5 ms·

A Guide to Unbundling Reddit

55 points by nreece 6y ago

Mediterraneo10 6y ago
It is curious that the author suggests Goodreads is a place for people to move to from r/books, when recent press coverage of Goodsreads tends to focus on how that site’s time has come and gone. Activity on Goodreads is down, and spammer accounts choke real activity like the place has gone to the weeds. Goodreads’ owner Amazon is reportedly no longer investing in the development of the site, so GR strikes young people today as an antiquated grandpa-era design and longstanding bugs have never been fixed. Maybe there really isn’t any business case any more for a standalone community for book lovers, and so I wonder how many of his other examples are not sound.
- CaptArmchair 6y ago
  > Maybe there really isn’t any business case any more for a standalone community for book lovers, and so I wonder how many of his other examples are not sound. Maybe there really isn't any profitable business case. The author of this article tends to focus on "unbundling" as a shift from a central platform towards many platforms whose primary mission is creating a profitable business. Whereas the analog world also has plenty of examples of small and larger formal and informal communities of book lovers i.e. reading groups, libraries, writing classes, groups exchanging books,... that aren't profit based. People simply want to get together to share their experiences about that awesome book they read, right? I think that platforms such as Reddit or Goodreads enabled those groups to converge in a single place not just because of the content, but primarily because of the cost of digital infrastructure, or lack thereof. Outside of the technology community, few communities are willing to invest time and money in their own standalone private platform if there's an alternative who provides that core functionality to communicate and share information, and the complex infrastructure that supports it, for, seemingly, free and with a extremely low entry bar: just create an account, create a new group, invite others: you're done. Scaling towards millions sounds like a great proposition, but non-paying users don't even cover operational costs of building and running infrastructure. The difficulty here is looking towards alternative sources of revenue. As far as Amazon is concerned, the value of GR is that it's simply another sales funnel. That's why Amazon only invests minimally in GR: just to keep enough potential customers around. Which is a far cry from hosting communities book lovers in their own right. The other examples in the article each have their own business model in which non-paying users aren't really the immediate customers. Going back to small communities of book lovers themselves, you could imagine a small non-profit offering a platform to its several hundreds of members. It's clear that such a non profit could never pool the financial resources together to hire a team of experts to build a dedicated platform that could rival with the likes of Goodreads. Nor would they want to do that since that would be clearly overkill. Maybe it's interesting to broaden the focus beyond vast high-profile, for-profit services and look towards hidden communities on the Internet which are very much alive, such as mailing list servers or very small, independently operated bulletin boards and forums (such as there still are around). I suspect there are a plenty of small, independent, active communities hidden under the surface that are never really seen. Much like famous dark matter in the Universe.
  - Mediterraneo10 6y ago
    > such a non profit could never pool the financial resources together to hire a team of experts to build a dedicated platform that could rival with the likes of Goodreads. In fact, they could. A lot of the work on Goodreads has always been done by volunteers – adding new books, fixing bibliographic errors, and deleting certain instances of spam is crowdsourced. If those same volunteers were able to delete obviously spam accounts, than they would do that as well. That means that only the website’s technology would require skilled staff, but Goodreads’ platform is antiquated and these days what it offers would easily be seen as within the reach of a small team of hackers. The ultimately difficulty is the decline in reading books in the age of snackable content, and the dwindling interest in standalone review sites. That would make it difficult for any new competitor to grow membership regardless of how solid the site is technically. > I suspect there are a plenty of small, independent, active communities I wish. In most of my own hobbies, standalone forums have hollowed out drastically as people moved to Facebook or Reddit, there are no secret Shangri-Las left. Those who remain on the old forums skew heavily towards the elderly, and also the sort of cranks who want to trade zingers or fuel flame wars instead of contribute to on-topic discussion. It is like traveling through one of those many whole regions on earth where all the young people have left to the big city.
