Millions to be made in Unbundling Reddit | Hacker News Reader

Millions to be made in Unbundling Reddit

realrealgood.substack.com

15 pointssharemywin8 comments

Reddit has the problem where the most popular subreddits (r/gaming for example) have generic content upvoted the most, and so there often isn't actually anything worthwhile there if you have an actual interest besides memes or general industry news. Then on the other extreme, you have overly niche subreddits for specific video games, where most of the content is just fan art, overly in-depth subreddit drama, or similar memes now just re-skinned for that specific game. There isn't really a middle ground for a lot of these categories, for the people who want "just enough content for the games I like". I've found either subscribe to r/gaming and get a broad amount of nothing, or subscribe to a list of the games you enjoy and get a very in-depth lot of nothing.

I guess the trick here is how do you make a site that is so much better than a subreddit that anyone is willing to manually click over to your site instead of consuming the subreddit’s content along with the rest of their reddit feed.

There are many ways. If you take the pc hardware subreddits for example, providing tools to easily build a pc spec and share it would already make it more useful than Reddit.

Goto some of these subreddits, and you’ll see the hoops these people jump through to take part in the community. Definitely need to start solving stuff like this.

I think you just described https://pcpartpicker.com/

How do I do that in about 60 seconds and share it on a Reddit-like site, with the possibility of people recommending alternative parts in a easy way?

I guess the point I’m making is if you want to improve on the subreddits, simple stuff like this is low hanging fruit.

Edit: I’ll add, pcpartspicker is exactly the kind of hoop I’m talking about. A large amount of those hardware subreddits are built on that tool, so why funnel all the traffic to Reddit at all?

two major reasons:

reach: get enough upvotes in Reddit and you can attract a lot of people including prominent figures in the space to look at your build

friction: people passing by might not want to create a profile just to comment on your build, but if they stumble on the build on a site where they already have registered it's so much more likely for them to speak their mind

a mass of users, even from unrelated topics, carry non linear value in social interaction based sites, and so it happens grouping topic together wins over fragmenting over multiple small sites

Interesting article. Definitely something to think about.

Thanks for sharing!

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