlaps with the content when the window is not in full-screen.<p>* If you register without an email, it is impossible to add one.<p>* Did I mention that 60% of my screen estate is wasted ?<p>* Reddit is open source, this is not.

Anyone can create a forum; the question is why people would actually visit this one instead of the existing alternatives. &quot;Real-time&quot; features don&#x27;t seem like that much of a draw and Reddit et al could easily implement them if they were.

<i>&quot;The app itself is powered by Laravel, Vue.js, Socket.io, and Node&quot;</i><p>Is there another Laravel other than the php one? Seems odd to roll out with both php and node.js. I don&#x27;t know why you would need both.<p>Edit: Yes, I see each has it&#x27;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 react to things you missed. I would have settled on one or the other. Feels like premature optimization.

Signed up...of all the recommended programming-related channels to show a first-time user, why (after &quot;opensource&quot;) are &quot;vuejs&quot; and &quot;laravel&quot; the channels most spotlighted? As opposed to &quot;programming&quot; or even &quot;javascript&quot;?<p>On a sidenote, given that Reddit &quot;growth-hacked&quot; its early days by creating fake accounts and the appearance of activity [0], it&#x27;d be funny to see Voten use bots to simulate activity based on Reddit&#x27;s years of activity. A slightly less obvious version of www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;SubredditSimulator, if you will.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;motherboard.vice.com&#x2F;en_us&#x2F;article&#x2F;how-reddit-got-huge-tons-of-fake-accounts--2" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;motherboard.vice.com&#x2F;en_us&#x2F;article&#x2F;how-reddit-got-hu...</a><p>edit: One missing feature: I skipped out of the recommended channels feature after signing up. OK, now I want to sign up for more channels. I&#x27;ve been clicking random buttons and hamburger icons for a minute now and still couldn&#x27;t tell you how to find the channels I&#x27;ve subscribed to, nevermind all the other existing channels. The &quot;Search&quot; menu appears to be the only place where I can find new channels to add. But there&#x27;s not a list of channels. I&#x27;m just supposed to guess which channels already exist as I type into the autocomplete?

I know a lot of people are rather pessimistic about a Reddit competitor gaining traction, but on a technology and UX note they&#x27;ve done a great job. I signed up on mobile and browsed around. The user experience is miles ahead of Reddit&#x27;s new mobile web client. Pages load instantly, everything is smooth, scaled well, and no tiny text to click. Well executed IMHO.<p>Regarding being a Reddit competitor, if they can get the content well seeded and manage to allow unpopular opinions that are substantial then I would gladly switch. HN has done a fairly good job of not allowing downvotes into oblivion because someone disagrees with a popular opinion on the forum. It is not perfect, but better than Reddit. Unfortunately HN is more or less a single topic forum. I can&#x27;t come here reliably for fishing discussions for example. Likewise, it would be great if Voten can figure out a way to disincentivize comments that are unconstructive or personal attacks but go along with the narrative (another problem I see on Reddit).<p>So in short, my hope for the founders is that they can attract good users, properly seed content until it takes off, and promote substantial and quality comments regardless of viewpoint. I think they could be a good alternative at a time when Reddit is becoming a victim of its own success.

Strange for a &quot;reddit alternative&quot; to have a <i>landing page</i> instead of, you know, content upfront like.. reddit.

I made a website a bit like this: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;suprsede.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;suprsede.com&#x2F;</a><p>It&#x27;s like reddit but each topic&#x2F;page has a realtime chat.<p>Unfortunately it&#x27;s rather infested by spammers currently :)<p>Getting traction for these social media sites is very tricky!

Login wall really hits my &quot;cba&quot; buttons, sorry. If it re-appears on my radar with some more info behind it I&#x27;ll give it a thought again.<p>To expand on that a little - if I forget and link an interesting comment thread to a friend and they have to register to view it I look like a dork. It&#x27;s not happening.

Aaand yet another reddit &quot;alternative&quot; 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&#x27;d really like to know why devs think they can rival Reddit, it&#x27;s just too big.

The immediate problem is that the home page is a boring marketing page and not content like reddit or hn

Has anyone signed up?<p>It&#x27;s very interesting what the first topics are. There is a #conservatism with 8 members already, but you can&#x27;t make #liberalism, #communism or #leftists. &quot;The_Donald&quot; is &quot;coming soon&quot;.<p>(Edit: I must have hit a bug because I tried with a few names and my attempts just didn&#x27;t do anything, but someone else did it immediately).<p>I wonder if this is like Gab, an attempt to make a more single-issue-politics-friendly variant of a popular site.

I&#x27;m not sold that real-time is a feature you want in your social site.<p>Reddit has an issue with lightweight throwaway comments already. Broad mostly-right comments killing actual discussion.<p>Wouldn&#x27;t adding real-time on top of that add up to the hell of teamspeak in games with a bunch of kids?<p>It could go like IRC... But if you&#x27;re saying you&#x27;re like Reddit, I don&#x27;t see how it wouldn&#x27;t devolve into pettyness.

I&#x27;m not sure if I&#x27;m in the minority, but for a lot of content I ingest (news, video) I don&#x27;t have an account, or actively use one, on the service. The only time I create an account is if I find the benefits of creating an account are more than just visiting the service without an account. For example, I keep an account on Youtube because I want to keep playlists and I don&#x27;t mind if they have my watch history as a result, but I don&#x27;t keep an account on Reddit because I just casually browse it without really participating (primarily because I feel like most of the discussion, by the time I see it, is something I can&#x27;t add to, as opposed to a place like HN). And so for me, if this site is registration only, I don&#x27;t see a point if it is only to make it real time and a &quot;Reddit alternative&quot; unless it&#x27;s significantly better, but the most important part of Reddit is the community aspect, which is hard to replicate.

