Show HN: FlingUp, a Reddit-like platform Ive been building for the last 2 years
flingup.com
flingup.com
Tech stack:
keycloak (auth) dot net core 6 typescript + react react router 6 bulma
I plan to open source both the backend API and the frontend client.
API documentation: https://api.flingup.com/swagger/index.html
A penny for your thoughts? Comments?
Wikipedia is a easy target but it's definitely a mile better than a lot of the trash out there.
There isn't one topic or person that doesn't have a share of dirty laundry and with the media going full clickbait nowadays one can source it well by wp standards.
A serious discussion should judge if the laundry is worthy of inclusion but what you get is power users flexing their muscles. They are judge jury and executioner. Non of the edit guidelines apply but if they did get the slightest consideration, the same faceless usernames have authority over those too!
That you have a nobel prize for the subject doesn't mean you get to make perfectly valid citations without permission.
The really stupid part is that people love to pretend it isn't so in stead of seeing and indeed enjoying the facinating dynamics of human interaction with such huge transparency.
It has all agendas represented for everyone to see!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_11_attacks
and here is what citizen editors wanted to write:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/9/11_conspiracy_theories
And here is the guideline that says you cant do a POV fork:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Content_forking
I have no opinion on the topic.
FWIW, I also don't see any section about whether or not bigfoot karate kicked the towers down either.
At the same time does any other top-10 site have a non-profit motive?
I think scaling donations is difficult. Wikipedia makes hundreds of millions of dollars a year, but its closest competitor, Google, makes hundreds of billions of dollars. But to the average person, a hundred million dollars is a hell lot of money. So people get cynical.
Also it's possible that donation models just don't work well. Dwarf Fortress is one data point. It was decent money at $15k per month, then people dropped 7 million dollars on the Steam release on the first month.
when you open Reddit (or any of its clones) you see a bunch of posts. They may resonate to you, they may not, but you do see them.
Opening your site present me with nothing.
When I commented previously I've got that stupid loading animation, site header, site footer and nothing more.
Which means the front page is served dynamically instead of from the cache and what there is no indication what there would be anything to be loaded (blank space instead).
Considering I received some updoots for the previous comment I presume I wasn't alone with a blank page.
Unfortunately also predicting a number of sites get stood up as competitors and then eventually pendulum back and forth until some sort of network-effect equilibrium emerges but this looks promising.
Not as familiar with dot net core and how it handles traffic scale up / DB reads. I'd gather it works OK for that sort of use?
Works in Firefox though.
TL:DR site is ok, will to win is not there
> You may only submit content to which you are the copyright owner.
Interesting pair of rules!
If I write a technical, non-commercial blog I'm not allowed to promote it, and I won't.
But crappy commercial spammers won't follow the rules and will use sock puppets to promote content anyway. Which means seo spam becomes the most common post.
OnlyFans spammers have completely overrun a lot of the subs on Reddit, and I'm sure they're looking for the next reddit already.
It seems as though users may share links to whatever, but only content which they own. A difficult line to tread.
For the op, I would ask for a little more clarity on the intent.
(N.b. this might cause some issues posting AI-gen content, which is sans copyright by law, at least in the US. Maybe that's the intent?)
I imagine this will be tough to create a community around, without some clarification.
Social bookmarking is something the internet should have as part of it's infrastructure.
Unfortunately the fediverse face-planted in it's time to shine. The infra is the hard part and that all has to be controlled by the same org.
Not only you have conflicting requirements (something to be part of the internet infrastructure while controlled by a single org) your comment gives absolutely zero constructive criticism. What about the fediverse was so bad that warrants anything like "face-planted in it's (sic) time to shine?" How/who/what are you supporting that is trying to get to the goals you listed?
Look how hard Wikipedia has to fight for donations and how much pushback they get over it. Wikipedia is comparatively simple, infrastructure-wise. A nonprofit reddit would need a lot more money I think.
I don’t think so. The whole of stackoverflow is run from a single (though quite powerful) machine. Server/operation costs are cheap, employees are the big cost.
I think a donation-based model could trivially finance the service costs.
No, it's not.
But anyway Stack overflow is only text, it's an irrelevant comparison.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23439437
https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented/blob/m...
I do have to say, I really dislike the card design that seems pretty much ubiquitous at this point. By introducing a border, you need to add a bunch of padding and then margins. Between two titles, you have padding (from the upper card), border, margin, border(lower card), padding. It's so much whitespace!
How do comments work? Can you have infinitely nested comment threads? If so, I'm not sure your API will scale? Do you need to fetch replies for each comment recursively? That'll be a pretty bad experience, since you need to wait for one comment level to load before you can fetch the next one. But maybe I'm misunderstanding the API docs.
