8 ms·
Ask HN: Alternatives to Reddit?
Reddit is pushing the new redesign which seems half-baked attempt at competing with facebook.
What sites/forums can be considered as alternative to reddit or its parts?
- startupflix 9y ago* Voat.co * Quora.com * Slashdot.org
- arbitrage 9y agoSlashdot and voat are full of the beardiest necks on the Internet. Quora is also showing signs of hardening of the arteries in its old age ... not really fun places to go to if you're not fully indoctrinated in the groupthink.
- SmellyGeekBoy 9y agoI used to be a big fan of Quora but there seems to be a lot of spam and deliberately provocative "political statements designed as questions" on there these days. If it hasn't jumped the shark already it's certainly going through the motions.
- 52-6F-62 9y agoI still am a big fan of Quora. There are a lot of great engineering and maths question/answer threads I enjoy reading on there when they show up in my inbox. But you're absolutely right that more and more I'm receiving notifications of questions like "What do Liberals do for fun?" "Why do Liberals hate Donald Trump so much?" etc, etc etc. Obvious trolling to spark anger, snark, or vitriolic response. It's toxic, and a damned shame.
- ratsmack 9y ago"Slashdot and voat..." Slashdot yes, but I would have to disagree on Voat being an old-timer hive.
- catach 9y agoYou can have young neckbeards.
- Psilidae 9y agoEvery week I still get a Quora Digest email, and every week, if I glance at it, I find myself asking "seriously, are these really the best there is?" I'm sure they're algorithmically picked, but it seems to be heavily polluted with things phrased as questions that are really just rants/complaints, political provocatism, naivete, bragging and showing off privilege (interestingly, frequently tied with seemingly being very naive); the ones that depress me the most are questions being asked by people who clearly must have been incredibly sheltered and repressed. For some of those, I am glad there's a place like Quora for people to actually get those questions answered, but Quora itself doesn't seem to be great at highlighting interesting questions.
- ashleyn 9y agoUnfortunately, Voat suffers from a problem that all "free speech" platforms do: the extreme, obnoxious behaviour of mainly national socialists and paedophiles drive out all normal, tactful users...leaving only very fringe and distasteful users. It's practically unusable because of its hands-off moderation.
- ender89 9y agoScrew this [insert decision of reddit admins], I'm going to Voat! The only problem with voat is it's probably the Mos Eisley of the internet now, since every time reddit kicks out the racists or the fascists or the bullies they all say they're going to voat.
- synthecho 9y agoI suggest Voat.
- steaknsteak 9y agoThe request was for a reddit alternative, not an alt-right reddit
- randomerr 9y agoOther then here, Voat is the best overall. Their source is on GITHub if you want to roll your own. https://github.com/voat/voat https://github.com/voat/voat If you want to do your own Reddit here are some clones, largely PHP based: https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/77bhdx/phpbased_selfhosted_reddit_clone/ https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/77bhdx/phpbased...
- StavrosK 9y agoIsn't Voat infested with the_donald refugees?
- catach 9y agoEnough to say that if someone's looking for a reddit replacement because they don't want racism, voat is not the answer.
- krapp 9y agoThere is probably a niche for which a stripped down HN-like forum with moderation but for general discussion might be moderately successful.. moreso if it provides a robust API that allows for third party clients. Maybe self-hosted forums will make a comeback.
- catach 9y agoI don't think self-hosted forums ever left, really. But it's like IRC versus modern messaging apps; there's been a huge amount of inflation in terms of what user base "success" is supposed to look like.
- FLUX-YOU 9y agovoat is also where all /r/fatpeoplehate posts went when reddit banned it
- steaknsteak 9y ago
- dvh 9y agonp.reddit.com
- catach 9y agolobste.rs is more of a HN replacement, but there you go.
- FrozenVoid 9y agoVery nice to see it getting popular since i've last seen it. Seems even more on-topic tech discussion than HN.
