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Comment by UpToTheSky | Hacker News Reader

What is the hard thing about building an open, user-friendly Reddit alternative?

Hosting the posts shouldn't be that hard. Storage is so cheap these days. Is it the legal aspects of handling user generated content?

Ranking the posts is another issue. Is that where the value of Reddit lies?

Maybe one could build some hybrid thing which capitalizes on existing structures? I could imagine a frontend which only shows posts by users who signed their posts via their Hacker News accounts. Aka they sign their post with a private key and publish the public key on their HN profile. This way, a new Reddit alternative could benefit from the karma distribution of the best community on the web today.

Hosting the content could maybe be done via one of the new decentralized systems like Mastodon, Nostr or Bluesky? Those inherently have open APIs, so it would be easy to build a frontend which aggregates the content into one simple UI.

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Three big issues off the top of my head:

* Hosting costs. Reddit was very lucky to have imgur pick up a lot of its bandwidth in its early days, but free image/video hosting sites are cyclical: absent a benevolent billionaire, the costs will rise with popularity, and the site will eventually need a source of revenue, which will introduce friction and start its inevitable decline in popularity.

* Moderation. Always a highwire tightrope act. Most Reddit spin-offs of the past several years have been focused on minimizing moderation, which ends up attracting people who tend to get banned from other places before the site gets a chance to form its own identity and pick up steam.

* Network effects, which are basically a lottery. You can have a scalable service with great UI, and a solid moderation story, but you still need to get lucky and catch lightning in a bottle to take off. This is common knowledge, which makes it even harder to justify starting to develop or use a new social medium.

Personally, I like places like HN, which focus on good moderation without trying to scale up. We are blessed to have dang, but if the site were structured more like Reddit or a forum with different boards, I bet it would become unmanageable very quickly.

> Most Reddit spin-offs of the past several years have been focused on minimizing moderation, which ends up attracting people who tend to get banned from other places before the site gets a chance to form its own identity and pick up steam.

Mastodon is a good example and counterexample of this trend. Gab was the biggest Mastodon instance, largely populated by the kinds of people pre-Musk Twitter banned or limited (and their followers.)

But the second (post-Musk) wave wasn't people who got banned, it was people leaving because they didn't like Musk and/or his changes to Twitter. And Reddit's own userbase came from Digg in much the same way.

Imagine if Mastodon had been easy to migrate to, Twitter would have collapsed like a popped balloon.

Reddit has a natural administrative/scalability partition boundary though, which makes federation much easier. I think a federated reddit would work better than Mastodon has.

>Reddit has a natural administrative/scalability partition boundary though, which makes federation much easier. I think a federated reddit would work better than Mastodon has.

To the point that quite a number of subreddits that have been banned, or that have been voluntarily shut down, have already set up their own clones on their own domains. t_d, drama, and fds are three notable examples that I can think of off the top of my heads.

HN is functionally like a single topic forum, which makes it a little easier to have rules about what is generally allowable content. Many single topic forums still exist, though in recent years have had to take a back seat to Reddit et al. Maybe if Reddit goes completely to pot, people will look them up again.

Network effect is the biggest one IMO.

If the hosting entity is in the US don't forget lawyer fees ....

Or if you have EU users

That doesn't apply by default. While the US is enabling people to be more litigious, EU will mostly slap you with fines for doing bad things. You have the option to... not do bad things. (Yes, I'm sure there's some odd counterexample somewhere, but this holds in general)

The problem is law doesn't fine for doing bad things, it fines for breaking the law which is not exactly the same.

In my previous company for a project we had to hire lawyer for more than a week just to determine if we were breaking law, even though the site didn't do any bad things by normal people standard.

In the end the suggestion was to just slap a consent form with consent rejection redirecting to some other site, which didn't made sense to me, but yeah that's what the law says.

> this holds in general

Way too complex to navigate that minefield, lawyer fees will be a big hit on the budget of any reddit challenger.

> Personally, I like places like HN

What are those places?

"Ask HN: Sites with the quality of Hacker News, but for more general topics?" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34302827) lists a couple. There's regular "what is the HN of <insert industry>" Ask HN questions, somebody would make a list.

Metafilter.

Hosting costs: Let's start with text only.

Moderation: True, that's hard. But maybe piggybacking on HN's karma points could solve it?

Network effects: Do we really need many users to make something useful?

The hardest part is going to be the community itself. Reddit (the board and shareholders) are betting that the community is too large to migrate to a better alternative.

Every time you upset your user base, you give them an opportunity to leave. Or, you turn your advocates into neutral. They stop being willing to do free work for you.

Reddit is dependent on free work. Moderators are a significant portion of that process, and they are the ones who depend on the API the most. If your moderators decide to do less work, your community starts going down in quality. If the community goes down in quality, they will make the decision that a smaller community is better than a poorly run community and someone else will capture that use case.

The question is if that will happen before an IPO. Given the climate, that IPO may be two years away.

