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This is such a good idea even without Reddit's monetization and potentially blocking NSFW content. To me it seems obvious. It's also something that's actually l

This is such a good idea even without Reddit's monetization and potentially blocking NSFW content. To me it seems obvious. It's also something that's actually likely to succeed and within the community's control, unlike getting Reddit to change their stance. Like, there's nothing stopping this from developing right now. - "There won't be as many people." That's ok, probably even a good thing. 1.5-2.5 million users are more than enough, especially considering most of them are power users. I believe HN has around 1.5-2.5 million and the content here is way better than Reddit. - "Making a social network is hard." Yes, but it's not too hard. Scaling is hard, but we're not scaling to Reddit's size (100+ million); and Mastodon has issues with scaling, but that's because their protocol is super-redundant in an effort to be decentralized (and apparently also kind of sucks). HN runs on 2 servers and uses a LISP dialect (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28478379); https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28478379); even though HN is text-only and Apollo would have images or videos, I'm 100% certain there are enough dedicated Reddit users who can make this a reality. - Also be aware that Reddit's community is different than Facebook, Twitter, YouTube; they're a lot more tech-savvy, a lot more anonymous, favor NSFW a lot more, and a lot more anti-corporate. Especially the moderators, who honestly control most of the community (though it's usually a bad thing). We're going to need those moderators to prevent the Apollo social network from becoming the next 4chan (because, hopefully you understand, that's a bad thing) There's absolutely going to be an exodus if Reddit does anything non-negligible, the only reason Reddit is even considering moving ahead with these changes is because they don't care.

