Is anyone here working on their own reddit-like site?
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”
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.
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.
Maybe my pessimistic brain can't see the opportunity. I'd be happy to be proven wrong.
Of course, it would be a pretty hard sell, and how the country would choose which web sites to fund would be a shit-show, but still, its an interesting idea.
I also would rather not post or log into any government run social media, that's seems like a big no from me.
I really don't know what a fix would be but I would be interested to see how a government ran social media would look, even if I wouldn't use it.
If people are willing to pitch in a buck a year, just charge them for it. Either you can find enough people to support it voluntarily or you can't. If you can, you don't need government, and if you can't, it's not enough of a benefit to force people to pay for it.
I’m not even talking about Reddit’s one of the most annoying current problems - AI bots disguised as real people. Make it publicly owned, people will have more skin in the game to make it worse. Sorry for the bot rant, but anything other than hyper-local subreddits are completely useless for getting any opinions at this point. The same points repeated every day to advance one or the other point of view, making it a hell hole. I feel bad for people who take in those opinions at face value thinking these are all real people.
If you want a "free" Reddit look at federated and distributed solutions. But "public" means "controlled by a government." No thank you. I prefer a Reddit where even a sitting President can be banned for breaking the rules.
The users do. That represents a small fraction of "we".
Over the last few years they've invested heavily in things that are very unrelated to the core features of the site, such as NFTs and other odd things that are barely visible, while firing people (Victoria & the death of r/IAMA, and snackexchange) that brought a lot of traffic to the site.
If a Reddit competitor were to surface that treated the company not as a facebook competitor // unicorn but rather than a company that is willing to reach a certain size and then stay there, none of this would be problems.
So who gets fired? How many people are you willing to make unemployed? What services get removed? What improvements stop? Realistically, the reason they don't make a profit is they're aiming for growth and they're getting the growth.
Everybody involved with the NFTs, with this API decision, with everything about New Reddit, the dumb crypto currencies, do we need to go on? It's a long list.
Its almost impossible to name any company that has not created at least a handful of major flops. And there are plenty of companies that continue to bungle and make multi-million dollar mistakes almost constantly.
What boggles my mind is that there are so many companies that continue to thrive while blowing millions of dollars on stupid decisions. Must be the power of having cash-cow products (and maybe some monopolistic traits too).
They can't really push for advertising until they eliminate 3rd party API access to the content. That or they have to start charging a usage fee.
Which is interesting. One option they do have is to charge the user for using Reddit via an API, not the apps using the API. If you want to access Reddit via a 3rd party app then you'll have to pay for it - say something on the order of $1.99 per month or $19.99 for the year. I imagine they must have explored that option, so it makes me wonder why they abandoned it.
I'd love to see the numbers of how these features actually amplified the experience. My gut tells me not much at all. Tech companies have huge misses all the time trying to make more money and often at the cost of the long-term success of the product.
The product itself is _done_. The code has been _written_, one can host their own open source reddit this very moment. Image/video storage has long been a problem for reddit, so perhaps users will have to get used to YouTube and Imgur again.
I think people are making too many excuses for Reddit when they act as if the product itself is unmonetizable. It’s not, they largely just hired too aggressively and made some design decisions which have been broadly poorly received.
They’ve effectively owned the space since 2008. I think in another world with different leadership Reddit could be in a much healthier position than it is right now.
I think there's an alternate timeline where reddit just kept on being a low profit-per-user site, and didn't do the 'monetization-degradation-decline' cycle we've seen so often with other sites over the years. There's no reason why you have to make all the money at once, especially if it's a tried and true method of trashing your platform, just so whoever absorbs all your fleeing users can repeat your mistakes in a few years time.
Why not just stick with what works?
Spend way less, in almost every category.
Not every business needs to do a billion dollars, or a billion users, or a billion x.
The killer feature of Digg is that everyone goes to Digg because Digg is Digg.
FTFY
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
> 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.
With a business model like .e.g King Arthur flour where the employees own the business.
I would be so down to try to make something like this.
I think because we are software engineers, we think some novel technology will fix this issue. But the real problem is that companies take on too much money and are then distorted by it.
There has to be a change in software away from VC funding outside of where it’s actually necessary. You don’t need 30 million dollars to build this idea. You could take out a small business loan instead.
We need to stop thinking of small businesses that create and sell software as “startups” and placing them into a special category in our heads.
I actually took an hour to look through the old reddit source code to see what it would take to spin up an alternative and add features quickly.
