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Comment by datenwolf | Hacker News Reader

What annoys me the most about Reddit is, that it's essentially just a rehash of Usenet with marginally more moderation features, up/down-voting and custom CSS for each group/subreddit. That's about it. If I were to attempt to implement a Reddit "clone", I'd merely spin up a couple of ISC InterNetNews NNTP servers and slap a web application in front of those.

The only thing that Reddit did – on the interaction level – was replacing the Usenet experience with a visually more appealing and easier to access web frontend. In that regard it's a continuation of Eternal September, with the side effect of draining the user pool from Usenet, leading to the shut down of many Usenet servers world wide because "nobody is using it anymore".

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Every programmer sees message boards and quickly runs down a database schema for users, comments, and upvotes, because they're all trivial and almost identical. The user base that builds up is the value. In the case of Reddit, I don't mean to imply positive value, but that's the value.

The question is how they managed to make such a commodity operation so dang expensive to run.

Endless injection of cash? Sometimes I think that the VC model is wrong, and taking a few pages from bootstrapped start-ups might make lot more sense...

I think VCs and similar sees profit as wasted growth. The product Reddit is selling is a bag holding transfer.

>I'd merely spin up a couple of ISC InterNetNews NNTP servers and slap a web application in front of those.

If this was the only thing differentiating Reddit from anything other text reliant information service, why hasn't anybody come along and disrupted Reddit by doing something similar to this?

Because that's not why people use products. They use them because others use them or the reputation suggests others use them.

You're ignoring the network of users they have, which is absolutely the hardest thing to create for an app like this. Any technically superior clone you build can easily lose to Reddit due to its userbase.

Moderation is the actual feature people want. Usenet has no useful moderation so ended up full of spam

Reddit is fundamentally a link aggregator and there are countless examples of them. 20 years ago (jeez) slashdot was doing the same

In fact, Reddit went mainstream when Digg fumbled their 2.0 launch, and just recently Reddit was in danger of doing the exact same thing with their poorly designed apps and new design.

This IPO valuation is based entirely on the value of the user content that will be sold to AI firms. The product is always the users.

I miss newsgroups. They were good enough. We didn't need to dress them up.

Our incessant chasing of the latest shiny thing, it's all so silly. We keep throwing the baby out with the bathwater in our endless, desperate forward motion.

> If I were to attempt to implement a Reddit "clone"

Go on champ. Show us how it’s done.

> side effect of draining the user pool from Usenet

Two different worlds. This is utter fantasy.

> Go on champ. Show us how it’s done.

The baseline product can and has been cloned by many people. Hacker news is one of those clones. Whipped up with minimal effort in a meme language no one ever used before.

Getting popular is the tricky part.

Please don’t be needlessly snarky

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