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Three big issues off the top of my head: * Hosting costs. Reddit was very lucky to have imgur pick up a lot of its bandwidth in its early days, but free image/

Three big issues off the top of my head: * Hosting costs. Reddit was very lucky to have imgur pick up a lot of its bandwidth in its early days, but free image/video hosting sites are cyclical: absent a benevolent billionaire, the costs will rise with popularity, and the site will eventually need a source of revenue, which will introduce friction and start its inevitable decline in popularity. * Moderation. Always a highwire tightrope act. Most Reddit spin-offs of the past several years have been focused on minimizing moderation, which ends up attracting people who tend to get banned from other places before the site gets a chance to form its own identity and pick up steam. * Network effects, which are basically a lottery. You can have a scalable service with great UI, and a solid moderation story, but you still need to get lucky and catch lightning in a bottle to take off. This is common knowledge, which makes it even harder to justify starting to develop or use a new social medium. Personally, I like places like HN, which focus on good moderation without trying to scale up. We are blessed to have dang, but if the site were structured more like Reddit or a forum with different boards, I bet it would become unmanageable very quickly.

UpToTheSky 3y ago
Hosting costs: Let's start with text only. Moderation: True, that's hard. But maybe piggybacking on HN's karma points could solve it? Network effects: Do we really need many users to make something useful?
marcod 3y ago
If the hosting entity is in the US don't forget lawyer fees ....
- tantalor 3y ago
  Or if you have EU users
  - viraptor 3y ago
    That doesn't apply by default. While the US is enabling people to be more litigious, EU will mostly slap you with fines for doing bad things. You have the option to... not do bad things. (Yes, I'm sure there's some odd counterexample somewhere, but this holds in general)
    - YetAnotherNick 3y ago
      The problem is law doesn't fine for doing bad things, it fines for breaking the law which is not exactly the same. In my previous company for a project we had to hire lawyer for more than a week just to determine if we were breaking law, even though the site didn't do any bad things by normal people standard. In the end the suggestion was to just slap a consent form with consent rejection redirecting to some other site, which didn't made sense to me, but yeah that's what the law says.
    - tester457 3y ago
      > this holds in general Way too complex to navigate that minefield, lawyer fees will be a big hit on the budget of any reddit challenger.
Finnucane 3y ago
HN is functionally like a single topic forum, which makes it a little easier to have rules about what is generally allowable content. Many single topic forums still exist, though in recent years have had to take a back seat to Reddit et al. Maybe if Reddit goes completely to pot, people will look them up again.
jimnotgym 3y ago
> Personally, I like places like HN What are those places?
- mtmail 3y ago
  "Ask HN: Sites with the quality of Hacker News, but for more general topics?" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34302827 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34302827) lists a couple. There's regular "what is the HN of <insert industry>" Ask HN questions, somebody would make a list.
- jstarfish 3y ago
  Metafilter.
EdwardDiego 3y ago
Network effect is the biggest one IMO.
sterlind 3y ago
> Most Reddit spin-offs of the past several years have been focused on minimizing moderation, which ends up attracting people who tend to get banned from other places before the site gets a chance to form its own identity and pick up steam. Mastodon is a good example and counterexample of this trend. Gab was the biggest Mastodon instance, largely populated by the kinds of people pre-Musk Twitter banned or limited (and their followers.) But the second (post-Musk) wave wasn't people who got banned, it was people leaving because they didn't like Musk and/or his changes to Twitter. And Reddit's own userbase came from Digg in much the same way. Imagine if Mastodon had been easy to migrate to, Twitter would have collapsed like a popped balloon. Reddit has a natural administrative/scalability partition boundary though, which makes federation much easier. I think a federated reddit would work better than Mastodon has.
- rjbwork 3y ago
  >Reddit has a natural administrative/scalability partition boundary though, which makes federation much easier. I think a federated reddit would work better than Mastodon has. To the point that quite a number of subreddits that have been banned, or that have been voluntarily shut down, have already set up their own clones on their own domains. t_d, drama, and fds are three notable examples that I can think of off the top of my heads.

UpToTheSky 3y ago

Hosting costs: Let's start with text only. Moderation: True, that's hard. But maybe piggybacking on HN's karma points could solve it? Network effects: Do we really need many users to make something useful?

marcod 3y ago

If the hosting entity is in the US don't forget lawyer fees ....

tantalor 3y ago
Or if you have EU users
- viraptor 3y ago
  That doesn't apply by default. While the US is enabling people to be more litigious, EU will mostly slap you with fines for doing bad things. You have the option to... not do bad things. (Yes, I'm sure there's some odd counterexample somewhere, but this holds in general)
  - YetAnotherNick 3y ago
    The problem is law doesn't fine for doing bad things, it fines for breaking the law which is not exactly the same. In my previous company for a project we had to hire lawyer for more than a week just to determine if we were breaking law, even though the site didn't do any bad things by normal people standard. In the end the suggestion was to just slap a consent form with consent rejection redirecting to some other site, which didn't made sense to me, but yeah that's what the law says.
  - tester457 3y ago
    > this holds in general Way too complex to navigate that minefield, lawyer fees will be a big hit on the budget of any reddit challenger.

Finnucane 3y ago

HN is functionally like a single topic forum, which makes it a little easier to have rules about what is generally allowable content. Many single topic forums still exist, though in recent years have had to take a back seat to Reddit et al. Maybe if Reddit goes completely to pot, people will look them up again.

jimnotgym 3y ago

> Personally, I like places like HN What are those places?

mtmail 3y ago
"Ask HN: Sites with the quality of Hacker News, but for more general topics?" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34302827 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34302827) lists a couple. There's regular "what is the HN of <insert industry>" Ask HN questions, somebody would make a list.
jstarfish 3y ago
Metafilter.

EdwardDiego 3y ago

Network effect is the biggest one IMO.

sterlind 3y ago

> Most Reddit spin-offs of the past several years have been focused on minimizing moderation, which ends up attracting people who tend to get banned from other places before the site gets a chance to form its own identity and pick up steam. Mastodon is a good example and counterexample of this trend. Gab was the biggest Mastodon instance, largely populated by the kinds of people pre-Musk Twitter banned or limited (and their followers.) But the second (post-Musk) wave wasn't people who got banned, it was people leaving because they didn't like Musk and/or his changes to Twitter. And Reddit's own userbase came from Digg in much the same way. Imagine if Mastodon had been easy to migrate to, Twitter would have collapsed like a popped balloon. Reddit has a natural administrative/scalability partition boundary though, which makes federation much easier. I think a federated reddit would work better than Mastodon has.

rjbwork 3y ago
>Reddit has a natural administrative/scalability partition boundary though, which makes federation much easier. I think a federated reddit would work better than Mastodon has. To the point that quite a number of subreddits that have been banned, or that have been voluntarily shut down, have already set up their own clones on their own domains. t_d, drama, and fds are three notable examples that I can think of off the top of my heads.