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Comment by rewmie | Hacker News Reader

> The real secret to Hacker News is the ability to attract a large target audience on an ongoing basis to view and contribute.

This might be a good time to mention voat. It was a better reddit than reddit, it had a superior UX, it performed better as well, but ultimately the community was utter shit.

Social networking services are not a technical challenge.

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I feel like voat is a lesson that something cannot be a success when its main sales pitch is "It's not [other thing A]"

Well, what was at least in my echo chamber considered to be the inofficial sales pitch of Facebook was "It's not MySpace".

Similarly for Reddit: "It's not Digg".

So in my opinion B's sole marketing pitch "It's not [other thing A]" can work if B is considered to be the new cool kid in town.

Reddit was a great community with its own character and norms prior to the great Digg exodus. It mostly managed to hold onto them, at least while it still made some kind of sense to think about reddit as one community vs. 10,000 subreddits.

They each had an AND attached to it that made them better.

Facebook was just like MySpace AND everyone at your university is on it (which then became timeline/news feed, and chat was added, etc.)

Reddit was just like digg (front page of the internet) AND had thousands of niche communities you could connect to

Voat was just like Reddit but had no AND that caused users to stick around. Discord is more of a threat because it is a community hub AND it provides live chat, voice channels, video sharing, etc.

Software clones are easy. Providing that AND is what makes companies stand apart and thrive

I don't think it's a valid take. If the incumbent is doing a shit job and pushing it's entire userbase always, providing the same service without being shit is definitely a good sales pitch.

It definitely didn't perform better. Each page request would do a giant N+1 query for all the comments and it frequently went down due to load.

quantifying technical achievements is a lot easier than qualifying policy changes.

X amount of views, X amount of subs, etc.

Removing problem people.

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