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Ask HN: Anyone Building a Competitor to Reddit?
108 points by data2data on June 7, 2023 | hide | past | favorite | 140 comments
With the recent rumblings over on reddit, I do wonder if reddit will experience its own “Digg moment”.

Is anyone here working on their own reddit-like site?

I feel part of what they are fundamentally missing is decent embedded search functionality as most people are still using google to search and find a relevant discussion of interest e.g “topic x reddit”



My question is why would you want to do that? You're just going to come against the same issues and problems that Reddit has, especially if you want to achieve anything close to Reddit's scale.

You'll need staff, money, legal and tech folks (not cheap). And to get the funds, you'll prob have to make the same decisions about ads and API fees.

You could pull off something smaller, maybe by being distributed or whatnot, but you'll probably never operate at the scale of Reddit. The killer feature of Reddit is that everyone goes to Reddit because Reddit is Reddit.

Maybe my pessimistic brain can't see the opportunity. I'd be happy to be proven wrong.


Reddit used to have pretty low overhead. You couldn't upload/host videos directly on Reddit, you could only share links or create self-posts. They didn't have all these superfluous features that they have now like live chat, push notifications, cryptocurrency wallets, first-party mobile apps, etc. A "classical" version of Reddit would be a fraction of the development and hosting cost compared to modern Reddit, especially if you can continue to keep moderation the responsibility of individual subreddits.


Think this all the way through - why did Reddit do these things? To attract more users and to generate revenue. As the OP said, what are you going to do to solve Reddit's income problem? This isn't a technical issue, the technical piece is straightforward and well-known.

They can't really push for advertising until they eliminate 3rd party API access to the content. That or they have to start charging a usage fee.

Which is interesting. One option they do have is to charge the user for using Reddit via an API, not the apps using the API. If you want to access Reddit via a 3rd party app then you'll have to pay for it - say something on the order of $1.99 per month or $19.99 for the year. I imagine they must have explored that option, so it makes me wonder why they abandoned it.


I’m pretty convinced that given the userbase, there exists a small team of exceptional marketers, engineers, and product designers who could come up with a “classic” reddit which could operate at a profit. A combination of ads, API limiting, and a monthly premium charge for some super turbo user features.

The product itself is _done_. The code has been _written_, one can host their own open source reddit this very moment. Image/video storage has long been a problem for reddit, so perhaps users will have to get used to YouTube and Imgur again.

I think people are making too many excuses for Reddit when they act as if the product itself is unmonetizable. It’s not, they largely just hired too aggressively and made some design decisions which have been broadly poorly received.

They’ve effectively owned the space since 2008. I think in another world with different leadership Reddit could be in a much healthier position than it is right now.


The replacement of external links with inferior in-house versions (the reddit video player is particularly egregious) makes sense if you're trying to maximize profit-per-user.

I think there's an alternate timeline where reddit just kept on being a low profit-per-user site, and didn't do the 'monetization-degradation-decline' cycle we've seen so often with other sites over the years. There's no reason why you have to make all the money at once, especially if it's a tried and true method of trashing your platform, just so whoever absorbs all your fleeing users can repeat your mistakes in a few years time.

Why not just stick with what works?


"Think this all the way through - why did Reddit do these things? To attract more users and to generate revenue."

I'd love to see the numbers of how these features actually amplified the experience. My gut tells me not much at all. Tech companies have huge misses all the time trying to make more money and often at the cost of the long-term success of the product.


They're never satisfied with the status quo, are they? Always have to grow, grow, grow!


This is absolutely possible but your numbers are off by a factor of 10, which means it'll be prohibitively expensive for many folks. I worked in advertising once upon a time; do you know the demographic that advertisers are most interested in reaching? It's not women 35-60. It's not men 18-15. It's not college educated minorities in Alabama. It's not any of these. The folks advertisers are dying to reach -- the reason they spend all that sweet, sweet ad money in the first place is to reach people who have the discretionary income to throw away $5/mo on a free website. People who spend money on the internet -- for a site that is free no less -- are going to be a gold-mine. The average ad revenue per user of this demographic is easily 10x higher than the overall per-user ad revenue site-wide; and if you take away these users advertisers will pull back spending and you'll actually get a bigger loss. You need to charge way more in subscription fees to make up for this ad spend loss.


Because the suits want more money, while we just want a functional reddit alternative. I know this is difficult for you MBA types but not everything exists to maximize profits.


> what are you going to do to solve Reddit's income problem?

Spend way less, in almost every category.

Not every business needs to do a billion dollars, or a billion users, or a billion x.


That version of reddit was created in 2005. The world has changed a lot since, and users are expecting certain features. If you don't have them, you are going to struggle to grow nowadays. For instance, the majority of users are on mobile now, so you need to offer them a proper UX.


Considering how many people use Old.Reddit I doubt that you're right in this case.