What will the moderation policy be like? Will forums in the vein of former subreddits like coontown and jailbait be welcome?<p>Also, why choose a domain so close to voat.co for a reddit alternative? Whether you&#x27;re a fan&#x2F;user of voat.co or not, i can see them being easily confused or mistaken as related projects. They could have at least gone with another tld.

Real-time will lead to even &#x27;lower quality&#x27; discussion. Consider email vs. chat.

For those looking for something similar there are these: Telescope[0], Drum[1], Slashcode[2], and Microscope[3]<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=7861985" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=7861985</a><p>[1]: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;drum.jupo.org" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;drum.jupo.org</a><p>[2]: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.slashcode.com&#x2F;www.slashcode.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.slashcode.com&#x2F;www.slashcode.com&#x2F;</a><p>[3]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;DiscoverMeteor&#x2F;Microscope" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;DiscoverMeteor&#x2F;Microscope</a>

I have looked for an alternative for along time. Maybe this is something maybe not. But I&#x27;m going to try :-). I love HN because you are able to have great content and great conversations, but it is afk SE focused. A new platform for other news would be great<p>Edit: created #agile was thinking of trying to create a agile focused HN and 1 minute later this came along :-). Anyway if this doesn&#x27;t work out; DM me if you are interested in starting something like a agile focused HN. Looking a bit more fore the business &#x2F; change management side of things instead of the SE side of things.<p>Or if this already exists please point me to it :-)

Does this require log in to browse as well? I&#x27;d imagine that anonymous read only viewing is larger percentage of the audience.

Looks really nice. Modern clean layout, uses OAuth2 for login. The content is really light, but I guess we can see how that progresses

Honestly, I don&#x27;t even like reddit for some reason. I can only handle HN. I tried Imzy and others before too. I always come back to HN.<p>I feel like more of these websites may be able to succeed (not sure Reddit has a network effect that could prevent another site from coming up), but I&#x27;m not sure how necessary it is.

Reminds me of Prismatic. I&#x27;m still sad that site isn&#x27;t around anymore. They were doing some great ML research.<p>The combined this category based UX with recommendation algorithms and social indicators. Worked well. But I believe they had trouble monetizing it or potentially growing it to scale.

Reddit is technology wise pretty simple - it&#x27;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!<p>Anyway this is a site by actual guys that used to work at Reddit so you&#x27;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&#x27;s just a barren &#x27;seed user&#x27; populated scaled down version of reddit.<p>The biggest USP is real time and there&#x27;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&#x27;d be creating a frenzy of real time activity so that AT LEAST we give people an glimpse of what we&#x27;re trying to create.<p>Poorly executed - you&#x27;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.

Here&#x27;s a few more alternatives: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.inc.com&#x2F;amy-vernon&#x2F;3-reddit-alternatives-for-the-diaspora.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.inc.com&#x2F;amy-vernon&#x2F;3-reddit-alternatives-for-the...</a>

I wonder what their moderation is going to be like; it looks like you can&#x27;t create your own channels (subreddits) yet, so the admins are on the hook for moderating the entire site, yes?<p>Or are they going to take on a complete hands-off approach?

Been browsing this for a little bit now. Honestly, the creator doesn&#x27;t sound like he has a clear vision for what the site should be and how it should function. The UI overall is pretty slick.

As a Reddit alternative, and given that the domain name is in Spanish, at least they could make the rest of the site in Spanish.<p>Make it useful for people in Venezuela.<p>It is the only reason I would use it over Reddit.

Looks dope, but not usable over Tor.<p>Requests to the API are returned with a 403 code.

The product did not need to be 2 years in development, there is not much need in so much features and niceties. The main value of reddit is the content and vast network of users.

Realtime is interesting. I&#x27;d suggest cramming way more stories on a page. HN&#x2F;Reddit work for me because I can glance the top 20-30 things.

Well it took me a minute to find out how to post and now the Submit button is even greyed out.. what the hell?

So this makes me wonder: HN what would you want in a reddit alternative that HN doesn&#x27;t provide?

I&#x27;m starting to think submitting PR pieces about Reddit clones on HN does more harm than good.

Yeah, just what I need a notification for every time someone responds to one of my comments.

Tried to sign in with Facebook but did not work (and the login button seems odd looking).

Can&#x27;t see the content without signing up (regardless of email). Bye.

Looks good so far. How do I change my account password?

Curious to know if this site applied to YC. Anyone know?

There&#x27;s also voat and imzy

Not worth it

so... I signed up... but I doubt it will catch on.. ala voat.co

Connect with FB is broken.

Best of luck. Reddit needs a good kick in the arse. Since shortly before Steve Huffman&#x27;s (Spez) return, Reddit has adopted a policy of top-down content curation - banning controversial subreddits, changing the voting algorithm to dis-favor &#x2F;r&#x2F;the_donald, and most recently introducing &#x2F;r&#x2F;popular which is basically &#x2F;r&#x2F;all without that pesky &#x2F;r&#x2F;the_donald subreddit (ffs just man up and ban the group rather than pretending to support the free exchange of ideas).<p>Reddit management prefers for their website to only showcase non-controversial content in order to attract advertisers. Which is their right, but I&#x27;m rooting for the disruptive upcomer that will kill that website like Reddit originally did to Digg back when Reddit was cool and stood for something.