7 ms·

Rather than shut down, it would be a great time for all these clients to get together and decide on an official alternative site to reddit, and start supporting

by dilap 3y ago

Rather than shut down, it would be a great time for all these clients to get together and decide on an official alternative site to reddit, and start supporting that. If they did it en-masse and in a coordinated fashion, it might be enough social momentum to achieve escape velocity on the new site.

graypegg 3y ago
What’s out there? I genuinely don’t know of any that would fit the Reddit data model.
- dilap 3y ago
  Yeah I don't know either. How hard could it be to build though? I say that half-jokingly... Is the reddit API complex?
  - 1270018080 3y ago
    I doubt the API would be complicated, the issue will be in all of the little QoL/scaling features: moderator settings, automoderation bots, hosting photos and videos in a scalable way. I imagine behind the scenes bot/spam detection is an entire engineering team.
    - graypegg 3y ago
      Yep, definitely. The API was only a small sample of the actual business logic inside the Reddit site as a whole.
      - alvarezbjm-hn 3y ago
        You are talking in past tense. Reddit is not dead, yet. The couple communities I participate in ("top 5%") aren't aware of anything happening
- gs17 3y ago
  There's Lemmy, not perfect but it is designed to be Reddit-ish.
- fencepost 3y ago
  The comments I've seen have included Lemmy (caveat: apparently some concerns about the devs, default instance and policies) or kbin both of which are ActivityPub capable.
willcipriano 3y ago
Build a alternative reddit api that is 1:1 and then wire that up to alternative content sources? RSS to start as a POC?
- intothemild 3y ago
  Not the worst idea.... Build an API that sits as a middleman to reddits api, it's paid for... But caches requests to cut costs. Possibly use some amount of web scraping too
nullindividual 3y ago
Reddit already purchased one of these apps and 'improved' upon it over the years. I don't see why they would feel the need to purchase another app.
- dilap 3y ago
  I meant go the other way -- the apps band together and all decide to support some alternative backend, instead of the official reddit. Ultimately it's the users that make a site valuable, and the clients seem to have a lot more goodwill than reddit itself right now. Of course, "just add a backend" is easier said than done! But not unachievable.
mort96 3y ago
Building an alternative to Reddit is actually incredibly hard, especially if you suddenly get a huge influx of new users. Not talking about the technical side of things, but the community. How should the developers of these clients feel certain that whatever alternative they decide to endorse won't end up like Voat?
- x0x0 3y ago
  Building an alternative to reddit generally is quite hard. Building a single subreddit (or handful, if they're interrelated) alternative seems way more doable. See eg thedonald which transitioned to an external forum until a mod shut it down because of (not really sure, I didn't follow, but it was a working site for a couple years.)
  - wincy 3y ago
    It’s still there. It’s just at patriots.win now. Although upvotes vary between 100 and 1,000 so, much smaller than it was on Reddit where you’d easily get 10,000+ upvotes.
    - brookst 3y ago
      So like 1 to 10 real people, where it used to be 100?
      - wincy 3y ago
        Sure whatever makes you feel better about depersonalizing the millions of people who voted for Trump.
  - johnnyanmac 3y ago
    I'd be interested. If there was something that was even 1% as large as r/games I'd be fine weaning off. Hopefully a community that isn't hellbent on bashing anything that isn't a console game. Most of my tech subs are covered pretty well here, but not media.
- 3y ago
jelling 3y ago
The problem with Reddit as a business is that they have the least profitable users of any social platform. So one would have to build a backend, incentive the app makers to switch, get advertisers and do it all more cost efficiently than Reddit does it. That’s a small needle to thread.
- brookst 3y ago
  The business model can't be "become a giant social network that makes billions and employs tens of thousands of people." If the whole thing is lean, with minimal costs, no account reps, and essentially non-profit, it's a lot easier. Of course, that means it goes one of two ways: 1. Never gets traction, dies after a bunch of work 2. Takes off and the people controlling it (rightfully) want to be compensated for their hard work, so they start adding advertising and focusing on monetization, which requires hiring more people, which requires a more mature business model, which heads towards IPO.
YetAnotherNick 3y ago
The simple fact is that you need money to host a site, to have moderation, to develop and maintain features etc. The problem apps are shutting down is because they don't want to loose money. If they make a new site, they will likely loose even more money. And they likely can't get profitable without resorting to same scummy behaviour as reddit.
- peanuty1 3y ago
  Reddit moderators are unpaid volunteers.
  - elbigbad 3y ago
    And among the worst sorts of people imaginable. Maybe they should be paid positions that are interviewed for and regularly undergo performance reviews.