I'm a mod at a >100k subscribers subreddit, and old reddit represents 2% of pageviews and 6% of uniques.


It isn't that simple, for example I don't use old.reddit as a URL, but I use RES or another program to force it into the old configuration regardless of the URL.


What source do you have for this metric?


The vast majority of reddit users would pay extra to strip away all of the features and have a barebones 2005 version of reddit.


The vast majority of reddit users have no idea what the 2005 version looked like and have only ever used the mobile app


One big issue with Reddit is that it is mismanaged. With the revenue they are generating ($456 million USD), it should be more than enough to run a site like Reddit.

Over the last few years they've invested heavily in things that are very unrelated to the core features of the site, such as NFTs and other odd things that are barely visible, while firing people (Victoria & the death of r/IAMA, and snackexchange) that brought a lot of traffic to the site.

If a Reddit competitor were to surface that treated the company not as a facebook competitor // unicorn but rather than a company that is willing to reach a certain size and then stay there, none of this would be problems.


But isn't making awful business decisions part of the human condition? They happen so often that I think they're not exceptions but the norm for almost all large companies.

Its almost impossible to name any company that has not created at least a handful of major flops. And there are plenty of companies that continue to bungle and make multi-million dollar mistakes almost constantly.

What boggles my mind is that there are so many companies that continue to thrive while blowing millions of dollars on stupid decisions. Must be the power of having cash-cow products (and maybe some monopolistic traits too).


> One big issue with Reddit is that it is mismanaged. With the revenue they are generating ($456 million USD), it should be more than enough to run a site like Reddit.

So who gets fired? How many people are you willing to make unemployed? What services get removed? What improvements stop? Realistically, the reason they don't make a profit is they're aiming for growth and they're getting the growth.


> So who gets fired?

Everybody involved with the NFTs, with this API decision, with everything about New Reddit, the dumb crypto currencies, do we need to go on? It's a long list.


So basically you're firing everyone? I bet you called Musk stupid for firing so many people at Twitter too.


Firing people who manage the ethics and technical specs of your site is different from shutting down a superfluous NFT division. That is a gold rush for stupid people.


They listed a whole group of people not just the NFT part. And that list was basically everyone.


Everyone involved with awful decisions, yes.


I think the answer in cases like that is there needs to be a public Reddit. We all benefit from it and we all want its operation to not be warped by profit-seeking… so we all should just pitch in a dollar a year (?) of our taxes.


Moderation would become a nightmare since a private business's right to remove certain content wouldn't apply and now what do you do when a mod or /r/buyitforlife takes down a post that doesn't support the type of coffee maker that like, or whatever a shady reddit mod does these days.

I also would rather not post or log into any government run social media, that's seems like a big no from me.

I really don't know what a fix would be but I would be interested to see how a government ran social media would look, even if I wouldn't use it.


"The government should do it" is (almost?) never the answer.

If people are willing to pitch in a buck a year, just charge them for it. Either you can find enough people to support it voluntarily or you can't. If you can, you don't need government, and if you can't, it's not enough of a benefit to force people to pay for it.


So you want a Reddit that gives intelligence agencies and law enforcement full access, is censored by the FCC or some similar three letter agency, and is infested with propaganda and psyops? Where you'll be required to present your real name and ID to have an account and you can be arrested by the mods?

If you want a "free" Reddit look at federated and distributed solutions. But "public" means "controlled by a government." No thank you. I prefer a Reddit where even a sitting President can be banned for breaking the rules.


Reddit makes a lot of decisions that tax-payer funded entity would never be able to do. It’s one of the unfortunate circumstances where publicly owned social aggregator would be severely lacking.

I’m not even talking about Reddit’s one of the most annoying current problems - AI bots disguised as real people. Make it publicly owned, people will have more skin in the game to make it worse. Sorry for the bot rant, but anything other than hyper-local subreddits are completely useless for getting any opinions at this point. The same points repeated every day to advance one or the other point of view, making it a hell hole. I feel bad for people who take in those opinions at face value thinking these are all real people.


You could make the argument that some web sites are part of the "public good" and could get funding from government. Think of NEA grants of PBS/NPR funding (small amount of their budget but not chump-change).

Of course, it would be a pretty hard sell, and how the country would choose which web sites to fund would be a shit-show, but still, its an interesting idea.


> We all benefit from it

The users do. That represents a small fraction of "we".


There are large scale "public" or non-profit web communities like Wikipedia. They come with a different set of challenges around governance.


Maybe the scale is the problem. What if instead you built the infra and then snatched away the users of one of the less popular subreddits, then federated the code? You'd have the same problems as Mastodon and stuff, but that would allow the concept to scale (you just wouldn't become a millionaire). Leave giant subs like /r/funny and /r/pics alone and nibble around the edges?