gaudat 3y ago
>prevent the Apollo social network from becoming the next 4chan The two forums in my top level comment do compare similarly as 4chan and reddit. The old one was previously known as the epicenter of shenanigans and memes in my language which has lost its shine, the new one being increasingly astroturfed and becoming more of an echo chamber day after day.
- celim307 3y ago
  Something awful?
  - gaudat 3y ago
    They are not in English. The old one is HKGolden while the new one is LIHKG. I think a similar pattern of movement happened from PTT to DCard too. I think these all have a Wikipedia page, and I hope translation tools work well enough to make them understandable.
    - Inocez 3y ago
      To be honest, the pattern is not quite similar. The main reason for PTT's decline can be boiled down to political issues. The PTT operators were unable to effectively deal with the issue of water armies, resulting in a decision to halt new user registrations for nearly three years.
bellowse 3y ago
I'm dying for this, and would happily throw in some free dev work. HN is the only community I still actually enjoy, social media is a cesspool. I'd love a "Lichess of social media," something centralized but robust and user-respecting, and for communities other than tech.
witchesindublin 3y ago
I actually think that Reddit is more "mass market" than tech-savvy. I never associate Reddit with techies in my entire life, unless you mean the people who move into tech for money.
- aaron_m04 3y ago
  How about "literati" instead of "tech-savvy"?
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- jodrellblank 3y ago
  A recent link on HN was the archives of Reddit comments from pushshift.io; of the first year of Reddit (December 2005 to December 2006), the comment counts on subreddits with >100 comments were: 115 ru 129 de 215 tr 380 nsfw 765 ja 932 freeculture 985 request 1487 joel 1784 lipstick.com 2022 features 4208 science 31266 programming 322776 reddit.com Where "joel" was Joel Spolsky's programming blog. That's quite programmer-heavy. Some of the comments on "reddit.com" in 2005 were: > "One thing I've noticed is that the bulk of reddit's content is usually IT-related or at least culturally related, while digg is more generalized in its content (perhaps this is a product of time?). My point is that it seems to me that the fact that the "who" uses the site has a greater influence on usability than "how" the site is used." - > "In the beginning, digg was pretty much all tech-related links, and whenever someone posted anything else you'd get a flurry of "this is a tech news site"-type comments. As the userbase grows and you get a more diverse demographic using the site, it becomes less "elite" and expands into other areas."
qball 3y ago
>the only reason Reddit is even considering moving ahead with these changes is because they don't care No, they're just flailing. The problem with Reddit is that its product is ideological conformity; but its owners are too busy pretending (or actually believing) that's not true to sell it honestly. Mods are, to put it bluntly, mostly replaceable, and charging for the ability to moderate an established large subreddit would go a long way provided whoever buys that power must go out of their way to plausibly deny that. And ideological conformity is worth a lot of money- Twitter was fairly valued in the tens of billions for a very good reason- but much like Twitter, that sort of thing sells "at a loss" because having the kind of content which enforcement of ideological conformity upon is meaningful necessarily means major companies won't want to put their products next to that content. Reddit is not a product that can generate a concrete return on investment, which is partially why it can survive operating at a net loss for a long, long time; capital directly funds political power. Cheap capital drying up means money is tighter- so financiers are getting harder to come by- and if you're in straits that dire and don't want to downsize you have to look for other sources of revenue. In Reddit's case, this will completely kill their main product, but they have a mental block that prevents them from dealing with that honestly so they might be screwed. >Mastodon has issues with scaling, but that's because their protocol is super-redundant in an effort to be decentralized (and apparently also kind of sucks) Mastodon has the same kind problem that Reddit does but massively amplified- server operators have power over user networks (the same thing happens on Reddit with bots) which is a no-go for honest communication.
- Spooky23 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - sdenike 3y ago
    “Reddit is a shitty web consolidation play that helped kill the internet. They rolled up a sea of phpbb and somehow made it worse.” I don’t know why I never thought of it this way, but that is 100% accurate.
  - wesapien 3y ago
    no system is perfect but twitter is much better now. i'd rather support "not progressives" than progressives.
donmcronald 3y ago
I've always thought it would be neat if there were loosely affiliated communities that host as an API only with a standard front end for the UI. So I run 'example.com', but only serve (ex:) content via JSON. Allow competing implementations of the API on AWS, Cloudflare, self-hosted, etc.. Then let UIs like Apollo act like an aggregator and an OIDC provider for their users. The API side could moderate their own content and restrict access to UIs that play nice and the UIs could refuse to surface content from API sides that suck. The only thing Reddit has going for it IMO is the uniform UI across communities and they seem determined to make that a crappy experience from what I've seen.
- wahnfrieden 3y ago
  I’m building it with both web and native Mac/iOS, on top of mostly rss for static friendliness. White labeled web and Apple App Store native SwiftUI deployments. Offline friendly
- madeofpalk 3y ago
  This is kind of more or less what ActivityPub and/or 'Mastodon compatible API' is to be honest.
- TkTech 3y ago
  You just described the ActivityPub universe. There are quite a few servers that are minimal ux or api only, and there are a ton of clients that allow you to use multiple servers on whatever platform you want, with mobile, desktop, and web clients.
- rovr138 3y ago