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  >The problem apps are shutting down is because they don't want to loose money. If they make a new site, they will likely loose even more money. Given the quotes I heard, I'd be very surprised if you lost more money in say, 2 years of building and hosting a new site than trying to even support a month of API calls from reddit c. July 2023. You can certainly make a decent front end for little cost (even if we're talking about paying competitive rates to a few talented mobile devs) and a small backend won't cost much more. It's always about the community to gather to make all that work. That's the hard part.
vanilla_nut 3y ago
Combining tons of disparate web forums under a single toxic leadership is what caused these issues in the first place. I would far prefer either something federated (in the Fediverse sense) or a decent lightweight reddit alternative with no shared accounts, and thus less incentive for karma farming and voting manipulation. Coincidentally, the forum we're commenting on right now uses a fork of the original Reddit codebase, and shares a small amount of DNA with old.reddit.com. I'd love to see something like HN for all of my favorite hobbies. But I'd also settle for a return to a healthy ecosystem of web forums. What is old is new again!
- robocat 3y ago
  > Coincidentally, the forum we're commenting on right now uses a fork of the original Reddit codebase The current codebase was developed from scratch - zero forking - from what I can see. HN is written in ARC http://www.paulgraham.com/arc.html http://www.paulgraham.com/arc.html which is a language designed by Paul Graham. Here’s a thread talking about the early days of HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27452276 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27452276 and it mentions “The earliest version of HN I can find; 166 LOC” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=723767 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=723767 Here’s Paul talking about the release of HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/hackernews.html https://news.ycombinator.com/hackernews.html AFAIK this is the latest public copy of the HN code, but it is significantly outdated: https://github.com/wting/hackernews/blob/master/news.arc https://github.com/wting/hackernews/blob/master/news.arc
  - robocat 3y ago
    https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit1.0 https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit1.0 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36367241 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36367241
jjcm 3y ago
I have an unlaunched open source reddit alternative. Before I go into that too much though, note that there are a bunch: https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/ https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/ My vision: Free to browse, subscription to interact. You choose your subscription amount. I take $1 to run the server, anything beyond that gets split evenly between everything you upvote that month. For the $1, I give 30% of the cut to any 3rd party app that user is using. With this model, creators make money, and the site hopefully is self-sufficient without ads. Right now I have a working website, backend, payments, and payouts. What I don't have is a mobile app. If anyone is interested and wants to partner, my email is in my profile. Site: https://non.io https://non.io (feel free to play around with login hackernews, pw: helloworld) Github: https://github.com/jjcm/nonio https://github.com/jjcm/nonio API: https://api.non.io https://api.non.io (slightly outdated, I need to do an update pass here)
- cyclotron3k 3y ago
  Seems like it's not really a drop-in replacement for Reddit - looks more like a Deviant Art or a YouTube replacement to me? A lot of Reddit (like HN) is linking to 3rd party content, and not much of it is actually user-generated OC. Nice site though - it looks really nice.
  - jjcm 3y ago
    This is 100% correct! I'm prioritizing self-hosted OC over external linking, mainly because my priority was finding a way to reward creators. Allowing external links would be fairly trivial, but I'd have to think through the monetization aspects of that. Not sure if I have the right model, but my hope is that since it's open source even if I go wrong someone else can find the right one. Also thank you for the kind words about the design - it's been a fun labor of love.
    - cl1nk 3y ago
      Start promoting this soon, if you gain traction in the NSFW subreddits, this would blow up
duxup 3y ago
Their apps are great but I don’t think the issues of funding, advertising, moderation, and content are things that they aren’t necessarily good at.
brookst 3y ago
It's an interesting idea. If it were going to work in just a few weeks, I think you'd need a replacement that is API-compatible with Reddit, so clients can just change their URI and have everything just work. I can't think of anything too difficult there. The hard part would probably be the anti-spam and other anti-abuse stuff that lives entirely server side. Maybe all it is IS the API endpoint, at least to start, so only the mobile clients can access? Doesn't solve abuse but mitigates it.
mikae1 3y ago
> an official alternative site to reddit It's important that it's not an alternative, or else we'll be in this situation again a few years from now. https://join-lemmy.org https://join-lemmy.org will allow us to create a network of sites (or instances) that are still able speak to one another.
ekanes 3y ago
100% -- the only reason reddit might get away with such terrible behavior is if people have nowhere to go. :(

by dilap 3y ago

graypegg 3y ago

What’s out there? I genuinely don’t know of any that would fit the Reddit data model.