I have the same thinking you do. I think it's extremely unlikely anyone would invest seriously in a Reddit competitor for one simple reason - Reddit users will try and flee at any attempt to make a profit. The fact everyone knows this means a competitor is unlike and fleeing is unlikely since there would be nowhere to flee to.


>>The killer feature of Reddit is that everyone goes to Reddit because Reddit is Reddit.

The killer feature of Digg is that everyone goes to Digg because Digg is Digg.

FTFY


I’ve been thinking about this a lot.

Every year for the last 12+ years there has been some alternative to Reddit. The code to the old version of Reddit is even open source.

The problem is most solutions want to go back to decentralized, which is problematic. I do think that the technical problem could be solved. Point and click solutions for installing open source software has been around forever (like cPanel and PHPBB) so I’m sure some value added cloud provider could do something similar (I think Digital Ocean already has this with their App Marketplace.)

For one, there’s no check on mods. So if someone spins up a Reddit specifically for [TOPIC] they’re the God of that server basically. Like old school IRC.

Second, there’s no built in user base. Third, any app would be subject to inconsistently applied restrictions on things like porn that Reddit gets a pass on because of its size.

I think a compelling alternative to Reddit would be a non venture capital backed company that is small headcount wise (think 50 people) and very straightforward about how it earns a profit, is sustainable, and focused on direct pay. No blockchain, no fediverse, etc…

That means no worrying about advertisers (or headcount associated with wooing them, managing them, etc…), creating a “subreddit” would cost a flat monthly fee and then being a user of the site might also incur a fee. Like $2 a month.

It’d preserve what I feel is the real value of Reddit which is smaller communities. And I would be willing to pay $2 a month knowing it’s helping sustain a platform I get value from.


> The code to the old version of Reddit is even open source.

I actually took an hour to look through the old reddit source code to see what it would take to spin up an alternative and add features quickly.

From what I can tell, Reddit open source code is very tightly bound into Pylons and Cassandra (and Python 2.7), so if you don't like those choices... too bad. It relies on global in-process locking of data store transactions. There are no allowances to separate queries/reads from commands/writes, or specify which models reside in which data store. No good way to make DTOs for lower network overhead. The whole thing is also an untyped mass of code (due to it being Python 2.7), so making any modification requires reading and mentally executing anything you're modifying.

Granted, to start out, all of this is fine. But feels like it will fall over as soon as it gets big.

It would be a large undertaking to even get the old Reddit source to a state where a dev could get up to speed and make changes without a month of study. I'm not saying it's not worth it, but I suspect that's the reason nobody's ever just forked Reddit and made their own.


>but I suspect that's the reason nobody's ever just forked Reddit and made their own.

People have absolutely made sites that have been described as "Reddit clones" - I never investigated enough to know if they were actually using a fork of the actual codebase.

But yeah, I wasn't suggesting that people use Reddit's source code to build a new Reddit. My point was, the functionality isn't difficult to build and certainly not a big "moat" - the difficulty in producing a better version of Reddit would almost certainly be in the softer side of things.

Although Reddit's modern interface is really bad. Like, really bad. And I am not one of those people who hates new stuff for being new or thinks SPAs are the devil or whatever. The performance is so bad it legitimately feels like something a coding bootcamp graduate cobbled together as a capstone project than something built by a team of skilled professional developers.

From things not loading. Like you bring up a post and the comments don't load. To the horrendous "video player". It's a complete fucking mess. So while I would say in a macro sense, there isn't a "moat" around the functionality they've done such a poor job that a well built front-end would go a long way.

But yeah, it would be a waste of time to actually try to use their backend code that has been open sourced, beyond referencing some business logic they added around fuzzing votes etc...


> I think a compelling alternative to Reddit would be a non venture capital backed company that is small headcount wise (think 50 people) and very straightforward about how it earns a profit, is sustainable, and focused on direct pay. No blockchain, no fediverse, etc…

> That means no worrying about advertisers (or headcount associated with wooing them, managing them, etc…), creating a “subreddit” would cost a flat monthly fee and then being a user of the site might also incur a fee. Like $2 a month.

With a business model like .e.g King Arthur flour where the employees own the business.

I would be so down to try to make something like this.


Yes I think a co op model could be good.

I think because we are software engineers, we think some novel technology will fix this issue. But the real problem is that companies take on too much money and are then distorted by it.

There has to be a change in software away from VC funding outside of where it’s actually necessary. You don’t need 30 million dollars to build this idea. You could take out a small business loan instead.

We need to stop thinking of small businesses that create and sell software as “startups” and placing them into a special category in our heads.


Funny you say this, I incorporated a worker co-op to build a reddit-esque platform with democracy and data-driven tools for communities late last year. Our team is pretty inexperienced, but conceptually and organizationally we've got a lot lined up.


Do you have a link to share? Btw I'm surprised you just made a HN account to share that? Seems kind of suspicious but I don't know why.


I think the problem with Reddit, is it doesn't know what it wants to be.