- kfrzcode 9y agoLove lobste.rs! Their April fools gag was to reskin the whole site as a PhpBB board circa 2004...
- viraptor 9y agoYou can always use a third party app. That works around any website redesigns.
- FrozenVoid 9y agoI actually read reddit with custom CSS filters and filtering userscripts(which redesign (obviously) broke), i don't want a mobile app expirience.
- catach 9y agoI expect that we'll soon see a handful of browser extensions that try to fix the redesign.
- xabi 9y agohttps://old.reddit.com https://old.reddit.com
- catach 9y agoIt seems highly unlikely that that will be supported for very long past the final launch of the new design.
- schnevets 9y agoI don't know - the "reddit disguised as work" site http://codereddit.com/ http://codereddit.com/ and the Android app Reddit is Fun have been running off the API for nearly a decade.
- exelius 9y agoHow long do you think the API will continue to exist? All of Reddit’s recent moves have shown me they finally realized that much of the DNA of the site (no account verification required, “questionable” speech being semi-tolerated, a dense UX that’s hard to cram ads into, portability, etc.) are what’s preventing them from monetizing. And they’re trying to monetize. This is exactly the transformation Twitter went through. They changed the UX to make it more advertiser friendly, and when people started using alternate clients to get around it, they cut off the API. Frankly I think the community will hate it but because it’s really hard to move millions of individual communities, Reddit likely won’t lose too many users.
- catach 9y ago> a dense UX that’s hard to cram ads into Not that it affects your overall point, but it's worth noting both that the new design has a rather nice 'compact' view, and that their new ad placement method (right in the post stream) could have been done with the old design.
- kalcode 9y ago>no account verification required I keep hearing this but I made an account recently with no email verification. Recently as in one week ago. I put in a no email address actually. YOu can go sign up right now, leave the email field empty and hit next, you can do the whole sign-up process without an email.
- bpicolo 9y agoUse a reddit mobile app / site alternative which serves your use case better? The official site/app is far from the only option.
- narag 9y agoYour option... I wouldn't call it alternative to be fair :) is against the expected feelings in this comments section. But it's very reasonable. People that visits subreddits can discuss what to do, either stay with the help of some tool or move to greener pastures.
- dageshi 9y agoAnyone interested in alcohol/tobacco is going here https://speak-easy.club/ https://speak-easy.club/
- sebtoast 9y agoHere's my list of alternatives https://hubski.com/ https://hubski.com/ https://lobste.rs/ https://lobste.rs/ https://snapzu.com https://snapzu.com https://soylentnews.org/ https://soylentnews.org/ and Voat, Slashdot.
- catach 9y agoHubski! I knew there was one I was forgetting. Also, thanks for the Snapzu and Soylent mentions, those are new to me.
- y0ghur7_xxx 9y agousenet
- wellboy 9y agoSteemit, upvote via tokens and make money by getting upvotes. Already alexa rank 1000
- loceng 9y agoIs Steemit using an incentivized blockchain structure (like the "cryptocurrencies" Bitcoin, Ethereum's Ether et al; Pyramid-Ponzi scheme), where the value/cost to purchase their tokens increases with demand or based on a price someone sets? If it's running on incentivized crypto-asset structure then I personally feel unless you're wanting to take advantage of uneducated/unaware population, whereby as the value/price of the crypto-assets go up then society's wealth is unreasonable/unnecessarily reallocated weighted towards the earliest adopters, then I personally won't be using such services. I started to read their whitepaper and it looks like they're attempting to create a "stable coin", however those inherently seem to have similar problematic issues.
- kenbolton 9y agoRoll your own: https://github.com/stephenmcd/drum https://github.com/stephenmcd/drum
- tjwds 9y agoThere isn't one that's going to do everything that reddit does, honestly. You might want to consider breaking down everything you were getting out of reddit that you aren't anymore and pursuing ways to find those things again. I recently realized that I was spending way too much time on Reddit, so I started only briefly scrolling through Reddit once per day without reading comments, and relying more on HN, twitter, and a few blogs for news. To feed that itch to belong to a community, I started commenting on HN more, and continue to go on JQBX and belong to a few slack channels.
