Ask HN: How do I build a community like Hacker News and Reddit?

Its simple. A community is where people exists. So you can create a WhatsApp Group, FB Group or Telegram Group where people can join in. It can be regarding to what you are interested in. Like some people like Games so create one for that. One recent example is WIP [0]. It started few months back for shippers & now is making around $2000 MRR. Its just a telegram group.

[0]: https://wip.chat

I think I am right in saying that Reddit did it by the founders posting lots of content as fake users. They even had a quick sign up form that their staff could use to create a new user and post. I think by creating the illusion of a very active community it made it easier to attract both search engines and new users. I am not going to comment on the morality of this. This has been discussed on HN before if you want to search.

We try to do that around irc and programming.

The idea is to propose to people to be involved in the process by doing tools that can communicate.

It's also inspired by the how Jeff Besos did to make AWS (you can use whatever tool/language you like but projects must talk programmatically).

http://dpt.slasheva.com/

You can start off by using something like this: Telescope: Build your own Hacker News, Reddit, or Product Hunt. http://www.telescopeapp.org

With a bit of tech and a lot of (good) marketing.