I think for many of us here, we treat it as a forum. We go an find specific subreddits in our interests, and interact with it similar to how we interact with hacker news. Interesting Articles and/or Discussion Questions are posted, and then there is a conversation about it.

But that is not how a lot of people use Reddit. To many people, it is social media, in the same vein as TikTok or Instagram. You just scroll through a bunch of quick photos, videos, or rage inducing headlines. There is no actual forum there. It is quick dopamine hits.

I bet if you asked Reddit who their competition is, they'd say TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, and Facebook (and maybe even Youtube), indicating that they don't think it is their forums that are important, but more so their social media aspect.

So, what is it you want to build? If you just want forums, then I think that is straight forward, and the hacker news crowd would probably be happy with it. But, I don't think that is where most of Reddit audience is anymore, so you aren't building a competitor to Reddit, you are building a competitor to TikTok and Instagram.


So back to BB ?


Overcoming reddit as a startup has a massive obstacle, moderation and removal of unwanted content.

It's something that's not well automated, and thus requires an enormous amount of labor (ie capital)

This is why those who have tried have turned into racist pornography filled shit holes.

Want to start a billion dollar startup? Figure out how to automate this problem.


That’s not even close to being the main problem in launching a Reddit competitor. Reddit moderators are unpaid. Content moderation not being automated is not a problem. People like to do it for free.

The problem is the user base. Biggest obstacle for any social media site is attaining critical mass. In order to do that, you need to be an order of magnitude better than your competitors on some metric which makes the users choose your platform over their entrenched one.


>> Content moderation not being automated is not a problem. People like to do it for free.

The old classic saying is "Anyone that wants to be a politician is not someone you want as a politician"

Well that is true for reddit mods as well, people that like to moderate subreddits are drawn to the action because they like to have power over the others, this is generally not someone you want in charge of anything


There are technical solutions to that problem though. I remember a Reddit replacement from a couple years ago called Aether. It made all moderation public, allowed clients to ignore a certain mod's actions (basically, personally removing them as a mod as far as their view is concerned), and allowed votes of no confidence for mods.

No idea if that model would actually work, as the app itself was one of those cool-on-paper-but-not-in-reality P2P types which made everything slow and likely made it rough attracting users.


I really liked Aether from a design and user interface standpoint, and even accepted it as a valid use of blockchain tech, but it was also the blockchain aspect that hampered it. Took too long to do things, and required a desktop client. Plus, of course, the network effect of no users. I hope those can be (or have been) solved some day.


Perhaps we need a sort of jury duty for content moderation where you are somehow held accountable for your actions and decisions.

I would be fine occasionally contributing some moderation to a community I am an active member of. I find I already have to do some of that on my workplace Slack when people get aggressive with the @here tag reaching the entire company when they really want one of 5 people.


I always thought Slashdot's meta-moderators was an interesting idea. Before you could ever moderate (vote up/down), you first had to get enough points via meta-moderating.

Meta-moderating consisted of being shown a single comment and how an unknown moderator scored it. If enough meta-moderators disagreed with how a moderator was scoring, then that moderator would eventually lose all their moderation points.

Those that meta-moderate would slowly gain points they could use to moderate (no one had unlimited moderation points)

Granted, slashdot was different in that it only applied to comments. Post on the front page were done by slashdot employees. Reddit would still need a different level of moderators to remove inappropriate posts all together.


Moderation is really not the problem if you just remove comments. I’ve thought for a while that crowd sourced link ranking with a good search mechanism would be more useful than google. For tech related topics I often find HN search to be more useful than google.


>Reddit moderators are unpaid.

Moderators won't exist without users.

Users won't join a shit filled platform.

The thing you're claiming as the biggest problem is dependent on the thing I'm claiming is the biggest problem.


Why not apply some commonsense to onboarding? Accounts on HN start their lives shadowbanned, once you've gained some karma you can downvote comments and some point after that the ability to vouch for dead posts. I don't have any data on to what degree it works, but it would make the lives of those seeking instant "gratification" somewhat harder. Alternatively you could apply rate limits. Maybe new users could create a small number of posts on their first day and it gradually increases over time before the training wheels are kicked off entirely. Obviously neither option eliminates the need for moderators, but in theory you should be able to get by with less of them.


Accounts on HN do not start shadow banned, but it's very easy for established users to flag their posts which hides them from most. I assume the flag threshold goes up over time.


That is not a technological problem, as what is one persons "hate speech" is another persons political speech, and no one can agree on where the line is

For me the line is no line... All Speech should be allowed, the problem with moderation is attempting to do it in the first place at the platform level

Give people their own personal controls to see or not see, to block, mute, or otherwise disassociate.

Anything beyond personal tools to control your own overton window will be a problem. Reddit is a prime example of this where by countless issues with power tripping mods who over censor communities exist.