dilap 3y ago
Yeah I don't know either. How hard could it be to build though? I say that half-jokingly... Is the reddit API complex?
- 1270018080 3y ago
  I doubt the API would be complicated, the issue will be in all of the little QoL/scaling features: moderator settings, automoderation bots, hosting photos and videos in a scalable way. I imagine behind the scenes bot/spam detection is an entire engineering team.
  - graypegg 3y ago
    Yep, definitely. The API was only a small sample of the actual business logic inside the Reddit site as a whole.
    - alvarezbjm-hn 3y ago
      You are talking in past tense. Reddit is not dead, yet. The couple communities I participate in ("top 5%") aren't aware of anything happening
gs17 3y ago
There's Lemmy, not perfect but it is designed to be Reddit-ish.
fencepost 3y ago
The comments I've seen have included Lemmy (caveat: apparently some concerns about the devs, default instance and policies) or kbin both of which are ActivityPub capable.

willcipriano 3y ago

Build a alternative reddit api that is 1:1 and then wire that up to alternative content sources? RSS to start as a POC?

intothemild 3y ago
Not the worst idea.... Build an API that sits as a middleman to reddits api, it's paid for... But caches requests to cut costs. Possibly use some amount of web scraping too

nullindividual 3y ago

Reddit already purchased one of these apps and 'improved' upon it over the years. I don't see why they would feel the need to purchase another app.

dilap 3y ago
I meant go the other way -- the apps band together and all decide to support some alternative backend, instead of the official reddit. Ultimately it's the users that make a site valuable, and the clients seem to have a lot more goodwill than reddit itself right now. Of course, "just add a backend" is easier said than done! But not unachievable.

mort96 3y ago

Building an alternative to Reddit is actually incredibly hard, especially if you suddenly get a huge influx of new users. Not talking about the technical side of things, but the community. How should the developers of these clients feel certain that whatever alternative they decide to endorse won't end up like Voat?

x0x0 3y ago
Building an alternative to reddit generally is quite hard. Building a single subreddit (or handful, if they're interrelated) alternative seems way more doable. See eg thedonald which transitioned to an external forum until a mod shut it down because of (not really sure, I didn't follow, but it was a working site for a couple years.)
- wincy 3y ago
  It’s still there. It’s just at patriots.win now. Although upvotes vary between 100 and 1,000 so, much smaller than it was on Reddit where you’d easily get 10,000+ upvotes.
  - brookst 3y ago
    So like 1 to 10 real people, where it used to be 100?
    - wincy 3y ago
      Sure whatever makes you feel better about depersonalizing the millions of people who voted for Trump.
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  I'd be interested. If there was something that was even 1% as large as r/games I'd be fine weaning off. Hopefully a community that isn't hellbent on bashing anything that isn't a console game. Most of my tech subs are covered pretty well here, but not media.
3y ago

jelling 3y ago

The problem with Reddit as a business is that they have the least profitable users of any social platform. So one would have to build a backend, incentive the app makers to switch, get advertisers and do it all more cost efficiently than Reddit does it. That’s a small needle to thread.

brookst 3y ago
The business model can't be "become a giant social network that makes billions and employs tens of thousands of people." If the whole thing is lean, with minimal costs, no account reps, and essentially non-profit, it's a lot easier. Of course, that means it goes one of two ways: 1. Never gets traction, dies after a bunch of work 2. Takes off and the people controlling it (rightfully) want to be compensated for their hard work, so they start adding advertising and focusing on monetization, which requires hiring more people, which requires a more mature business model, which heads towards IPO.