Not only does it rely on the labor of mods and dealing with a lot of bad behavior. However, the admins also enforce a "code of conduct" on the mods and threaten the loss of the sub for lack of compliance.

Do we really need a big part of the community to have a good "forums for everything" site?

To me it seems, that 99% of Reddit is just "content fast food" and low quality comments.

If we would get just 1000 HN users to use an alternative, that could already be something.

Do you visit niche or speculate topics? They have far better communities than any of the default communities. My observation is comment quality scales with complexity of the topic.

It’s extremely hard to rebuild most of these high quality communities elsewhere. Often, it seems only the troublemakers/outliers are willing to move to another platform. They simply become a stain on the alternative platform.

Yeah. A new platform needs to offer something fun or interesting in its own right to attract users. Otherwise it's going to be an island prison for the worse members of the old community.

A golden rule of using Reddit has been to unsubscribe from all the default subreddits and subscribe to niche interest ones. /r/politics etc are huge but they’re dumpster fires.

There’s essentially two reddits in one: the default one and the enjoyable one. You don’t get the enjoyable one by default.

The issue is also that the right people need to come.

Generally speaking, the issue with new startup competitors for social networks is that the first people they attract a critical mass of are people who got banned from the other sites for spam or excessive toxicity, and once they’re there they spook potential new people. It’s the online version of the “Nazi bar” problem.

That's why I suggested piggybacking on HN's karma points.

The internet is still young, but full of once successful than failed social media sites. Myspace, digg, Friendster, Orkut, Google+, Vine, LiveJournal, etc..

I promise you, Reddit won't be around in 50 years. And it may not be much in 5 the way they're disrespecting their core audience.

There are many reddit clones. The value is completely in the communities and not in the technology.

r/all subs like r/pics are completely replaceable, but something like r/personalfinance is an institution that is not easy to replicate elsewhere.

What are some of those Reddit clones?

Any of them decentralized, so there is no "one ruler" who can close down the thing in the future?

I think Aether comes close: https://aether.app/features/general/

There are reddit-likes on the fediverse (which means they are using the ActivityPub protocol). The fact that a software like kbin works on ActivityPub means that users on other fediverse software like Mastodon (twitter-like) can interact with posts on kbin. Discussion, interaction and discoverability are thus not limited to just the small community on kbin. https://kbin.social/

Here is a discussion by @feditips@mstdn.social on reddit alternatives on the fediverse. https://mstdn.social/@feditips/110476830253102884

>but something like r/personalfinance is an institution that is not easy to replicate elsewhere.

bogleheads?

> What is the hard thing about building an open, user-friendly Reddit alternative?

One already exists in Lemmy.

I suspect a big hurdle is dealing with all of the laws & regulations that exist in the United States. I've already seen one good sized mastodon instance vanish forever because hostile actors flooded it with actual child abuse material. And despite #fediblock, new instances with hate speech spring up all the time.

Are "all of the laws and regulations" against "child abuse material" specific to the US?

Bootstrapping an alternative. Growing it from nothingness, being easily welcoming but not overrun by spam and malicious content. Getting to a critical mass before losing the goodwill with users and runway with whoever pays for this. This is a very significant moat, one that makes Reddit's leadership believe they can turn the screw without worrying about competition for now.

> What is the hard thing about building an open, user-friendly Reddit alternative?

This 'alternative' needs to be able to attract and move both new and existing Reddit users, replicating its network effect and retaining them so that they do not go back to Reddit.

> Hosting the content could maybe be done via one of the new decentralized systems like Mastodon, Nostr or Bluesky? Those inherently have open APIs, so it would be easy to build a frontend which aggregates the content into one simple UI.

Before these generative AI systems this was not a problem and free APIs on social networks was fine. Now having free open access APIs on social networks doesn't make that much sense anymore thanks to generative AI.

It just enables these AI systems to easily train on their platforms at little to no cost to accelerate the grifters, scammers, and bots flooding and overloading the social network which also increases the costs of spam, moderation, servers and low quality content. It doesn't scale for humans alone to reduce it once API access is totally free, whether if it is on the largest instances or even with another Reddit alternative.

But anyway...

...AI really is going just great. /s

The irony that the technology we once used to combat spam is being used to create spam has not been lost on me

The Network Effect.

This is the point critics are missing when they argue about Bitcoin's intrinsic value. Bitcoin has no value other than its network effects. Facebook, Reddit, Bitcoin, etc. are valuable because of their usage. Which makes them hard to replace even if they're not perfect.

> Is it the legal aspects of handling user generated content?

Section 230 of the CDA shields operators of interactive computer systems from liability for user generated content.

That's not quite the whole story.

Moderation of large scale social media is a god-damned nightmare.

The automoderator feature of reddit seems to be very complex. You can configure a lot.

creating momentum is hard, even with a better product. Even before the internet, the slightly technologies did not necessarily get enough traction to unseat the incumbents

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