    - CaptArmchair 6y ago
      Those are good points. Your first point regarding differentiating between volunteers who manage content and skilled experts maintaining expert expresses my sentiment as well. I've been a board member of several non profits and my (anecdotal) experience is that finding a small team of hackers who would do the work pro bono is a hard challenge. Your comment on the 'snackable entertainment' is a take on the increased competition and pressure between hobbies and activities. In a world with so many fast changing options and rapidly changing expectations, it's hard to keep people's attention for a prolonged time. So, more often then not, if an organisation or a community doesn't have the resources, access to expertise or the time to focus on setting up infrastructure, things rather quickly get relegated to centralised platforms because of their non-existent entry bar. Your last comment is also on point: outsourcing and leveraging existing infrastructure at marginal costs is an engrained strategy in younger generations: don't waste time building technology, if you could readily use tools that are available to you. Maybe the big differentiator that makes captivating communities a success or a bust is just plain old day-to-day governance. Rather then pushing a particular business model that's often at odds with the interests of the communities present on a platform.
- agustif 6y ago
  There was a nice book community built by YC alumni, can't remember their name/domain as I don't use it or read much books currently anyway. Will edit or reply myself if I can remember it later and anyone else hasn't posted it yer.
mebr 6y ago
The author appears to forcefully prove his theory about reddit in order to sell a website he's an advisor at. I wish the disclaimer was at the top of the text.
- jimhi 6y ago
  That's not really fair. If you bother you click into the website he is an advisor at and see it is an app for finding and investing in new companies, you will see it has nothing to do with this article. It is literally just the footer at the bottom of all his articles.
  - robjan 6y ago
    His product is one of the suggested alternatives
  - derision 6y ago
    It's literally putting 2 and 2 together. The article is about how to start new companies based off reddit communities, and he's an advisor for an app for finding and investing in new companies. This is nothing more than a marketing piece trying to boost their funnel
    - im3w1l 6y ago
      While it is a marketing piece trying to boost their funnel, it does provide value for HN readers too.
      - netsharc 6y ago
        I skimmed through it and I wasn't convinced by his idea (I think he thinks if he says it long enough it will come true), so it did not provide value to me.
flywheel 6y ago
Reddit is a cesspool.
tetris11 6y ago
The point of reddit is* not to find a sub where people advertise their products, but to find a place to speak with like minded individuals in an anonymous environment without ulterior motives. That is* the beauty of anonyminity, where your worth is* measured by the merit of your words and arguments, and not by what you can do for someone else. This blog post screams of vulture capitalism. *was
- MickerNews 6y ago
  >This blog post screams of vulture capitalism. This is Hacker News?
alexmingoia 6y ago
For any given topic, you will probably find business(es) connected to it. Isn’t that... obvious? There were businesses related to gardening, cars, games, etc. regardless of whether or not Reddit or Craigslist ever existed.
anon98356 6y ago
The author uses discord as the prime example and then fails to explain the link. They talk about the large r/LoL community but then identify that Discord replaced TeamSpeak. Is r/LoL now dead? I'm failing to see in what way this actually relates to reddit. It looks more like a team identifying a poorly served market (in game chat) and making a better product that's it. Maybe they used reddit to expand their reach, I don't know. But it's a massive stretch to say that Discord is replacing a subreddit.
- CM30 6y ago
  As someone who uses both Reddit and Discord quite a bit, I can definitely see the latter eating a lot of the former's marketshare, especially in communities for entertainment related topics like gaming, TV, music, etc. In the case of r/LoL it's replaced TeamSpeak, and for quite a few other communities it's replaced IRC or other chat systems, but a lot of subreddits and old school forums have been replaced with Discord servers too. For instance, many speedrunning communities are now primarily focused around Discord servers, as are communities for the Mario RPGs, the Luigi's Mansion series and most game mods/fan projects. An awful lot of communities focused around YouTube and Twitch personalities have made that jump too. So while the article may have not given the best example, there are definitely a lot of instances where Discord has replaced, or at least significantly hurt the activity of a subreddit.
- jabroni_salad 6y ago
