JSavageOne

Since we're shilling projects, this is the Notion clone I've been working on: https://mindgarden.app/. It's not ready yet though, hopefully will be in a few weeks.

Would love to see a demo and/or the code if you were open to open-sourcing it! I'm sure there's someone out there who'd be willing to contribute to the styling.

I agree. Originally I'd been planning to have upvotes be redeemable as tokens, but quickly scrapped that idea for the same reason.

I'm thinking now the best way a site like Reddit can satisfy people like me disappointed with the quality is to improve their ML algorithms to better serve content suited to users. I'm not talking about anything revolutionary here, can just do some basic clustering and add an "insightful" option. I'm admittedly not a ML person so not claiming any expertise here. I hope someone more well-versed in that area can create a Reddit clone or Chrome extension or something that has these better more accurate comment sort by algorithms, I'd sign up.

Yea that's why I'm not even mad about it.

I think the route to go if the spam persists would be making it invite-only, and so that uninvited user registrations would have to be manually approved. Wouldn't eliminate the problem, but would potentially dramatically reduce the amount of moderation work vs. making it a free-for-all. Not getting enough usage now to justify it, but just an idea.

I think with the right people, the platform doesn't really matter at all. I mean the best communities now are probably in random Telegram group chats.

The main challenge is attracting a community of the right people in the first place, and that challenge is more marketing than technical. I think maybe the right approach here might just be creating and curating high quality content, then the people come. This is how most communities are built I think (eg. Indie Hackers). I'm admittedly more focused on other projects at the moment that I think have more obvious utility though (working on a self-hosted open source Notion clone at the moment)

This is exactly the type of clueless low substance anti-crypto HN comment I created Zsync to avoid.

> "I don’t want anything to do with cryptocurrency"

That's fine. It's a completely optional feature.

> "Reddit incentivized good comments without ETH"

First of all Reddit comments are garbage. Second, Reddit only allows you to gift another user "Reddit gold" if you really like their comment. Your "gift" to the recipient is just paying Reddit, and the recipient doesn't get any of that money. In Zsync, you can directly tip the user whatever token you want, and no platform or middleman is getting any cut (ie. I make no money here). I guess theoretically this could be accomplished without crypto, but I'm guessing not every user wants to link their bank account with a social media site, nor do I want to deal with that headache of brokering international bank transfers.

I agree on the need to filter out out abuse and spam.

Thanks for your feedback.

I didn't even say "AI" in the post, I said ML. And the ideas I proposed are basic ML 101 stuff. Nothing revolutionary, just basic common sense features that would drastically improve Reddit if implemented. Do you have any objections to the actual ideas proposed, or you just want to ad hominem?

Yea I built this last yea when the term "web3" was still in vogue. I agree that buzzwords tend to be overused and especially "web3", but in any case I'd appreciate if you'd actually address the ideas proposed instead of focusing on the terminology.

What is your specific objection to the cryptocurrency feature of this site? Or are you just dogmatically anti-crypto for emotional reasons? If the latter, well that's exactly what I was criticizing about HN ("it can sometimes randomly be very hostile/toxic to new tech, the most glaring example being crypto.") and so the site is probably not for you anyways. HN is better for anti-crypto.

The ML stuff was just throwing some ideas out there for the future.

Regarding the spam, apologies on that. I posted this before going to sleep, and woke up to see the spam. This is just a side project and I didn't implement any automated spam moderation yet or assign any mods.

I'm def not attached to the name, was just the best I could think of with a domain available. Can brainstorm others / open to ideas. Thanks for the feedback.

I should've clarified that these algorithms would all be completely optional and could be opted out.

Currently Reddit by default sorts comments by "best", which uses whatever methodology they've decided (idk how that works, but clearly it doesn't work well for me). Other options they have include "top", "new" / "old", and "controversial".

I'm simply proposing having "best" be more accurate, and/or adding other options (eg. via clustering) like "insightful" - which is really the only one I care about for this kind of site. Then people who want the most quality, well-researched, thought-provoking comments can find those, while kids who just want memes and puns can find that. Everyone gets what they want and lives happily ever after.

The problem with personalized recommendations on other platforms like Facebook and Youtube are that you can't opt out of or customize them. I agree with you that that's a crap experience as a user.

Why couldn't this be accomplished through tags? For example instead of going to the /r/digitalnomad subreddit, you can view the digital nomad tag (https://zsync.xyz/t/digitalnomad)

I agree that there's still value in private subreddit style communities, but I believe that that could co-exist with tags.