- wooshy 9y agoJust use 4chan
- swirepe 9y agoUse it through the Clover app for a much better time. https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.floens.chan/ https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.floens.chan/
- indiachan 9y agoOr use https://indiachan.com/ https://indiachan.com/ An indian chan inspired by 4chan.
- indiachanuser 9y agoWe apologize for our weirdo admin. We have no idea how he got out again
- bitexploder 9y agoReddit scrubs the identity out of many communities/topics. I have found much deeper and meaningful discussion on focused forums. For almost any topic with any significant interest there is a non Reddit forum or community that is deeper and more customized. Not always, but usually. Just support those communities and forums. Example, mtgsalvation is by far better to visit for meaningful MTG deck building and discussion. Subaru forums are another great example. There are plenty of established communities out there.
- jug5 9y agoThat has always been the case, Reddit is just the mainstream dilution of any real community.
- fao_ 9y agoVouching for this comment, because while it doesn't explicitly add anything anyone else hasn't said, there doesn't seem to me to be a reason to have it shadowbanned -- it's not a bad comment, just a commonly remarked one. For the record, you've been marked as shadowbanned for the last 7 months.
- FrozenVoid 9y agoOne of reddit's strengths is that you could build a community within reddit, reusing existing resources and users. Its like an incubator for user-created forums. Compared to building and managing a forum, reddit provides much easier ways to create a community.
- taylorexpander 9y agoThis part is what I don’t like. I _dont_ want my social identities linked together. Maybe I’m the odd one, but I’m constantly making new reddit accounts. I always just generate a random username and a random password, that I don’t store because I just don’t care or want to. I have different logins for all my devices because I don’t want people associating my reddit account with my personal blog and so on.
- 9y ago
- kfrzcode 9y agoYou could always spend your time on StackExchange!
- AnnoyingSwede 9y agoBeing Swedish, i love Flashback.org - Ir's the best since unsliced bread you can slice yourself.
- tootie 9y agoUse https://i.reddit.com https://i.reddit.com. It's basically the craiglist view of reddit built for mobile. Super fast and no fluff.
- mandelbulb 9y agoRedditors asked the admins to confirm they won't remove the old style plenty of times, and there is enough evidence the message came through--here's one [1]. You can uncheck the style in settings or switch between https://old.reddit.com https://old.reddit.com and https://new.reddit.com https://new.reddit.com for temporary testing. The settings also allow you to view the profiles in legacy mode separately. For the tor browser the i. design ( same as https://www.reddit.com/.compact https://www.reddit.com/.compact ) is the best, though, in particular since it's better not to resize the window. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/7ul5k9/hey_were_here_to_talk_about_that_desktop_redesign/dtl4nkq/?context=10 https://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/7ul5k9/hey_were_here_...
- pandasun 9y agoMade a quick url rewrite userscript: https://pastebin.com/A55FBKug https://pastebin.com/A55FBKug
- tootie 9y agoI still have to visit the www site sometimes because the compact one is missing a few features (like delete). They haven't done any maintenance on it for years.
- itakedrugs 9y agoMy favorite is https://ns.reddit.com https://ns.reddit.com ... and I use the Redirector Firefox addon to redirect all reddit links to this domain ... but of course that probably won't work for much longer
- 0x445442 9y agoThank you for the link. I can read Reddit on my phone again.
- cies 9y agohttps://raddle.me https://raddle.me mostly lefties I guess https://steemit.com https://steemit.com ties into a crypto currency, you can get paid for content there
- nikopopol 9y agoYou know there is a compact view similar to old design right ?
- ghthor 9y agohttps://steemit.com/trending/ https://steemit.com/trending/ Where you should be able to turn your good karma back into something you can use to buy food.