  I swap between FFXIV and WoW and personally I did not find that Discord replaced the generalist message boards of /r/wow and /r/FFXIV. There are general discord communities for these but personally I find that they move too fast to contain any useful discussions. However, it did replace basically all of the guild services and some class-based communities. It used to be that any decently organized guild would have a private voice server (be it Mumble, TS3, or Ventrilo) and a forum. The first was for event communications and the second for organizing events (calendar, recruitment, roster management, documenting strategies, etc). Now, all of that happens in Discord and very few guilds seem to have a dedicated website much less an operable forum. In FFXIV specifically there is a virtual item called the 'Linkshell' that lets you join a private chat channel in-game. The only problem is that you are limited to the number of Linkshells you can hold, each Linkshell has a cap of 64 members, and you have to be in-game to talk to them. At some point in their early stages, Discord offered an integration with one of the FFXIV databases and it displaced the linkshell communities seemingly overnight.
jiofih 6y ago
> Discord is "Slack for Gaming" Gaaa. This makes my skin crawl. Slack came out yesterday and did not invent chat. Saying things like this shows a profound lack of knowledge about the internet and devalues the entire article.
- Semaphor 6y ago
  But Slack is what people know. Saying "IRC for gaming", "MUC for gaming" would win the author 3-4 people (including you) and lose the vast majority of them.
- duskwuff 6y ago
  The parallels run deep. Discord and Slack have extremely similar UIs and feature sets.
tbran 6y ago
I came across this article when I was grabbing some links for this comment [0] I wrote that talked a little about unbundling. I didn't find the article very meaty, but I agree with the main point of it - that there is probably a lot opportunity in taking a Reddit community and creating something tailored to those users. I don't know for sure, but I suspect that Reddit's attempt to become a social network will be one of the things that make it less cool/usable. For an indie hacker, unbundling is one of the better concepts to keep in mind if you're looking for business ideas. Maybe you can't build a massive startup from a slice of Reddit, but you could have a pretty nice lifestyle biz. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23428138 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23428138
agustif 6y ago
As a non-regular reddit user, I would rephrase it as. Be a part of a big community, find a niche you like in it, engage and listen closely, and try to build and cater to that specific audience. A version of this is what I did as a 16 year old when a community I was part of was sold to a new owner, I forked a new one with my own content in it, and deleted my content from the older one, and redirected any users that would contact me via DM
csb6 6y ago
I had never heard of unbundling before. I wonder what value taking something like Craigslist and breaking it up into dozens of areas really adds. I guess Indeed, Airbnb, etc. have some proprietary systems for matching people with jobs/rentals, but aren’t a lot of these services location-based anyway? If I am looking for a job, is Indeed’s algorithm orders of magnitude more effective than just filtering by city and occupation in a simple Craiglist search? I can see these unbundled sites adding some value, but enough value to be cumulatively worth way, way more than Craigslist? It seems doubtful to me, even if they do offer some benefits. It just seems like it would be a lot easier if we all just used a simple classified ads site instead of dozens of closed platforms with hype/marketing behind what is not really a new service.
ciarannolan 6y ago
Can anyone suggest a good alternative to r/books besides Goodreads?
msla 6y ago
It's like a Douglas Adams bit: "We need to unbundle Reddit." "I'm with you there." "It's a silo, and it's toxic." "Indeed." "Now, how do we do that?" "Slap a better UI on Usenet and completely de-silo everything. I think we're calling it Mastodon now." "I got a great idea! Move everyone out! Out! Far out! Out to dozens of silos, each topic-specific!" "No. That doesn't solve the underlying problem." "Indeed! Move everyone out to a network. A network where users will be free to be siloed." "How is that any better?" "It's much better! It's ten silos instead of one! Surely ten individual platforms can't possibly all go bad." And then he went off to talk into his phone wearing a face mask and gloves.
bawolff 6y ago
The title led me to believe there was supposed to be a guide here? All it claims is that sometimes small specialist companies can swoop in and outcompete big companies in a specific niche. Certainly true. Has nothing to do with technology or websites. The opposite is true of course too, that big companies can benefit from efficiencies of scale and pooling resources across different niches. This is literally business 101.