Probably the line is decency, is what you are saying decent or nasty. Keep it simple, keep the nastiness to yourself (I’m not saying you, I’m saying everyone).

The world would be a kinder place.


Reddit is designed to propagate content to the front page that invokes indecency. Take, for instance, a video of someone jumping turnstiles at a subway station or a homeless person bathing themselves in free hand sanitizer solution. What kind of comments is a video like this going to solicit?

If you want to keep things decent and avoid nastiness, prohibit content that evokes a strong emotional response. This strong emotional response, unfortunately, is what keeps people coming back.


Have you been to reddit? Or other places where political conversations are had?

Also let me ask, is declaring "The US should have strong border security and limited immigration" being "decent" because I have seen people respond to that exact statement with claims that is hate speech...

What about "There are only 2 genders"


It can’t be subjective like that. Nobody will ever agree on the definition or trust whoever is making the judgment call.


'AI' seems to be approaching a point where automated moderation (or at least AI assisted moderation with a human in the loop) is feasible.


> This is why those who have tried have turned into racist pornography filled shit holes.

While some reddit alternatives might qualify as "racist", they've done a very good job at not being "porn filled shit holes", unlike reddit. In fact, most of the porn spam on these websites are images or videos hotlinked from... reddit.


How exactly is Reddit a "porn filled shit hole"? I don't see any porn in the vast majority of subreddits. Nobody forces you to visit the rest, and they are typically even marked adult-only.

Besides, are porn and racism really the only questionable things in social media? What about extreme violence, videos where real people get shot or blown up? Somehow messed up American society thinks that violence is quite okay thing for people to see, but nudity and porn are not.


> How exactly is Reddit a "porn filled shit hole"? I don't see any porn in the vast majority of subreddits. Nobody forces you to visit the rest, and they are typically even marked adult-only.

My bad, I should have said "reddit is a porn spammer filled shit hole" on top of really being a "porn filled shit hole" /s

The fact that you feign being oblivious to all the CSAM, depraved porn and revenge porn hosted on reddit really doesn't make any difference.


The point isn't that that content doesn't exist there.

The point is that as a Reddit user, you won't see that content unless you disable your NSFW filter and go searching for it.

Because the platform is moderated.


> The point is that as a Reddit user, you won't see that content unless you disable your NSFW filter and go searching for it.

The point is that people use reddit to hotlink depraved, illegal porn images and videos and spam these media on other forums. That depraved content is not moderated, it should not be possible to hotlink porn material from reddit. The platform is not moderated like you claim, a checkbox in the preferences is not moderation, if evading "moderation" consist simply in hotlinking porn hosted on reddit.


That's completely tangential to the stated problem though.

That sounds like your own personal beef, which as we can see from Reddit would not hamper user growth.


> That's completely tangential to the stated problem though.

No it isn't "tangential", it is what makes reddit a "porn filled shit hole", these are your own words.

> That sounds like your own personal beef, which as we can see from Reddit would not hamper user growth.

Sounds like you have your own personal beef against reddit alternatives when reddit itself is a "porn filled shithole" which you refuse to acknowledge for some reason.


> feign being oblivious to all the CSAM, depraved porn and revenge porn hosted on reddit

And that is the point where you out yourself as a troll.


I think there is a much bigger problem and capital cost. Servers. 7 billion API requests per month from a third party app that's just one of them. There would be several. Then the much larger traffic from official sources. If you can't afford the servers moderation isn't even worth thinking about.

Who is going to pay for all of those?


No startup goes from zero to 7 billion API requests immediately. That's a problem that can be scaled in to over time.


We're talking about a Reddit replacement. It's realistic to think a half decent one would get a 1 million or so users straight away within weeks. That's 7 billion requests.

BlueSky had to be invite only to stop getting too much traffic straight away. 1.5 million joined Mastodon when Twitter got bought. The numbers for a feasible replacement are still skyhigh at the start.


You're assuming integrations exist on day one.

Hell you're assuming that an API even exists for people to build integrations against on day one, rather than the company just providing it's own UIs/APPs and scaling into APIs when it's ready.


It doesn't matter if it's web requests or API requests. Traffic is still traffic and it still needs to be handled by web servers that cost money. And the idea that a start up can go from 0 to 1 million users in a few weeks without a lot of cash for servers isn't realistic. No real competitor for Reddit would slowly grow, they either take advantage of people being unhappy and do so in a quick manner and have an intital surge or they don't even have a chance.

BlueSky has millions of users, people still complain that it's basically dead. Even though lots of people are using it. It's just dead compared to Twitter. That makes adoption harder.


Splitting might help:

* Open source reddit-like clone designed for a single sub.

* Hosting company specialising in hosting this clone for a small fee.


I'm working on the first. :D


> It's something that's not well automated, and thus requires an enormous amount of labor (ie capital) This is why those who have tried have turned into racist pornography filled shit holes. Want to start a billion dollar startup? Figure out how to automate this problem.