- FrozenVoid 9y agoHow its not filled with paid ads? The platform seems interesting technically, but what prevents them from being swamped with promoted content/ads/blatant spam?
- urtrs 9y agoThere is also a subreddit dedicated to alternatives https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives
- 5_minutes 9y agoOh,right yes ofcourse there's a subreddit for that...
- threepipeproblm 9y agoThis one https://steemit.com/ https://steemit.com/ is interesting... would be more interesting if the percentage of non-cryptocurrency-related articles were higher.
- anthony_romeo 9y agoSince there's a lot of talk about rss feeds on hn nowadays, you can also subscribe to any individual subreddit by adding "/.rss" to the end of the url (e.g. "reddit.com/r/subreddit/.rss"). I've been weaning myself off reddit, but there are some subreddits that I still want to follow, and rss is a fine compromise.
- p4post 9y agoChat-blogging platform P4 in Markdown, yeah! https://onp4.com/@p4-team/about-us-72r45 https://onp4.com/@p4-team/about-us-72r45
- stephen82 9y agoWhat about https://raddle.me/ https://raddle.me/ ?
- repler 9y agoCtrl-F "digg", no results. LOL. rip
- 27182818284 9y agoI get more value out of the modern Digg than I do the modern Reddit. If someone reading this hasn't been to Digg in years, it isn't in the up-down-vote format but rather a few curated articles and funny clips as the day goes on. It is different enough from modern Reddit that I wouldn't call them competitors anymore.
- dznodes 9y agofark.com
- johnsnowtho 9y agoI made a reddit alternative that focused on removing the power from moderators. It never really took off, although I do keep it up at this point. https://linkgum.com https://linkgum.com
- CM30 9y agoThere's actually a whole subreddit (somewhat ironically) dedicated specifically to Reddit alternatives: https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/ https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/ That may have a few to check out. However, I still agree that forums tend to have better communities than subreddits over all, and the specialised ones really outperform the ones on said services. If your interests aren't purely in a general/top level subject (like music/TV/games/sports as a whole), you'll probably find better discussions on specialised sites. I've also noticed a fair communities using chat esque services like Discord now, and those seem to be a lot more active than subreddits are. And well, if you're after tech stuff... you're already posting on the best Reddit alternative for that field.
- Harkins 9y agoYou can use the https://Lobste.rs https://Lobste.rs codebase from https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters . Before I became the sysop of Lobsters I used it to start https://barnacl.es https://barnacl.es and the GitHub wiki has few more sister sites. Drop by #lobsters on Freenode if you need help getting it running.
- snikeris 9y agoyours.org
- trip9 9y agoIt has quite a reputation from back in the day, but I find Something Awful to have a very high level of dialogue, probably because you have to pay a small fee for membership, and they aren't afraid to probate/ban people.
- imsofuture 9y agoYep, SA obviously has a brand of humor, but the discourse on a huge variety of things is absolutely top-notch. Active moderation keeps the riff-raff out.
- Psilidae 9y agoSA is still my go-to when I'm looking for some random stranger's advice on a topic. Bonus points because I think humor is a good thing to have included in any subject, including serious discussions.
- FrozenVoid 9y agoPaid forums are niche area, it will not be a reddit alternative: the "filter" you describe is not geared towards maximum quality, but to enrich the owners of the site. They have financial incentive to ban at the slightest provocation, restricting everything to safe and predictable "high-level dialogue" that can't challenge the status quo. Reddit thrives on multiple levels of "dialogue" segregated into their own communities. Its pro-growth vs SA pro-elitist stance. Thats why SA will never be a reddit alternative.
- pmoriarty 9y agoUsenet. It's a shame it's been mostly abandoned. In so many ways it was reddit long before reddit even existed, and was superior to it in so many ways.
- dmix 9y agoIsn't that mostly a result of UI/UX problems? IRC has fostered a good community of tooling. But the content side of Usenet seems to have been completely ignored, outside of file sharing.