YetAnotherNick 3y ago

The simple fact is that you need money to host a site, to have moderation, to develop and maintain features etc. The problem apps are shutting down is because they don't want to loose money. If they make a new site, they will likely loose even more money. And they likely can't get profitable without resorting to same scummy behaviour as reddit.

peanuty1 3y ago
Reddit moderators are unpaid volunteers.
- elbigbad 3y ago
  And among the worst sorts of people imaginable. Maybe they should be paid positions that are interviewed for and regularly undergo performance reviews.
johnnyanmac 3y ago
>The problem apps are shutting down is because they don't want to loose money. If they make a new site, they will likely loose even more money. Given the quotes I heard, I'd be very surprised if you lost more money in say, 2 years of building and hosting a new site than trying to even support a month of API calls from reddit c. July 2023. You can certainly make a decent front end for little cost (even if we're talking about paying competitive rates to a few talented mobile devs) and a small backend won't cost much more. It's always about the community to gather to make all that work. That's the hard part.

vanilla_nut 3y ago

Combining tons of disparate web forums under a single toxic leadership is what caused these issues in the first place. I would far prefer either something federated (in the Fediverse sense) or a decent lightweight reddit alternative with no shared accounts, and thus less incentive for karma farming and voting manipulation. Coincidentally, the forum we're commenting on right now uses a fork of the original Reddit codebase, and shares a small amount of DNA with old.reddit.com. I'd love to see something like HN for all of my favorite hobbies. But I'd also settle for a return to a healthy ecosystem of web forums. What is old is new again!

robocat 3y ago
> Coincidentally, the forum we're commenting on right now uses a fork of the original Reddit codebase The current codebase was developed from scratch - zero forking - from what I can see. HN is written in ARC http://www.paulgraham.com/arc.html http://www.paulgraham.com/arc.html which is a language designed by Paul Graham. Here’s a thread talking about the early days of HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27452276 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27452276 and it mentions “The earliest version of HN I can find; 166 LOC” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=723767 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=723767 Here’s Paul talking about the release of HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/hackernews.html https://news.ycombinator.com/hackernews.html AFAIK this is the latest public copy of the HN code, but it is significantly outdated: https://github.com/wting/hackernews/blob/master/news.arc https://github.com/wting/hackernews/blob/master/news.arc
- robocat 3y ago
  https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit1.0 https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit1.0 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36367241 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36367241

jjcm 3y ago

I have an unlaunched open source reddit alternative. Before I go into that too much though, note that there are a bunch: https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/ https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/ My vision: Free to browse, subscription to interact. You choose your subscription amount. I take $1 to run the server, anything beyond that gets split evenly between everything you upvote that month. For the $1, I give 30% of the cut to any 3rd party app that user is using. With this model, creators make money, and the site hopefully is self-sufficient without ads. Right now I have a working website, backend, payments, and payouts. What I don't have is a mobile app. If anyone is interested and wants to partner, my email is in my profile. Site: https://non.io https://non.io (feel free to play around with login hackernews, pw: helloworld) Github: https://github.com/jjcm/nonio https://github.com/jjcm/nonio API: https://api.non.io https://api.non.io (slightly outdated, I need to do an update pass here)

cyclotron3k 3y ago
Seems like it's not really a drop-in replacement for Reddit - looks more like a Deviant Art or a YouTube replacement to me? A lot of Reddit (like HN) is linking to 3rd party content, and not much of it is actually user-generated OC. Nice site though - it looks really nice.
- jjcm 3y ago
  This is 100% correct! I'm prioritizing self-hosted OC over external linking, mainly because my priority was finding a way to reward creators. Allowing external links would be fairly trivial, but I'd have to think through the monetization aspects of that. Not sure if I have the right model, but my hope is that since it's open source even if I go wrong someone else can find the right one. Also thank you for the kind words about the design - it's been a fun labor of love.
  - cl1nk 3y ago
    Start promoting this soon, if you gain traction in the NSFW subreddits, this would blow up

duxup 3y ago

Their apps are great but I don’t think the issues of funding, advertising, moderation, and content are things that they aren’t necessarily good at.

brookst 3y ago

It's an interesting idea. If it were going to work in just a few weeks, I think you'd need a replacement that is API-compatible with Reddit, so clients can just change their URI and have everything just work. I can't think of anything too difficult there. The hard part would probably be the anti-spam and other anti-abuse stuff that lives entirely server side. Maybe all it is IS the API endpoint, at least to start, so only the mobile clients can access? Doesn't solve abuse but mitigates it.

mikae1 3y ago

> an official alternative site to reddit It's important that it's not an alternative, or else we'll be in this situation again a few years from now. https://join-lemmy.org https://join-lemmy.org will allow us to create a network of sites (or instances) that are still able speak to one another.

ekanes 3y ago

100% -- the only reason reddit might get away with such terrible behavior is if people have nowhere to go. :(