Can't modern AI help with that? I'd guess GPT is pretty good at determining sentiment like racism.

Try it with ChatGpt, ask it determine if a sentence you give it is racist or not.

Of course, AI can't be the only moderator, but it may help to filter out most of the obvious cases.


That's an obscenely expensive solution.


Lemmy is a federated attempt at being a Reddit competitor but I think it has quite a bit of work to do before it’s viable.

https://lemmy.ml/


That is just one instance. I believe the .ML stands for Marxist Leninist if that is the community you want to join. There are many other instances sprouting up, and you can spin up your own pretty easily. Like any fediverse instance, the amount of work to maintain and moderate it is dependent on the number of people on it. https://join-lemmy.org/instances


> I believe the .ML stands for Marxist Leninist

According to the link you posted, I think you're talkong about lemmygrad.ml. lemmy.ml is hosted by the original Lemmy developers.


You are right. .ML is the TLD for the country of Mali which is an interesting choice. I did a trace route on both and found them hosted on different servers. There may be no connection, and I don't think it matters anyways.


The original Lemmy developers are hardline Marxist-Leninists, they make no secret of this.

https://dessalines.github.io/essays/dessalines_marxism_study...


Not a competitor to Reddit but something for smaller private communities. It's called Micro Chat - https://micro.mu

Previously on HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36135683

I think the public community thing is interesting but it's now been done do death and people's solution for smaller subreddits is federation or self hosting which I don't really agree with. I'm leaning towards even smaller "micro" communities that are entirely private. Talk to 20 people you know and get on with. Create separate groups/communities for things you care about. That's it. I don't want to have the discussion in public, I don't want upvoting/downvoting. I don't even want karma.

If you're looking for something entirely public like HN here's a thing I built last year https://home.m3o.com. no search though.


I have come up with a plan that might get a Reddit competitor up and running. I have also started to implement it.

Step 1. Create an alternative API for Reddit (I've created an MVP for this here: https://api.reddiw.com)

Step 2. Set up an alternative front-end for Reddit built on top of the alternative API (my plan is to host it at reddiw.com)

Step 3. Start implementing a custom back-end, with submissions showing up interspersed with existing Reddit content, perhaps on the very same alternative front-end to drive adoption or one on a separate URL.

How will I deal with costs/moderation? Same way as Reddit did at the beginning: text only. With images/videos hosted by imgur etc. and each thread linking directly to a separate host for images/videos.

While I do have step 1 complete and it has got some traction on Reddit I don't think any third-party app has adopted it yet. It would be nice to get that to show the demand is there. Otherwise I might not pursue the next steps.


> Step 1. Create an alternative API for Reddit (I've created an MVP for this here: https://api.reddiw.com)

How is this working, exactly? Are you just caching API responses from the official one?


No, I'm not using the official API at all. I'm scraping + caching.


What are your thoughts on handling the authenticated portions of the API? For example, retrieving the list of subreddits a user is currently subscribed to? Or posting a comment / checking the user's inbox?


My thoughts are: the read-only unathenticated API should cover 80% of the API usage for apps. If there is adoption I will think about the authenticated portions.


This is awesome. How will copyright laws work if you clone UI


Apollo seems like a natural, they already have a bunch of users and a well loved FE and an API spec.

It seems like they could just build their own BE to work with what they already have.


> they could just build their own {X}

How are these type of statements not anathema for anyone doing any actual tech work, or any work at all?


Apollo is not even available on Android


I'd be down to help with a decentralized Reddit with decentralized aggregation.

Each subreddit is hosted by someone. They manage the moderators, the rules, the users. This gets us away from the bottomless pit of moderation. They can write custom plugins to extend their subreddit in interesting ways. The level of effort and resources required to run a subreddit is minimal. This is made much easier to setup via a CLI to deploy to various cloud platforms, hosting providers provided by us. Think ~5 dollars a month in costs.

Decentralized aggregators allow searching these subreddits, aggregating their content to see trending, popular, worthwhile posts for discovery. This is decentralized in theory, but to start out, there's probably a single aggregator. The resources required is high, and curation also involves some human judgement. For example: denylist an entire subreddit, no adult content, etc.. Verifying authenticity of upvotes or whatever the heck is interesting too. This can be a for profit company. Is it going to be worth billions? Probably not, but it can be sustainable and provide a service.

Some affordance in the protocol to allow for users to cross subreddit boundaries so registration isn't required, etc. are all interesting to think about.

I'm sure mastodon, Bluesky, or another protocol has interesting ideas to steal that are applicable to a Reddit like experience vs. a full blown social network.


If you're interested in Go, I develop such a project and the plumbing required for it.

The code is at https://github.com/mariusor/go-littr and you can check it out at https://brutalinks.tech


I am. I've been working on it for 3.5 years. It's open source and it's called Comment Castles [0]. I am currently in the process of changing the name to Comment Castles, the main instance is currently at the old name [1].