  > So I run 'example.com', but only serve (ex:) content via JSON. Allow competing implementations of the API on AWS, Cloudflare, self-hosted, etc.. Then let UIs like Apollo act like an aggregator and an OIDC provider for their users. Reddit has something like this, but definitely not as intentional, - https://www.reddit.com/r/all/.json https://www.reddit.com/r/all/.json - https://www.reddit.com/r/all/.rss https://www.reddit.com/r/all/.rss - https://www.reddit.com/r/all/.xml https://www.reddit.com/r/all/.xml >The only thing Reddit has going for it IMO is the uniform UI across communities and they seem determined to make that a crappy experience from what I've seen. Old reddit had stylesheets and they could be very interesting. I still prefer that over the current thing they built.
dang 3y ago
> I believe HN has around 1.5-2.5 million HN has about 5M unique monthly users depending on how you count them.
- searchableguy 3y ago
  Really? How many users perform any writes monthly? I only see a couple thousand people actively comment or vote.
  - klooney 3y ago
    The usual ratio is pretty crazy, like 99 to 1.
    - TylerE 3y ago
      The way I've usually seen it states is that 10% of your users will comment, and 10% of that 10% will start new threads/posts.
      - daemoens 3y ago
        Easier to just say 10% comment, 1% posts.
        dayjaby 3y ago
        That describes my usage pretty well. Dang, no comments from me on the next 9 articles.
        deafpolygon 3y ago
        Can't comment on 9 in an hour anyways. You get rate-limited on HN. :)
        barefootcoder 3y ago
pyuser583 3y ago
I don’t do 4chan, but I know people IRL who do. They seem to think it’s pretty good. Is there a chance it’s getting better?
- Ulus 3y ago
  I’ve used it off and on since 2005 and /b/ has always been bad, while the tech and music boards have been pretty good.
  - pyuser583 3y ago
    Seems tech neighborhoods are pretty good everywhere. Twitter and Reddit tech neighborhoods have good reputations.
- yoshamano 3y ago
  4chan will never "get better" because if that happens it'll cease to be 4chan as we know it. /b/ has always been an open pit sewer that the occasional nugget of gold flows through. /trv/ is where I like to hang out, but /pol/ can't help itself and likes to crap-post in there on the regular. /gif/ and it's blue board, "safe for work," version /wsg/ are fun to browse, but the 4chanX extension and some filters are needed to hide a lot of the trolling and truly awful stuff while browsing.
  - pyuser583 3y ago
    Are these things like subreddits?
    - yoshamano 3y ago
      Yes. On 4chan they're called boards. Some boards are focused on particular content. Other boards are focused on the type of media posted. /b/ = random /trv/ = travel /pol/ = politically incorrect /gif/ = .gif and .webm files /wsg/ = the work safe version of /gif/ (its toned down but still not actually safe for work)
- 3y ago
emodendroket 3y ago
> Also be aware that Reddit's community is different than Facebook, Twitter, YouTube; they're a lot more tech-savvy, a lot more anonymous, favor NSFW a lot more, and a lot more anti-corporate. Especially the moderators, who honestly control most of the community (though it's usually a bad thing). We're going to need those moderators to prevent the Apollo social network from becoming the next 4chan (because, hopefully you understand, that's a bad thing) You’re describing Reddit ten years ago. There’s not really a “typical Reddit user” at this point it’s so big. All kinds of people are on it and most of them are not techies with a particular ideological bent.
- pcthrowaway 3y ago
  You can still be anonymous on Reddit, unlike facebook, which comes with good and bad. I think it's true that Reddit leans more towards supporting internet privacy initiatives, net neutrality, etc. whereas facebook users often have no awareness of these issues in the first place. But at the same time, no requirement to associate with a real-world identity means there are more sockpuppet accounts, more astroturfing, etc.
hardware2win 3y ago
>i believe HN has around 1.5-2.5 million and the What? Id say max 50k
rat9988 3y ago
> I believe HN has around 1.5-2.5 million and the content here is way better than Reddit. I have to heavily disagree with this. Reddit content is way better in both quality and quantity. The only thing worse is maybe the Signal to noise ratio, and even that is questionable. For example, askHistorians is a gem. Many subreddits are very useful. Moreover, for many questions, I find myself adding "reddit" on google. Not once have I needed it to find useful content on hacker news.
- fooker 3y ago
  >For example, askHistorians is a gem. Ask about anything remotely controversial, and you'll see how quickly it's an echo chamber.
  - fknorangesite 3y ago
    > you'll see how quickly ~~it's an echo chamber.~~ requires sources
- red-iron-pine 3y ago
  I'm convinced askHistorians is mostly for the same people asking and answering their own questions
  - deroanth 3y ago
    Just in case you're not joking: if that were the case, there would be few-to-no questions with no responses, but there are plenty of those. I won't deny it's possible there is some of that, but I doubt it's all that common.
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  >for many questions, I find myself adding "reddit" on google. I do it more out of necessity than because reddit is a good site. You get into a niche enough subject and your choice is either a small subreddit or delving into the artifacts of the early internet like GameFaqs, Deviant Art, or some new site forums (the ones that still exist). I Still need to take a grain of salt and check if the redditor isn't blowing hot air or isn't on some unhinged rant. HN is great but focused on very specific, technical contetnt. Not gonna be much oppurtunity to talk about media or craft hobbies here.
wesapien 3y ago
4chan is indeed not the ideal but the current reddit isn't ideal either because it leans too much progressive. i would like to prune both extremes.
johnnyanmac 3y ago
>We're going to need those moderators to prevent the Apollo social network from becoming the next 4chan (because, hopefully you understand, that's a bad thing) TBH, 4chan these days are nowhere near the days when it was known as the boogieman of the internet. Still stuck with language that wouldn't last 10 seconds on Twitter or even Reddit, but we're not talking about a doxxing/harassment hub anymore. Or at least, no more a hub for that than Twitter/Reddit.