Maybe I'm showing my age, but honestly I think UI design for this type of site peaked at a list of blue links 20 years ago. It's actually one of the reasons I liked Reddit (and still love old reddit).
I can never tell if I'm out of touch or if kids these days are wrong.
So let's say you have A (root) -> B -> C -> D
Wouldn't you make one request to fetch A (root comments). Then a second request to fetch B (replies of A), another request to fetch C (replies of B) and then finally another request to fetch D (replies of C)?
And you can't fetch B,C,D in parallel, because you don't know the id's ahead of time to request the child comments.
Just something to think about, obviously doesn't matter until you have deeply nested discussions. But if you look at Reddit (or even HN) that is probably the most common case.
I actually have no idea what the right choice is. I only know how I use these types of sites and I usually go depth first. So I'd start with one thread, read it until I get bored, then continue. Not great for your current architecture, but I could be a weird user.
I had to design comment systems quite a few times, so I'm always curious how other people do it. I don't think there's a perfect solution, always trade offs to be made.
Though most dbs can do efficient recursive queries like this nowadays.
How do I follow a particular community?
Show HN: Non.io, a Reddit-like platform Ive been working on for the last 4 years
Even the apostrophe from "I've" is missing in both. Odd.
reddit is, at it's core, a place where people can host a community discussion board. the front page is just a very shallow window into that. all the reddit-alikes seem focused on reproducing the front page. something like tildes (or non.io at the top of HN right now) looks really cool, but it's just one community. you can filter and categorize all you want, but for any post there's just one discussion for the whole site to share. that's not a reddit replacement, it's a replacement for one subreddit, with some extra filtering tools bolted on.
I'd be curious to see if the "no pornography" rule hinders growth at all. While I don't have actual numbers, I know from personal and second-hand experience that quite a lot of Reddit's (or the internet's in general) traffic is porn-related.
In any case, I hope this platform takes off and succeeds. I think a non-profit alternative to Reddit would be awesome.
Error 1015 You are being rate limited
The owner of this website (realm.flingup.com) has banned you temporarily from accessing this website.
Refreshing took me to an error page, which then tried to send me to:
Thing is, the platform looks like a great start, so I hope this can be fixed quickly!
(I was able to register an account using Chrome)
My only question/quibble is that I'd like to know if there's a setting to make the site full-width. I'm used to old reddit and hackernews being heavily text-focused and I hate seeing my webpages letterboxed into the center 1/3rd of my monitor.
Other than that, I'm a big fan! Hope it takes off. Just made an account and a community!!
Show HN: Non.io, a Reddit-like platform Ive been working on for the last 4 years (https://non.io)
Probably needs a bit more modern UI but it's functional.
Overall it is decent, but there is still plenty of work,
Here are my comments, ignore if you don't agree.
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Content loading: Initial Page
old.reddit.com loads fast all content, without javascript. flingup.com instead is stuck on 5 blue bars bouncing because no actual content is loaded on first page. It is all loaded on some delay for some reason. Here is a thing: render content on backend, and if it is expensive, render it and cache it.
The only good thing is that flingup uses own subdomains, unlike reddit that uses other domains like redditmedia.com / redd.it / reditstatic.com . I hate companies that use alternative TLD because it is hard to discern if domain is real, or used by scammers.
Additionally, only 2 javascripts are needed to load flingup, and they are hosted from realm.flingup ... the other 4 seem to be some form of bloat. Basicaly, there is an iframe that loads something from realm.flingup on port 8443 and this iframe loads two javascripts. If these are so critical, why are they loaded through an iframe? why port 8443? why realm.flingup ? Sigh.
the good part, despite flingup being js based, it supports middle click / control click on links correctly, unlike plenty SPA. But not all items, can't middle click to see user profile, instead user has to normal click, which does some odd useless popup with an actual button to see user profile.
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Content look: information density at 30%
old.reddit.com gives me 29 items I can see concurrently on my screen. Flingup only shows 9.
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Content look: almost no comments loaded (25% of 40)
I will ignore the fact that most items are just links, not discussions. But lets use the top link "migrating from reddit" as example. It has some odd 40 comments, but only like 10 are loaded, because the remaining are hidden behind a series of 'there are 3 replies'.
Contrast this with old.reddit that will load 500 comments, up to ?8? levels deep (I counted up to 8, maybe more?) with a button to 'load more comments' either in a thread, or at bottom.
Paradoxically, my other complaint is no option to collapse uninterested thread, or to link to specific reply (aka permalink)
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Content: tooltips missing
I dislike the '2 days ago' as it doesn't say when. old.reddit provides actual time of a comment / post when user hovers over '2 days ago'. Flingup doesn't.
ps: fling sounds like a dating app.
Cheers
Good first impression.
I did! Looks slick. I hope you’re ready for the moderation gauntlet.
Sigh...