Hacker News Reader

Comment by isaacremuant | Hacker News Reader

There's no content on the site. Seems like premature advertisement.

Back in the day before Reddit, Facebook, Twitter and Social Networks, there were groups that specialized in being "forum launch crews" that would help seed forums with a group of early, genuine users and posts, based on topics and categories to match the overall theme of the forum.

The last time I helped launch a forum, this was migrating a group mailing list to vBulletin. With some research, I did locate this Reddit post with some tips. [0]

Since this is 2023, One could also use ChatGPT Plus (GPT-4) [1] to generate the content, or the GPT-4 API if available.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/modguide/comments/e7ircv/how_to_see...

[1] https://chat.openai.com/?model=gpt-4-browsing

How exactly do you expect the content to reach the site before the users do?

I know this is a rhetorical question but with a compatible backend like this, could an app like Apollo pay the API fees to Reddit for historical posts, seeding content for the platform, and write subsequent posts to this new alternative database? That way you avoid the cold start problem, and the API fees to Reddit should fade over time as the content becomes stale -- the posts can even be sunsetted once native content is enough to sustain a network. Would that violate any terms?

I absolutely love your idea but I can't imagine Reddit would contribute to their own demise.

Granted, a lot of the decisions they're making over there lately would indicate otherwise, so maybe they'll love the idea.

Side note, anyone finding good alternatives? Obviously I love this forum as it does feel more like Old Reddit. But it's scratching a different itch for me. I've been experimenting with the Fediverse and it feels like it's one great app away from taking off. I'm very interested to see this Wikipedia-adjacent project that is supposed to come out and be the new Reddit.

tildes.net? I have a couple of invites. Though it's not quite reddit, nor aiming to become reddit. I like the stated philosophy and the discussion quality.

https://docs.tildes.net/philosophy

Could you possibly send me an invite? If not, no worries!

I like the philosophy as well, and I miss the high(er) quality discussions reddit used to have. I have liked H News for a while but there are some itches it doesn't scratch which Reddit used to.

Sure! You don't have any contact info in your profile, however, so I have no way to currently message you.

I have a hard time imagining that not violating TOS.

The creators should seed the site with content. This is what Reddit and many other social platforms like Tinder did.

Because you get some users on more organic ways than just posting in HN and expecting people to jump in and fill your product with value when there's none for themselves.

HN is a one/few shot opportunity and you better make a good impression.

HN is for hackers to see an idea and perhaps get inspired to build off it in some way. People use it for finalized product announcements but that's not the core.

Reddit founders used fake accounts to fake activity at the start.

You should see if anyone has written any articles about network effects.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com