gaudat 3y ago

>prevent the Apollo social network from becoming the next 4chan The two forums in my top level comment do compare similarly as 4chan and reddit. The old one was previously known as the epicenter of shenanigans and memes in my language which has lost its shine, the new one being increasingly astroturfed and becoming more of an echo chamber day after day.

celim307 3y ago
Something awful?
- gaudat 3y ago
  They are not in English. The old one is HKGolden while the new one is LIHKG. I think a similar pattern of movement happened from PTT to DCard too. I think these all have a Wikipedia page, and I hope translation tools work well enough to make them understandable.
  - Inocez 3y ago
    To be honest, the pattern is not quite similar. The main reason for PTT's decline can be boiled down to political issues. The PTT operators were unable to effectively deal with the issue of water armies, resulting in a decision to halt new user registrations for nearly three years.

bellowse 3y ago

I'm dying for this, and would happily throw in some free dev work. HN is the only community I still actually enjoy, social media is a cesspool. I'd love a "Lichess of social media," something centralized but robust and user-respecting, and for communities other than tech.

witchesindublin 3y ago

I actually think that Reddit is more "mass market" than tech-savvy. I never associate Reddit with techies in my entire life, unless you mean the people who move into tech for money.

aaron_m04 3y ago
How about "literati" instead of "tech-savvy"?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
jodrellblank 3y ago
A recent link on HN was the archives of Reddit comments from pushshift.io; of the first year of Reddit (December 2005 to December 2006), the comment counts on subreddits with >100 comments were: 115 ru 129 de 215 tr 380 nsfw 765 ja 932 freeculture 985 request 1487 joel 1784 lipstick.com 2022 features 4208 science 31266 programming 322776 reddit.com Where "joel" was Joel Spolsky's programming blog. That's quite programmer-heavy. Some of the comments on "reddit.com" in 2005 were: > "One thing I've noticed is that the bulk of reddit's content is usually IT-related or at least culturally related, while digg is more generalized in its content (perhaps this is a product of time?). My point is that it seems to me that the fact that the "who" uses the site has a greater influence on usability than "how" the site is used." - > "In the beginning, digg was pretty much all tech-related links, and whenever someone posted anything else you'd get a flurry of "this is a tech news site"-type comments. As the userbase grows and you get a more diverse demographic using the site, it becomes less "elite" and expands into other areas."

qball 3y ago

>the only reason Reddit is even considering moving ahead with these changes is because they don't care No, they're just flailing. The problem with Reddit is that its product is ideological conformity; but its owners are too busy pretending (or actually believing) that's not true to sell it honestly. Mods are, to put it bluntly, mostly replaceable, and charging for the ability to moderate an established large subreddit would go a long way provided whoever buys that power must go out of their way to plausibly deny that. And ideological conformity is worth a lot of money- Twitter was fairly valued in the tens of billions for a very good reason- but much like Twitter, that sort of thing sells "at a loss" because having the kind of content which enforcement of ideological conformity upon is meaningful necessarily means major companies won't want to put their products next to that content. Reddit is not a product that can generate a concrete return on investment, which is partially why it can survive operating at a net loss for a long, long time; capital directly funds political power. Cheap capital drying up means money is tighter- so financiers are getting harder to come by- and if you're in straits that dire and don't want to downsize you have to look for other sources of revenue. In Reddit's case, this will completely kill their main product, but they have a mental block that prevents them from dealing with that honestly so they might be screwed. >Mastodon has issues with scaling, but that's because their protocol is super-redundant in an effort to be decentralized (and apparently also kind of sucks) Mastodon has the same kind problem that Reddit does but massively amplified- server operators have power over user networks (the same thing happens on Reddit with bots) which is a no-go for honest communication.