From what I can tell, Reddit open source code is very tightly bound into Pylons and Cassandra (and Python 2.7), so if you don't like those choices... too bad. It relies on global in-process locking of data store transactions. There are no allowances to separate queries/reads from commands/writes, or specify which models reside in which data store. No good way to make DTOs for lower network overhead. The whole thing is also an untyped mass of code (due to it being Python 2.7), so making any modification requires reading and mentally executing anything you're modifying.
Granted, to start out, all of this is fine. But feels like it will fall over as soon as it gets big.
It would be a large undertaking to even get the old Reddit source to a state where a dev could get up to speed and make changes without a month of study. I'm not saying it's not worth it, but I suspect that's the reason nobody's ever just forked Reddit and made their own.
People have absolutely made sites that have been described as "Reddit clones" - I never investigated enough to know if they were actually using a fork of the actual codebase.
But yeah, I wasn't suggesting that people use Reddit's source code to build a new Reddit. My point was, the functionality isn't difficult to build and certainly not a big "moat" - the difficulty in producing a better version of Reddit would almost certainly be in the softer side of things.
Although Reddit's modern interface is really bad. Like, really bad. And I am not one of those people who hates new stuff for being new or thinks SPAs are the devil or whatever. The performance is so bad it legitimately feels like something a coding bootcamp graduate cobbled together as a capstone project than something built by a team of skilled professional developers.
From things not loading. Like you bring up a post and the comments don't load. To the horrendous "video player". It's a complete fucking mess. So while I would say in a macro sense, there isn't a "moat" around the functionality they've done such a poor job that a well built front-end would go a long way.
But yeah, it would be a waste of time to actually try to use their backend code that has been open sourced, beyond referencing some business logic they added around fuzzing votes etc...
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's something that's not well automated, and thus requires an enormous amount of labor (ie capital)
This is why those who have tried have turned into racist pornography filled shit holes.
Want to start a billion dollar startup? Figure out how to automate this problem.
The problem is the user base. Biggest obstacle for any social media site is attaining critical mass. In order to do that, you need to be an order of magnitude better than your competitors on some metric which makes the users choose your platform over their entrenched one.
The old classic saying is "Anyone that wants to be a politician is not someone you want as a politician"
Well that is true for reddit mods as well, people that like to moderate subreddits are drawn to the action because they like to have power over the others, this is generally not someone you want in charge of anything
No idea if that model would actually work, as the app itself was one of those cool-on-paper-but-not-in-reality P2P types which made everything slow and likely made it rough attracting users.
I would be fine occasionally contributing some moderation to a community I am an active member of. I find I already have to do some of that on my workplace Slack when people get aggressive with the @here tag reaching the entire company when they really want one of 5 people.
Meta-moderating consisted of being shown a single comment and how an unknown moderator scored it. If enough meta-moderators disagreed with how a moderator was scoring, then that moderator would eventually lose all their moderation points.
Those that meta-moderate would slowly gain points they could use to moderate (no one had unlimited moderation points)
Granted, slashdot was different in that it only applied to comments. Post on the front page were done by slashdot employees. Reddit would still need a different level of moderators to remove inappropriate posts all together.
Moderators won't exist without users.
Users won't join a shit filled platform.
The thing you're claiming as the biggest problem is dependent on the thing I'm claiming is the biggest problem.
For me the line is no line... All Speech should be allowed, the problem with moderation is attempting to do it in the first place at the platform level
Give people their own personal controls to see or not see, to block, mute, or otherwise disassociate.
Anything beyond personal tools to control your own overton window will be a problem. Reddit is a prime example of this where by countless issues with power tripping mods who over censor communities exist.
The world would be a kinder place.
Also let me ask, is declaring "The US should have strong border security and limited immigration" being "decent" because I have seen people respond to that exact statement with claims that is hate speech...
What about "There are only 2 genders"
If you want to keep things decent and avoid nastiness, prohibit content that evokes a strong emotional response. This strong emotional response, unfortunately, is what keeps people coming back.
Can't modern AI help with that? I'd guess GPT is pretty good at determining sentiment like racism.
Try it with ChatGpt, ask it determine if a sentence you give it is racist or not.
Of course, AI can't be the only moderator, but it may help to filter out most of the obvious cases.
While some reddit alternatives might qualify as "racist", they've done a very good job at not being "porn filled shit holes", unlike reddit. In fact, most of the porn spam on these websites are images or videos hotlinked from... reddit.
Besides, are porn and racism really the only questionable things in social media? What about extreme violence, videos where real people get shot or blown up? Somehow messed up American society thinks that violence is quite okay thing for people to see, but nudity and porn are not.
My bad, I should have said "reddit is a porn spammer filled shit hole" on top of really being a "porn filled shit hole" /s
The fact that you feign being oblivious to all the CSAM, depraved porn and revenge porn hosted on reddit really doesn't make any difference.
