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Why is it such a problem to create a reddit clone? I’m assuming it’s the user base; most attempts I’ve seen are either empty or focus on non-mainstream and oft
by thih9 3y ago
Why is it such a problem to create a reddit clone?
I’m assuming it’s the user base; most attempts I’ve seen are either empty or focus on non-mainstream and often controversial content.
Are there ways to address that? Or is there something else?
- regecks 3y agoThere is years and years and years of amazing content and community on Reddit. Rallying people around a replacement looks challenging. I am hopeful that it happens.
- hkt 3y agoLemmy is pretty good, and is working towards full activitypub federation: https://join-lemmy.org/ https://join-lemmy.org/ As for the usage.. there's some, but it is niche. The average user just won't move unless something goes from so-so-satisfactory to offensive. This is how mastodon got its (seemingly brief) user spike.
- DoItToMe81 3y agoLemmy's community is one of the worst I've seen. I'd stay away.
- holler 3y agoThere are dozens of Reddit clones, many have come and gone. In my eyes they don't work because they aren't novel or innovative. There's no reason to switch for the average user.
- wkat4242 3y agoNo, but they are now rapidly making reasons for users to move.
- cabalamat 3y agoIt's mostly the user base. An idea: Twitter has lots of users, maybe Elon could build Reddit-like features into it.
- tayo42 3y agoInternally Twitter was trying to figure this out for awhile. Before Elon
- Gunnerhead 3y agoWould love to read/learn more about this.
- ronsor 3y agoI've written three of them. It's not technically difficult, but good luck getting people to actually use it (and if you do, you may end up with a userbase worse than 4chan).
- paulddraper 3y agoThere have been many redit clones. And they've been about as successful as Google plus. It's indeed the community.
- raziel2701 3y agoThe clones that drew the most attention all ended up becoming right-wing cesspools. I remember they were often created because of free-speech absolutism which was code for "I want to express hateful views without consequence".
- iguana_lawyer 3y agoYou nailed it
- xtracto 3y agoWhatever happened to voat? I think one problem people here underestimate is the cost of running the required infra. I seem to remember voat fell under it's own weight?
- DoItToMe81 3y agoVoat was hijacked by neonazi communities that used bots to massively pre-register popular community names and effectively prevent anyone outside of their circle from using the site. It also was absolutely full of tech issues and spent at least a quarter of its first few years down.
- dmckeon 3y agoOne could argue that, from the point-of-view of a reader, Reddit is a clone of Usenet, or Fido, or BBSes. Not the back-ends, of course, but the UIs, the organic growth of communities, the community spirit that often develops, the meta-arguments about policies, moderation, moderators.
- tezgon 3y agoIf someone makes a new usenet I can die happy. Honestly hoping for reddit to crumble, I'd have a lot more time each day to spend on useful things
- vogt 3y ago[flagged]
- bluedemon 3y agoI'd like to see the 3rd party app developers collaborate to build a reddit clone. They got a good user base combined.
- cmsj 3y agoIf you think about Reddit as each of its subreddits being little islands, each island has a timeline of user posts, each post has a tree of comments, and there are moderators who enforce the rules of that island. To me that starts to sound a lot like each subreddit could be replicated as an instance of something like Mastodon, and you're really only some kind of shared user database away from being able to make something that functions exactly like Reddit, but without any corporate control.
- byhemechi 3y agoThe problem with that is that you need to spend money to either host your own instance or pay someone else to do it for you. Most people are tech-illiterate and do not want to pay to host something which doesnt even reach the threshold to be a "hobby"
- nitia 3y agoYou just reinvented lemmy
- shitlord 3y agoWhen you create an alternative to big tech sites, you end up with the people who can't or won't use big tech sites. It's usually the former, and they suck. You get Nazis, commies, anarchists, and all the sorts of people whose posts you don't want to see between memes and cute animal pictures. It takes effort to prevent these people from taking over your website and driving away the normies.
- scarface_74 3y agoEither you have a free for all with no moderation that will be toxic to the mainstream and impossible to monetize or you end up with Reddit again.
- raincole 3y agoI think you quite underestimate how large Reddit community is. It became "the default community" for most topics.
- pellucidar 3y agoI wouldn’t go that far. Often there’s a bigger and/or better community elsewhere, but the Reddit one is also passable because so many people are on Reddit.