Ultimately it's a tradeoff. Without tagging you have to figure out which subreddits to post in, potentially cross-posting in tons of different subreddits, fragmenting discussion. With tagging you only need to post once, but a single tag feels less like a "community". I guess personally I never really felt any real sense of community from any subreddits (unlike the old phpBB forums), so the sacrifice made sense to me to keep discussion in one place. But this would only work well if the site can actually foster balanced, intelligent discussion and debate across the spectrum (otherwise just becomes the PC hivemind dump that is the mainstream subreddits like /r/politics), which Reddit has proven incapable of over the last decade - ending up fostering extreme communities like /r/TheDonald as a backlash to the PC hivemind + censorship in the rest of the site.

Fair point on the active moderation. I've never moderated a community before so I have no idea how much work goes into it, perhaps I'm drastically underestimating it. For example I posted this before going to sleep and woke up to see that someone had spammed the site with 300+ throwaway posts. Forgot there are people like that.

I agree on the value of subreddits as private communities. I suppose private communities and tagging can still co-exist. Many different ways to design that.

Do you have any examples?

For example during COVID, Reddit was extremely toxic and hostile to any questioning of COVID lockdown policies. You couldn't even talk about travel in travel forums without being shamed as some kind of murderer and downvote censored to oblivion, let alone questioning the justification of lockdowns, border restrictions, and vaccine mandates.

Reddit has had an extreme woke left bias for a long time such as in its main subs like /r/politics. Of course this extremity on one side breeds counter extremes on the other like /r/TheDonald. The hivemind nature of the site ultimately makes everyone more divided and worse off.

I wrote a bit about the toxicity of Reddit here https://jsavage.xyz/2022/03/13/the-downfall-of-reddit-why-re...

That's a good idea. I think upvoting can still work though particularly if the platform can use your upvotes to infer what kind of content you like and give you more of that.

I have not found any serious alternatives. The main problem is the chicken and egg problem where no one cares unless other people are using it. I created my own alternative as a side project (https://zsync.xyz) with some differences (eg. tags instead of subreddits), but there are no users - and why should there be?

I used to use Reddit pretty heavily, but I stopped when I realized outside a few small use cases it wasn't benefitting my life and was mostly a time sink. I find that HN and Twitter is enough for my "social media" needs.

I do hope we see a better alternative to Reddit though, one focused on fostering high quality. Reddit was like that in 2008-9 when I joined, but in just a few years devolved into the meme dumpster and PC hivemind. The Reddit founders and their investors (cough YC *cough) should be embarrassed. It's like raising a child prodigy with the potential to cure cancer only for that kid to grow up into some grifting alcoholic bum who just smokes weed all day and survives off of fake disability benefits.

I totally agree on the general superiority of tags vs. subreddits, and did the same for my Reddit/HN alternative https://zsync.xyz . I can see the case for private communities/forums, but I think tags make more sense for most use cases.

My main complaint with Reddit since the early ~2010s has been the crap post/comment quality. In 2008/9 when I first joined, the comment quality was very high. Then memes, puns, one-liners, and hivemind took over and ruined the site.

An ideal Reddit would be able to show you posts/comments that you're most likely to enjoy, such as via a "sort by" option tailored to you, or other sort by options like an "insightful" that actually works and doesn't just give you low effort one-liners that add nothing to your life.

High quality content in general needs to be better incentivized, and right now it's not. Anyways I have a lot of ideas around that I wrote elsewhere so will refrain from dumping then all here [1]

The challenge with developing a Reddit alternative however unfortunately is not technical, it's overcoming the chicken and egg problem where nobody cares about your site if no one else is on there.

[1] https://jsavage.xyz/2022/03/13/the-downfall-of-reddit-why-re...

I'm surprised this doesn't violate anti-trust laws. Massive behemoths buying competitors to shut them down goes against the spirit of capitalism.

Just some advice if you want more people interested, put some images and/or videos of the gameplay. Clicked around and could not find even a single image of what the game looks like.

To me not being able to be fully remote is a complete non-starter for any job. I've been remote for the last 5 years, no way in hell I'd give up that freedom to be chained to an office again.

Also I'm not interested in wasting my time studying competitive programming questions for those interviews.

But sure if you love grinding Leetcode and don't mind being chained to a desk, I'm sure Google is alright.

> yeah I can tell that remote is far less effective.

Completely disagree, and the countless examples of successful remote teams disprove your claim.

None of these issues couldn't be addressed in remote teams. It's not as if you can just take an office culture, make everyone be remote overnight, and have everything continue to chug along exactly the same as if nothing happened. Remote does require some adaptations. But in my experience, ultimately remote work is a drastic increase of quality of life without any decrease in productivity.

I really hope Google and other remote-hostile companies lose their prestige as some kind of stamp of excellence that's supposed to signal you're some higher caliber engineer. I never applied to work there because of their absurd interview process (along with other FAANGs) which require candidates to spend months on "interview prep" grinding Leetcode questions - a colossal waste of everyone's time. Even during COVID when all companies were remote I didn't apply because most big corporations tend to require employees to be trapped in their country unless you go through the hassle of transferring offices, and I prefer the freedom to live wherever I want.