Spooky23 3y ago
[flagged]
- sdenike 3y ago
  “Reddit is a shitty web consolidation play that helped kill the internet. They rolled up a sea of phpbb and somehow made it worse.” I don’t know why I never thought of it this way, but that is 100% accurate.
- wesapien 3y ago
  no system is perfect but twitter is much better now. i'd rather support "not progressives" than progressives.

donmcronald 3y ago

I've always thought it would be neat if there were loosely affiliated communities that host as an API only with a standard front end for the UI. So I run 'example.com', but only serve (ex:) content via JSON. Allow competing implementations of the API on AWS, Cloudflare, self-hosted, etc.. Then let UIs like Apollo act like an aggregator and an OIDC provider for their users. The API side could moderate their own content and restrict access to UIs that play nice and the UIs could refuse to surface content from API sides that suck. The only thing Reddit has going for it IMO is the uniform UI across communities and they seem determined to make that a crappy experience from what I've seen.

wahnfrieden 3y ago
I’m building it with both web and native Mac/iOS, on top of mostly rss for static friendliness. White labeled web and Apple App Store native SwiftUI deployments. Offline friendly
madeofpalk 3y ago
This is kind of more or less what ActivityPub and/or 'Mastodon compatible API' is to be honest.
TkTech 3y ago
You just described the ActivityPub universe. There are quite a few servers that are minimal ux or api only, and there are a ton of clients that allow you to use multiple servers on whatever platform you want, with mobile, desktop, and web clients.
rovr138 3y ago
> So I run 'example.com', but only serve (ex:) content via JSON. Allow competing implementations of the API on AWS, Cloudflare, self-hosted, etc.. Then let UIs like Apollo act like an aggregator and an OIDC provider for their users. Reddit has something like this, but definitely not as intentional, - https://www.reddit.com/r/all/.json https://www.reddit.com/r/all/.json - https://www.reddit.com/r/all/.rss https://www.reddit.com/r/all/.rss - https://www.reddit.com/r/all/.xml https://www.reddit.com/r/all/.xml >The only thing Reddit has going for it IMO is the uniform UI across communities and they seem determined to make that a crappy experience from what I've seen. Old reddit had stylesheets and they could be very interesting. I still prefer that over the current thing they built.

dang 3y ago

> I believe HN has around 1.5-2.5 million HN has about 5M unique monthly users depending on how you count them.

searchableguy 3y ago
Really? How many users perform any writes monthly? I only see a couple thousand people actively comment or vote.
- klooney 3y ago
  The usual ratio is pretty crazy, like 99 to 1.
  - TylerE 3y ago
    The way I've usually seen it states is that 10% of your users will comment, and 10% of that 10% will start new threads/posts.
    - daemoens 3y ago
      Easier to just say 10% comment, 1% posts.
      - dayjaby 3y ago
        That describes my usage pretty well. Dang, no comments from me on the next 9 articles.
        deafpolygon 3y ago
        Can't comment on 9 in an hour anyways. You get rate-limited on HN. :)
        barefootcoder 3y ago

pyuser583 3y ago

I don’t do 4chan, but I know people IRL who do. They seem to think it’s pretty good. Is there a chance it’s getting better?

