Comment by wcchandler | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wcchandler | Hacker News Reader

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Reddit doesn't provide value to me anymore. I've been toying around with the idea of building out what I once used Reddit for - news from the Internet. Obviously, it's about 20 years post Reddit's inception, so I've been brainstorming how that would look today. I know I want a skimfeed-like "clean" site with OpenGraph support, but what else? Do we even need comments anymore? I'm half tempted to feed articles into AI, and get them to generate a few dozen comments. Then let users upvote those comments accordingly. Nobody can generate their own comments. Could that approach be fine tuned to a useful site? Or would it turn into a bigger echo chamber with everyone being racist? [1][2]

1 - https://www.cbsnews.com/news/microsoft-shuts-down-ai-chatbot...

2 - https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/advanced-ai-chatbots-...

> Do we even need comments anymore?

Since the very beginning, the only thing of value on reddit was the comments. If you do away with comments, then you will only ever see content from people who can be bothered to learn how to use Wordpress or whatever and post it to a blog. For those starting out, that sounds screaming into the void, so they never start. Commenting is a much more casual and approachable way to provide specialized, detailed content to those who are already proven interested, and you're virtually guaranteed that at least one person out there will give you the attention your effort earned.

Any social media that doesn't allow this is either dead on arrival, or popularity is heavily manipulated by some industry heavyweight who can make it popular despite its uselessness.

don't we have Reddit's source? Why doesn't someone just clone it?

There have been multiple attempts to clone it, but the communities there almost always end up toxic or filled with illicit activities.

Some (including me) have shifted to Lemmy, a FOSS Fediverse alternative like Mastodon is to X (Twitter). There are many instances of Lemmy to choose from as home. Mine is lemmy.world. I run a few communities there and we have a chill environment there.

If you miss the old reddit feel, you can emulate it with old.lemmy.world

Some Reddit third-party app devs converted their apps to Lemmy apps after Reddit made those API changes.

There's tildes.net which is run by a former Reddit admin, but it's smaller and invite-only.

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