This banning of remote work is so backwards, and will only contribute to their demise from their former peak. Next thing you know Google will no longer be seen as a "cool" place to work, and face the same fate as many former behemoths like IBM and Yahoo.

At this point I wonder who even desires to work at companies like Google except for entry level hires, prestige whores, and old people with families wanting stability.

This reads like something I could've wrote. Built a bunch of apps, launched none. Always feels like there are more features left to complete, and eventually I get bored and/or jump to some other idea that looks more promising.

I think part of it is also fear of rejection. Easier to tell nobody then to put yourself out there.

And as much as I like to think I don't care about money, I think the reality is that it's hard to keep plugging away on some side project if there's no financial incentive (I speak as someone who's not financially independent, maybe not having to worry about money would change things).

Might as well list my most recent unlaunched side projects

- MindGarden.app (currently sitting at yume.fyi, and I need to redo the landing page). Basically started off as an attempt to make a Notion clone that I plan to open source, where users can publish folders of documents (eg. into a blog). But there's always more work to do (eg. bare minimum would be end-to-end encryption, proper image support, endless list of random bugs / unfinished work, and then there's extra stuff like multiplayer support, desktop app, etc.). Hard to stay motivated to keep at it when I don't see any potential for it to make money since it's basically an inferior Notion.

- zsync.xyz - Reddit / HN where my primary goal is that comment quality be high, and posts can be separated by tags. Put some minor UX modifications to try to incentivize that, and was going to put in some token incentives before the bear market and not finding a good strategy around that that can't just be gamed. But in any case I realized there's a massive chicken and egg problem with this kind of site so got bored and stopped working on it without even posting it anywhere.

- nomadz.app - A crowdsourced map of cafes that are good for working, where people can rate them by wifi speed, power outlets, etc. Didn't post it anywhere because it's kind of crap, and I realized it's probably not worthwhile to continue working on it. I still think something like this could be very valuable (I've been nomadic the last 5 years working out of coffee shops so finding good work cafes is a big deal for me), but of all the possible things I could be working on I can't rank this towards the top.

I'll try to put in the last mile to get mindgarden.app to a launchable state.

Of course now my side project attention is focused on a new app I'm building. I think this new app has more obvious utility, though would be difficult to monetize. But will do my best to actually finish and launch it!

It's just a landing page with a video and an email signup form. No usable product. Is this kind of thing allowed on Show HN threads?

Right, so like I said in my previous comment - you are the equivalent of someone telling Linus Torvalds "Why bother creating another operating system? MS-DOS already exists".

As someone who's used various DAWs extensively, Ableton Live most certainly is not perfect. It has a terrible piano roll (see FL Studio for a good one). Many have felt the same way, but they don't fix it and there's nothing you can do about it because it's closed source.

Of course building a DAW is extremely difficult. Doesn't mean that because a closed source version already exists that it's not an endeavor worth pursuing. I personally would love for there to be a quality open source DAW comparable to the commercial ones (if I were wealthy it'd definitely be something I'd bankroll).

Which is a damn shame because RTS games are my favorite genre, with Age of Empires 2 and Warcraft 3 being my favorite games of all time.

It's really a shame to me that the most popular multiplayer games these days seem to be FPS games, or games where you just control a single character. Don't get me wrong those games can still be fun, but they entail a fraction of the strategy as RTS games.

I hope one day we'll see a resurgence of the RTS genre.

Cool concept but it doesn't seem to be multiplayer? That or the rooms I joined were empty.

Do you have any sources that aren't videos? Curious about this, but don't care enough to sit through 10 minute videos.

In any case I don't see any issues with something being "politically incorrect", unless that's a euphemism for something else.

What a toxic and stupid comment. Hey guys Windows already exists, why build another operating system? /s

You hit the nail on the head here. The whole standup process is extremely degrading. I don't think I'd ever work at another company that does a daily standup, the most I can take is 3x/week - and ideally as short as possible.

> Also, I have a hard time getting objective information about the work culture at startups.

Yes this is a big problem as you have no idea what you're signing up with startups. Maybe the founder expects you to work 12 hours/day and constantly be available, maybe they will fire you a month before your equity vesting, or just randomly fire you one day despite having never given any negative feedback. I've seen all of this at startups, and there is zero accountability. Last time it happened to me I wasn't even offered any severance.

If anyone is considering working for a startup, please do your due diligence. Do not be naive and think that because the founders are very friendly and their startup is backed by YC that they are a good place to work and won't fire you the second they have any doubts about you (personally I'll never work as a full-time employee for a startup going through YC ever again, but that's a story for another day).

Going forward if I'm ever thinking about working for a startup, I will reach out to employees, and ideally ex-employees, to get the inside scoop on what the founders are really like behind the smoke & mirrors.