Ulus 3y ago
I’ve used it off and on since 2005 and /b/ has always been bad, while the tech and music boards have been pretty good.
- pyuser583 3y ago
  Seems tech neighborhoods are pretty good everywhere. Twitter and Reddit tech neighborhoods have good reputations.
yoshamano 3y ago
4chan will never "get better" because if that happens it'll cease to be 4chan as we know it. /b/ has always been an open pit sewer that the occasional nugget of gold flows through. /trv/ is where I like to hang out, but /pol/ can't help itself and likes to crap-post in there on the regular. /gif/ and it's blue board, "safe for work," version /wsg/ are fun to browse, but the 4chanX extension and some filters are needed to hide a lot of the trolling and truly awful stuff while browsing.
- pyuser583 3y ago
  Are these things like subreddits?
  - yoshamano 3y ago
    Yes. On 4chan they're called boards. Some boards are focused on particular content. Other boards are focused on the type of media posted. /b/ = random /trv/ = travel /pol/ = politically incorrect /gif/ = .gif and .webm files /wsg/ = the work safe version of /gif/ (its toned down but still not actually safe for work)
3y ago

emodendroket 3y ago

> Also be aware that Reddit's community is different than Facebook, Twitter, YouTube; they're a lot more tech-savvy, a lot more anonymous, favor NSFW a lot more, and a lot more anti-corporate. Especially the moderators, who honestly control most of the community (though it's usually a bad thing). We're going to need those moderators to prevent the Apollo social network from becoming the next 4chan (because, hopefully you understand, that's a bad thing) You’re describing Reddit ten years ago. There’s not really a “typical Reddit user” at this point it’s so big. All kinds of people are on it and most of them are not techies with a particular ideological bent.

pcthrowaway 3y ago
You can still be anonymous on Reddit, unlike facebook, which comes with good and bad. I think it's true that Reddit leans more towards supporting internet privacy initiatives, net neutrality, etc. whereas facebook users often have no awareness of these issues in the first place. But at the same time, no requirement to associate with a real-world identity means there are more sockpuppet accounts, more astroturfing, etc.

hardware2win 3y ago

>i believe HN has around 1.5-2.5 million and the What? Id say max 50k

rat9988 3y ago

> I believe HN has around 1.5-2.5 million and the content here is way better than Reddit. I have to heavily disagree with this. Reddit content is way better in both quality and quantity. The only thing worse is maybe the Signal to noise ratio, and even that is questionable. For example, askHistorians is a gem. Many subreddits are very useful. Moreover, for many questions, I find myself adding "reddit" on google. Not once have I needed it to find useful content on hacker news.

fooker 3y ago
>For example, askHistorians is a gem. Ask about anything remotely controversial, and you'll see how quickly it's an echo chamber.
- fknorangesite 3y ago
  > you'll see how quickly ~~it's an echo chamber.~~ requires sources
red-iron-pine 3y ago
I'm convinced askHistorians is mostly for the same people asking and answering their own questions
- deroanth 3y ago
  Just in case you're not joking: if that were the case, there would be few-to-no questions with no responses, but there are plenty of those. I won't deny it's possible there is some of that, but I doubt it's all that common.
johnnyanmac 3y ago
>for many questions, I find myself adding "reddit" on google. I do it more out of necessity than because reddit is a good site. You get into a niche enough subject and your choice is either a small subreddit or delving into the artifacts of the early internet like GameFaqs, Deviant Art, or some new site forums (the ones that still exist). I Still need to take a grain of salt and check if the redditor isn't blowing hot air or isn't on some unhinged rant. HN is great but focused on very specific, technical contetnt. Not gonna be much oppurtunity to talk about media or craft hobbies here.

wesapien 3y ago

4chan is indeed not the ideal but the current reddit isn't ideal either because it leans too much progressive. i would like to prune both extremes.

johnnyanmac 3y ago

>We're going to need those moderators to prevent the Apollo social network from becoming the next 4chan (because, hopefully you understand, that's a bad thing) TBH, 4chan these days are nowhere near the days when it was known as the boogieman of the internet. Still stuck with language that wouldn't last 10 seconds on Twitter or even Reddit, but we're not talking about a doxxing/harassment hub anymore. Or at least, no more a hub for that than Twitter/Reddit.