- jonhendry18 9y agoSpam killed it, I think.
- pmoriarty 9y agoWhat UI/UX problems does Usenet have? My impression was that Usenet was abandoned mostly because it had a ton of spam, and at the time there was no good solution to that. These days, spam is not nearly as much of a problem, so the only obstacles to its adoption of it are most users' ignorance of it, their psychological dependence on their web browsers as their primary online communicaton tool, and most importantly the network effects of reddit and other web forums being much more popular.
- pasabagi 9y agoIt's also really hard to get into. If you just download a news reader, read the manual, and go onto a random forum, you'll find a lot of weird early-2000's spam, and maybe some (crazy) discussion, and it's really hard to find active communities. People who live there don't have these problems because they have big kill lists, know which groups are interesting, and only download new stuff, which is pretty spam-free.
- trollied 9y agoYeah, it's mostly used for piracy now. It's a shame. alt.wesley.crusher.die.die.die will never be forgotten.
- ProAm 9y agoIts weird but Ive gone back to Digg. Really interesting articles without the twitter-like commenting. Ive gone full circle it seems.
- linsomniac 9y agoI mentioned Digg to a friend of mine the other day and he said "Oh, is that still a thing?" I didn't realize that it was a thing to put Digg down. It and HN are the two sites I go to in the morning to pick up news. HN I also go to in the afternoon. Digg works really well for keeping me up to date on newsy things.
- Huhty 9y agoMy team and I run Snapzu (http://www.snapzu.com http://www.snapzu.com), a which we started several years ago. First off, the main reason there's no de facto "Reddit alternative" (Like Reddit was to Digg) is because it's nearly impossible to grow a community based around thousands of topics from scratch. It's a massive "chicken or egg" dilemma where you need a steady flow of users (1000's per day or more) to provide the necessary community "value" to other users. And even then, the users are scattered all over the place with all kinds of different interests, making it hard to keep them around and coming back for more. I've kept an eye out on all the competition that has come and gone (hundreds of them at this point), and most of them don't make it even one year before throwing in the towel. Building a link-sharing/discussion platform is one thing (anyone can do it), but populating it with active people is a whole other beast and probably 100x harder, requiring routinely time consuming tasks such as blogging, promoting the blogging, and trying anything and everything to get the word out. This is where most people fail, and the saying "build it and they will come" is utter BS. It also doesn't help that Reddit has copied (probably unintentionally) many of the things we added over the years to try and differentiate from them. We had their new "cross-posting" feature many years ago, but ours is named "mirroring" where you can add an existing post into other tribes (our version of sub-reddits). We also had the ability to add "related links" for years now, and I've noticed they added that feature to their "mega-thread" topics, and I'm sure they will make it a site wide feature soon enough. Reddit gets millions of daily visitors from SEO alone, and all of that SEO is dependent on their user-generated content. For MANY search terms, you can find a Reddit link on the first page of the Google results. At this point we've had to pivot (focusing on bloggers/creators and their audiences) because we understand that we can't directly compete with them.
- skrause 9y agoAt least pretty much everything that requires an invitation by another user is doomed to fail.
- vegn 9y agoI've been lurking and reading here for many years and have finally found the place to jump in. I want to submit https://postwith.me https://postwith.me for consideration. Our Twitter profile (@postwithme) describes it as: "Building a better social community through civility, data privacy, and a meaningful exchange of ideas." I wrote it as a side project over the past several months and then launched it a few weeks ago when the Facebook stuff was happening. It's getting a fair amount of traction and increasing engagement. We are still way within the "do things that don't scale" phase. From a tech standpoint, it is completely serverless. S3/CloudFront hosting a React front-end (React Native apps almost done), API Gateway with Lambda functions, DynamoDB and Redis. Happy to answer any questions about the site or the tech stack.
- djfrodo 8y agoreally late to the party here, but https://headcycle.com https://headcycle.com