All the features work with front-end JavaScript turned off.

I am currently wrapping up the OAuth 2 server implementation so that we can have third party apps (no API fees!).

After I wrap up some remaining features I am going to move everything to commentcastles.org and forward the old site there.

It's currently text only (emojis allowed).

I do want to build good custom search but haven't really started on that task yet.

[0] https://github.com/ferg1e/comment-castles

[1] https://www.peachesnstink.com


skip the search engine for now. offload that to site:domain.com "search" on google. focus on your niche and delegate where you can. if you can't see why I am saying this, then you need somebody to help you prioritize cause search is not it when you can delegate it to google in less than a day.


This looks promising, I hope it gets some traction. Simple design much like HN.


ok... I have to ask about the old name. It really sounds like it should be chock full of NSFW images. Is there some other way to read it?


It was simply a poor name choice by me, didn't realize peaches meant butt (lol). Not to worry though, I will launch the new site/name ASAP.


Posted recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36203610

The p2p backend makes it fairly slow to load, but it's an interesting approach. They seem to have put in a lot of effort to make the UI an almost-clone. Which is sort of interesting since the reddit UI gets a lot of negative feedback. Probably lots anyone could learn from the source code though.


I wish. Reddit jumped the shark years ago but I did look into it at one point. There's a lot of factors you wouldn't anticipate that will trip you up. Not the least of which is quality moderation. Your site will either die under the crush of awful free speech, or live long enough to run out of visitors. It's a tough balance Reddit didn't have to face as harshly in a different time.


The painful lesson here is that nothing with the "you are the product" business model escapes enshittification. So I am not really interested in anything that's not community controlled.

Thankfully I've been making my home over at the Fediverse for the past few months so it's a lot easier to leave now than it would have been a year ago.

Yeah, it's not perfect but it's ours.


I’ve been thinking about doing this myself. I think the problem is the business model. I was thinking of a transparent, share-based and community-owned model had potential.


I wrote a little on the subject of content moderation, or as I think of it as a user... just filtering. How can _I_ take charge of what I see, and how can _I_ deploy tools, features, functionality to improve the signal to noise ratio for my own preference. How can other users with similar tolerance/threshold help me get the most out of social media/forums/etc. It was written after being particularly annoyed with LinkedIn, but it applies to all sorts of user generated content sites. Maybe someone will implement the ideas contained within.

https://blog.eutopian.io/building-a-better-linkedin/


There are many reddit alternatives, there is even a subreddit for that [1] :p

The problem is not the tech, the problem is community, or even better, the network effect. It is the same discussion people were having when twitter musk downfall started.

NPR did a good peace on it discussing why these platforms are so hard to be replaced, it is a good read/listen [2]

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/

[2] https://www.npr.org/2023/04/12/1168232177/twitter-tik-tok-re...


A competitor, no.

A similar link aggregator and discussion platform, yes.

Reddit is far too large for anyone to build a competitor from scratch, nobody (unless they're a major player that doesn't mind sinking exorbitant costs into hosting) will be able to afford hosting discussions for the number of accounts that reddit has. The best we can hope for as users is that various communities from reddit migrate to some of the open-source options that already exist (lemmy seems to get the most mindshare at the moment) but hopefully the one I work on, brutalinks, also.

In my opinion offloading individual communities to their own instance that hosts content for hundreds to (maybe)thousands of users is the way to go for hobbyist level platforms.


It's a lot harder than it sounds. Moderation is hard, and these days I don't think it's free either, unless you have a very, very niche community with people who are passionate. This wasn't a problem back in phpBB days. You could have a forum with 100k users, and 500 people on at any given time, and moderation was extremely easy because people wanted to do it - it made the community better.

Reddit also has many users who are suffering from the familiarity syndrome. They don't care some API price is going up, they just want an endless feed of content and gazillion comments to mindlessly gaze through. This part of Reddit's audience is pretty much impossible to convert.


People who want to browse /r/all can just stay on reddit.


If the comments move somewhere else, they are easy to convert...


You are being awfully generous with implying that Reddit has quality comments.


I was just trying to say that the content generators need to move... And everything else will follow.


The "Marseyverse" exists. It really only has individual subreddit-websites. Each website is a fork of Ruqqus code (which itself was a failed-reddit clone that forked reddit's code) Examples would be

rdrama.net watchpeopledie.tv themotte.org ovarit.com

All full-reddit clones that I know of have failed miserably. And many reddit communities have tried establishing off-sites and failed. The factors for success seem to be:

1. The communities were banned or hampered on reddit 2. The communities have a unique culture 3. Some people in the community take on the responsibility for developing/maintaining the offsite 4. The users of the community donate money to keep everything running (a la SomethingAwful)


>Ruqqus code (which itself was a failed-reddit clone

Ruqqus was murdered. They decided that it was better to kill the site rather than tolerate those nasty evil Republicans posting there.