55 points by nreece 6y ago

It is curious that the author suggests Goodreads is a place for people to move to from r/books, when recent press coverage of Goodsreads tends to focus on how that site’s time has come and gone. Activity on Goodreads is down, and spammer accounts choke real activity like the place has gone to the weeds. Goodreads’ owner Amazon is reportedly no longer investing in the development of the site, so GR strikes young people today as an antiquated grandpa-era design and longstanding bugs have never been fixed. Maybe there really isn’t any business case any more for a standalone community for book lovers, and so I wonder how many of his other examples are not sound.

CaptArmchair 6y ago
> Maybe there really isn’t any business case any more for a standalone community for book lovers, and so I wonder how many of his other examples are not sound. Maybe there really isn't any profitable business case. The author of this article tends to focus on "unbundling" as a shift from a central platform towards many platforms whose primary mission is creating a profitable business. Whereas the analog world also has plenty of examples of small and larger formal and informal communities of book lovers i.e. reading groups, libraries, writing classes, groups exchanging books,... that aren't profit based. People simply want to get together to share their experiences about that awesome book they read, right? I think that platforms such as Reddit or Goodreads enabled those groups to converge in a single place not just because of the content, but primarily because of the cost of digital infrastructure, or lack thereof. Outside of the technology community, few communities are willing to invest time and money in their own standalone private platform if there's an alternative who provides that core functionality to communicate and share information, and the complex infrastructure that supports it, for, seemingly, free and with a extremely low entry bar: just create an account, create a new group, invite others: you're done. Scaling towards millions sounds like a great proposition, but non-paying users don't even cover operational costs of building and running infrastructure. The difficulty here is looking towards alternative sources of revenue. As far as Amazon is concerned, the value of GR is that it's simply another sales funnel. That's why Amazon only invests minimally in GR: just to keep enough potential customers around. Which is a far cry from hosting communities book lovers in their own right. The other examples in the article each have their own business model in which non-paying users aren't really the immediate customers. Going back to small communities of book lovers themselves, you could imagine a small non-profit offering a platform to its several hundreds of members. It's clear that such a non profit could never pool the financial resources together to hire a team of experts to build a dedicated platform that could rival with the likes of Goodreads. Nor would they want to do that since that would be clearly overkill. Maybe it's interesting to broaden the focus beyond vast high-profile, for-profit services and look towards hidden communities on the Internet which are very much alive, such as mailing list servers or very small, independently operated bulletin boards and forums (such as there still are around). I suspect there are a plenty of small, independent, active communities hidden under the surface that are never really seen. Much like famous dark matter in the Universe.
- Mediterraneo10 6y ago
  > such a non profit could never pool the financial resources together to hire a team of experts to build a dedicated platform that could rival with the likes of Goodreads. In fact, they could. A lot of the work on Goodreads has always been done by volunteers – adding new books, fixing bibliographic errors, and deleting certain instances of spam is crowdsourced. If those same volunteers were able to delete obviously spam accounts, than they would do that as well. That means that only the website’s technology would require skilled staff, but Goodreads’ platform is antiquated and these days what it offers would easily be seen as within the reach of a small team of hackers. The ultimately difficulty is the decline in reading books in the age of snackable content, and the dwindling interest in standalone review sites. That would make it difficult for any new competitor to grow membership regardless of how solid the site is technically. > I suspect there are a plenty of small, independent, active communities I wish. In most of my own hobbies, standalone forums have hollowed out drastically as people moved to Facebook or Reddit, there are no secret Shangri-Las left. Those who remain on the old forums skew heavily towards the elderly, and also the sort of cranks who want to trade zingers or fuel flame wars instead of contribute to on-topic discussion. It is like traveling through one of those many whole regions on earth where all the young people have left to the big city.
  - CaptArmchair 6y ago
    Those are good points. Your first point regarding differentiating between volunteers who manage content and skilled experts maintaining expert expresses my sentiment as well. I've been a board member of several non profits and my (anecdotal) experience is that finding a small team of hackers who would do the work pro bono is a hard challenge. Your comment on the 'snackable entertainment' is a take on the increased competition and pressure between hobbies and activities. In a world with so many fast changing options and rapidly changing expectations, it's hard to keep people's attention for a prolonged time. So, more often then not, if an organisation or a community doesn't have the resources, access to expertise or the time to focus on setting up infrastructure, things rather quickly get relegated to centralised platforms because of their non-existent entry bar. Your last comment is also on point: outsourcing and leveraging existing infrastructure at marginal costs is an engrained strategy in younger generations: don't waste time building technology, if you could readily use tools that are available to you. Maybe the big differentiator that makes captivating communities a success or a bust is just plain old day-to-day governance. Rather then pushing a particular business model that's often at odds with the interests of the communities present on a platform.
agustif 6y ago
There was a nice book community built by YC alumni, can't remember their name/domain as I don't use it or read much books currently anyway. Will edit or reply myself if I can remember it later and anyone else hasn't posted it yer.