The point is that as a Reddit user, you won't see that content unless you disable your NSFW filter and go searching for it.
Because the platform is moderated.
The point is that people use reddit to hotlink depraved, illegal porn images and videos and spam these media on other forums. That depraved content is not moderated, it should not be possible to hotlink porn material from reddit. The platform is not moderated like you claim, a checkbox in the preferences is not moderation, if evading "moderation" consist simply in hotlinking porn hosted on reddit.
That sounds like your own personal beef, which as we can see from Reddit would not hamper user growth.
No it isn't "tangential", it is what makes reddit a "porn filled shit hole", these are your own words.
> That sounds like your own personal beef, which as we can see from Reddit would not hamper user growth.
Sounds like you have your own personal beef against reddit alternatives when reddit itself is a "porn filled shithole" which you refuse to acknowledge for some reason.
And that is the point where you out yourself as a troll.
* Open source reddit-like clone designed for a single sub.
* Hosting company specialising in hosting this clone for a small fee.
Who is going to pay for all of those?
BlueSky had to be invite only to stop getting too much traffic straight away. 1.5 million joined Mastodon when Twitter got bought. The numbers for a feasible replacement are still skyhigh at the start.
Hell you're assuming that an API even exists for people to build integrations against on day one, rather than the company just providing it's own UIs/APPs and scaling into APIs when it's ready.
BlueSky has millions of users, people still complain that it's basically dead. Even though lots of people are using it. It's just dead compared to Twitter. That makes adoption harder.
According to the link you posted, I think you're talkong about lemmygrad.ml. lemmy.ml is hosted by the original Lemmy developers.
https://dessalines.github.io/essays/dessalines_marxism_study...
Previously on HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36135683
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.
If you're looking for something entirely public like HN here's a thing I built last year https://home.m3o.com. no search though.
Step 1. Create an alternative API for Reddit (I've created an MVP for this here: https://api.reddiw.com)
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)
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.
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.
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.
How is this working, exactly? Are you just caching API responses from the official one?
It seems like they could just build their own BE to work with what they already have.
How are these type of statements not anathema for anyone doing any actual tech work, or any work at all?
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.
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.
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.
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.
The code is at https://github.com/mariusor/go-littr and you can check it out at https://brutalinks.tech
All the features work with front-end JavaScript turned off.
I am currently wrapping up the OAuth 2 server implementation so that we can have third party apps (no API fees!).
After I wrap up some remaining features I am going to move everything to commentcastles.org and forward the old site there.
It's currently text only (emojis allowed).
I do want to build good custom search but haven't really started on that task yet.
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.
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.
Yeah, it's not perfect but it's ours.
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.
NPR did a good peace on it discussing why these platforms are so hard to be replaced, it is a good read/listen [2]
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/
[2] https://www.npr.org/2023/04/12/1168232177/twitter-tik-tok-re...
A similar link aggregator and discussion platform, yes.
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.
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.
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.
rdrama.net watchpeopledie.tv themotte.org ovarit.com
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:
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)
Ruqqus was murdered. They decided that it was better to kill the site rather than tolerate those nasty evil Republicans posting there.
Were there a bunch of stormmers and Reichtards posting there too? Yes, there were. But most of the rest of the site's userbase did their best to drown them out with communication. The site's developers decided that wasn't enough.
Any site that claims to be dedicated to freedom of speech but won't allow their userbase to exercise that freedom of speech is worthless. Ruqqus was worthless.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
What if the CEO, product manager, and other key roles in Redit, Facebook, Twitter, ect, were elected by the users?
What if the there was something like a constitution that dictated that all source code be open source?
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?)
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy
List of instances to join: https://join-lemmy.org/
List of communities ("subreddits"): https://lemmy.one/communities/listing_type/All/page/1 or https://browse.feddit.de/ - this is not an exhaustive list.
Some subreddits have experimented with re-creating over there: https://old.reddit.com/r/PrivacyGuides/comments/13x7oe3/who_...
I love 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.)
Tbh I'd like to see a move back to standalone, independent forums.
Moderation on many sites starts with the question "Is this person conservative" If the answer is yes, literally anything he posts is 'hate speech' and he is banned. Some mods look up the poster's past posts I believe and ban people based on that. There seems to be an effort on Reddit not to ban 'hate speech' but to stomp conservative minded people into the ground.
Have rules, certainly. But who will honestly apply those rules without bias? That is Reddit's problem in many cases. There are lots of good reddits with intelligent discussions going on. Just have to look for them and not post anything, even if it adds to the discussion.
It’s a small community that has been up since 2018. It’s open source as well.
Note: I’m not affiliated just a user of both Reddit and tildes.