Were there a bunch of stormmers and Reichtards posting there too? Yes, there were. But most of the rest of the site's userbase did their best to drown them out with communication. The site's developers decided that wasn't enough.

Any site that claims to be dedicated to freedom of speech but won't allow their userbase to exercise that freedom of speech is worthless. Ruqqus was worthless.


I seek for more small communities, similar to niche subreddits. So, I'm building a community software called Booklet: https://www.booklet.community

It's forum software, but with the polish of Notion/Slack. Everything is threaded and real-time. I put a lot of effort into the automated email newsletter - so you can stay up-to-date with what's happening, without ever logging in. It's mostly whitelabeled and supports custom domains.

It's in early testing with some users - ranging from an MBA class to a members community that switched off of google groups. If you're trying it out, email me!


When you look up 'reddit alternatives' you find hackernews often at the top of the list. There are MANY live alternatives.

The "digg moment" won't happen over some pricing of api stuff. It's not a serious problem which doesnt come even close to Yishan Wong or Ellen Pao levels of censorship. Reddit should by all metrics have had a digg moment after both of those people.

If you do go back in time before Musk bought twitter. Yishan had made some very odd unsubstantiated absolutely absurd comments. After the twitter files we found out the US government was behind this. The US government is keeping Reddit in power and you'll be banned to prevent migration.


Not a competitor; but I was thinking yesterday about what the next big thing in forums like Reddit needs to be: Non-profit Democracies.

The big problem with social networks today is that there is little recourse when the parties that are in charge make decisions that aren't in the best interest of the users.

What if the CEO, product manager, and other key roles in Redit, Facebook, Twitter, ect, were elected by the users?

What if the there was something like a constitution that dictated that all source code be open source?

What if funding was mostly donation-based, like how people support their church or similar civic organizations? (For example, in order to vote you need to pay $15 / year?)


I can see that you're getting downvoted but your suggestions are very reasonable indeed.


Maybe mastodoon type system would suit a Reddit competitor


That's Lemmy:

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy

List of instances to join: https://join-lemmy.org/

List of communities ("subreddits"): https://lemmy.one/communities/listing_type/All/page/1 or https://browse.feddit.de/ - this is not an exhaustive list.

Some subreddits have experimented with re-creating over there: https://old.reddit.com/r/PrivacyGuides/comments/13x7oe3/who_...


In addition theres also lotide

https://sr.ht/~vpzom/lotide/


We're building a Google searchable communities at Linen.dev (An alternative to Slack/Discord). We're going to support forum views soon :)


I would happily build the discord equivalent of reddit, no general space just requested access spaces. The problem with reddit from a mod perspective is that it is inversely open, anyone can see it, but very few opinions are allowed on most subreddits. I'd rather the inverse as it allows for more range of opinion and less "omg why do i have to see X when i open my laptop".


I hope so.

I love the variety of content on Reddit. But many of the subreddits are so toxic and fully of cry-bullies that it's nearly intolerable. I can't wait for the next generation of Reddit to come along, one that will welcome more participation from civil-minded people. (Kudos to Hacker News for somehow achieving that, btw.)


People are too busy building a Facebook competitor


https://freedit.eu/

https://github.com/freedit-org/freedit


I have ran large community type projects. My learnings: the community always revolts. They want less ads, they want more moderation for free but of course, less over-site.


It's not the technical details that are a problem in replacing reddit.

Tbh I'd like to see a move back to standalone, independent forums.


If there are any others here who want to start a consortium to act on this and fix what Reddit broke, please count me in.


Communities.win exists, but they allow free speech that would get people instantly banned from HN.


The racism is horrendous


Everything is racist in today's world. You cannot hold a decent discussion of anything even remotely dealing with race. I have been kicked off 8 different subs for 'hate speech'.

Moderation on many sites starts with the question "Is this person conservative" If the answer is yes, literally anything he posts is 'hate speech' and he is banned. Some mods look up the poster's past posts I believe and ban people based on that. There seems to be an effort on Reddit not to ban 'hate speech' but to stomp conservative minded people into the ground.

Have rules, certainly. But who will honestly apply those rules without bias? That is Reddit's problem in many cases. There are lots of good reddits with intelligent discussions going on. Just have to look for them and not post anything, even if it adds to the discussion.


https://stacker.news


Also I wouldn’t be surprised investors are currently talking to Apollo about just this


I'd be surprised. Making (a few billion) API calls to someone else's database is much different than hosting and storing all that info (not to mention managing all the mods etc).


Good point


https://tildes.net/

It’s a small community that has been up since 2018. It’s open source as well.

Note: I’m not affiliated just a user of both Reddit and tildes.


Do you still have invites? (:


Reddit's proved time and again that any "bad" changes are eventually accepted.




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