mebr 6y ago

The author appears to forcefully prove his theory about reddit in order to sell a website he's an advisor at. I wish the disclaimer was at the top of the text.

jimhi 6y ago
That's not really fair. If you bother you click into the website he is an advisor at and see it is an app for finding and investing in new companies, you will see it has nothing to do with this article. It is literally just the footer at the bottom of all his articles.
- robjan 6y ago
  His product is one of the suggested alternatives
- derision 6y ago
  It's literally putting 2 and 2 together. The article is about how to start new companies based off reddit communities, and he's an advisor for an app for finding and investing in new companies. This is nothing more than a marketing piece trying to boost their funnel
  - im3w1l 6y ago
    While it is a marketing piece trying to boost their funnel, it does provide value for HN readers too.
    - netsharc 6y ago
      I skimmed through it and I wasn't convinced by his idea (I think he thinks if he says it long enough it will come true), so it did not provide value to me.

flywheel 6y ago

Reddit is a cesspool.

tetris11 6y ago

The point of reddit is* not to find a sub where people advertise their products, but to find a place to speak with like minded individuals in an anonymous environment without ulterior motives. That is* the beauty of anonyminity, where your worth is* measured by the merit of your words and arguments, and not by what you can do for someone else. This blog post screams of vulture capitalism. *was

MickerNews 6y ago
>This blog post screams of vulture capitalism. This is Hacker News?

alexmingoia 6y ago

For any given topic, you will probably find business(es) connected to it. Isn’t that... obvious? There were businesses related to gardening, cars, games, etc. regardless of whether or not Reddit or Craigslist ever existed.

anon98356 6y ago

The author uses discord as the prime example and then fails to explain the link. They talk about the large r/LoL community but then identify that Discord replaced TeamSpeak. Is r/LoL now dead? I'm failing to see in what way this actually relates to reddit. It looks more like a team identifying a poorly served market (in game chat) and making a better product that's it. Maybe they used reddit to expand their reach, I don't know. But it's a massive stretch to say that Discord is replacing a subreddit.

CM30 6y ago
As someone who uses both Reddit and Discord quite a bit, I can definitely see the latter eating a lot of the former's marketshare, especially in communities for entertainment related topics like gaming, TV, music, etc. In the case of r/LoL it's replaced TeamSpeak, and for quite a few other communities it's replaced IRC or other chat systems, but a lot of subreddits and old school forums have been replaced with Discord servers too. For instance, many speedrunning communities are now primarily focused around Discord servers, as are communities for the Mario RPGs, the Luigi's Mansion series and most game mods/fan projects. An awful lot of communities focused around YouTube and Twitch personalities have made that jump too. So while the article may have not given the best example, there are definitely a lot of instances where Discord has replaced, or at least significantly hurt the activity of a subreddit.
jabroni_salad 6y ago
I swap between FFXIV and WoW and personally I did not find that Discord replaced the generalist message boards of /r/wow and /r/FFXIV. There are general discord communities for these but personally I find that they move too fast to contain any useful discussions. However, it did replace basically all of the guild services and some class-based communities. It used to be that any decently organized guild would have a private voice server (be it Mumble, TS3, or Ventrilo) and a forum. The first was for event communications and the second for organizing events (calendar, recruitment, roster management, documenting strategies, etc). Now, all of that happens in Discord and very few guilds seem to have a dedicated website much less an operable forum. In FFXIV specifically there is a virtual item called the 'Linkshell' that lets you join a private chat channel in-game. The only problem is that you are limited to the number of Linkshells you can hold, each Linkshell has a cap of 64 members, and you have to be in-game to talk to them. At some point in their early stages, Discord offered an integration with one of the FFXIV databases and it displaced the linkshell communities seemingly overnight.

jiofih 6y ago

> Discord is "Slack for Gaming" Gaaa. This makes my skin crawl. Slack came out yesterday and did not invent chat. Saying things like this shows a profound lack of knowledge about the internet and devalues the entire article.

Semaphor 6y ago
But Slack is what people know. Saying "IRC for gaming", "MUC for gaming" would win the author 3-4 people (including you) and lose the vast majority of them.
duskwuff 6y ago
The parallels run deep. Discord and Slack have extremely similar UIs and feature sets.

tbran 6y ago

I came across this article when I was grabbing some links for this comment [0] I wrote that talked a little about unbundling. I didn't find the article very meaty, but I agree with the main point of it - that there is probably a lot opportunity in taking a Reddit community and creating something tailored to those users. I don't know for sure, but I suspect that Reddit's attempt to become a social network will be one of the things that make it less cool/usable. For an indie hacker, unbundling is one of the better concepts to keep in mind if you're looking for business ideas. Maybe you can't build a massive startup from a slice of Reddit, but you could have a pretty nice lifestyle biz. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23428138 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23428138

agustif 6y ago

As a non-regular reddit user, I would rephrase it as. Be a part of a big community, find a niche you like in it, engage and listen closely, and try to build and cater to that specific audience. A version of this is what I did as a 16 year old when a community I was part of was sold to a new owner, I forked a new one with my own content in it, and deleted my content from the older one, and redirected any users that would contact me via DM

csb6 6y ago

I had never heard of unbundling before. I wonder what value taking something like Craigslist and breaking it up into dozens of areas really adds. I guess Indeed, Airbnb, etc. have some proprietary systems for matching people with jobs/rentals, but aren’t a lot of these services location-based anyway? If I am looking for a job, is Indeed’s algorithm orders of magnitude more effective than just filtering by city and occupation in a simple Craiglist search? I can see these unbundled sites adding some value, but enough value to be cumulatively worth way, way more than Craigslist? It seems doubtful to me, even if they do offer some benefits. It just seems like it would be a lot easier if we all just used a simple classified ads site instead of dozens of closed platforms with hype/marketing behind what is not really a new service.

ciarannolan 6y ago

Can anyone suggest a good alternative to r/books besides Goodreads?

msla 6y ago

It's like a Douglas Adams bit: "We need to unbundle Reddit." "I'm with you there." "It's a silo, and it's toxic." "Indeed." "Now, how do we do that?" "Slap a better UI on Usenet and completely de-silo everything. I think we're calling it Mastodon now." "I got a great idea! Move everyone out! Out! Far out! Out to dozens of silos, each topic-specific!" "No. That doesn't solve the underlying problem." "Indeed! Move everyone out to a network. A network where users will be free to be siloed." "How is that any better?" "It's much better! It's ten silos instead of one! Surely ten individual platforms can't possibly all go bad." And then he went off to talk into his phone wearing a face mask and gloves.

bawolff 6y ago

The title led me to believe there was supposed to be a guide here? All it claims is that sometimes small specialist companies can swoop in and outcompete big companies in a specific niche. Certainly true. Has nothing to do with technology or websites. The opposite is true of course too, that big companies can benefit from efficiencies of scale and pooling resources across different niches. This is literally business 101.