5 ms·

The people who would enjoy building a reddit really don't want to run a reddit. The people who want to run a reddit, shouldn't.

s1k3s 3y ago
I have a 1:1 clone of old.reddit in my PC already, I built it for fun a few months ago. It's a one week task for a senior web developer anyway. The thing is though, most people don't care about these changes and will continue to use reddit with their official apps. It's just not worth the stress IMO.
- KingOfCoders 3y ago
  And then there is IP blacklisting, prevent login after 5 tries, rate managing, all the edge cases ...
- mandmandam 3y ago
  > most people don't care about these changes and will continue to use reddit with their official apps. Yeah that's probably what the Digg execs said, and StumbleUpon, and the Myspace guys before that. "Most people" will take notice when the people who made Reddit worth looking at leave. It might linger for a while, with rehashed posts from bots and the like, but it's walking dead right now.
  - riku_iki 3y ago
    > Yeah that's probably what the Digg execs said, and StumbleUpon, and the Myspace guys before that. it was early days when audience consisted of internet geeks. Today its also a lot of casual users who may not care about api drama much.
  - polski-g 3y ago
    Reddit was worth looking at because the creators were literally starting up fake accounts to ask/answer questions. This could probably be automated with GPT in today's age to make Lemmy or whatever a possible migration path.
derefr 3y ago
Why would building it require running it? It's just software. There can be a separate installation of it per community. Like WordPress, or any old phpBB forum. > The people who want to run a reddit, shouldn't. The people who want to run something that's like Reddit.com, shouldn't, sure. I don't see why e.g. a YouTube content creator shouldn't be able to have "a Reddit" (i.e. a single-subreddit installation of Reddit) in the same sense that they have "a blog" or "a Discord." The whole point there is that it's a cult of personality, so the moderation incentives align with the user expectations. I also don't see why a community like /r/AskHistorians wouldn't be excellent at running "a Reddit" of their own. (In fact, that would be much better than currently, as they could run a very heavily modified fork of Reddit that uses a moderation queue for comments; requires that toplevel comments on posts are either follow-up questions [according to some LLM] or come from verified historian accounts; allows questions to be merged; etc. ...Hey, wait, that's just StackExchange!) Also, did you know that LessWrong.com used to be "a Reddit"? That is, it was a single-subreddit fork — I believe the only one ever allowed, as some one-off gesture — of the proprietary Reddit codebase. It worked pretty okay for that community! (Though it never received updates from "upstream", so it code-rotted, which is most of the reason they moved away from it. This wouldn't happen in an open-source Reddit project.)
- ris58h 3y ago
  > There can be a separate installation of it per community. "Reddit - Dive into anything". You will kill the UX with such separation.
  - derefr 3y ago
    I don't know what you think of Reddit as, but I think of it as two things: - a collection of independent niche communities that are just using Reddit for hosting, whose members don't think of themselves as visiting "Reddit" but rather as visiting those specific community forums. This is the valuable part of Reddit, that generates and gathers original content and novel discussions that can't be found anywhere else on the Internet. This is the part everyone's rushing to preserve/archive or migrate elsewhere. - a Usenet-like set of generic default-subscribed "category" subreddits, that just act as content aggregators to bubble up the "least controversial" stuff in each category from across the Internet. Nobody cares much about this (other than Reddit's investors), since it's just another view on the same content that gets surfaced through every other social network one way or another. If you think of Reddit as just the valuable part, and forget about the junk, then you can reinterpret the Reddit UX like so: Reddit just happens to have a single-pane-of-glass view for a feed of multiple communities' posts, just like Twitter has a single-pane-of-glass view for a feed of multiple accounts' posts. But 1. this isn't crucial to how users engage with these communities; and 2. you could preserve this property anyway, by having a shared SSO system (like how WordPress.com works) and by making Reddit-the-software federate its posts through ActivityPub. Then a "Reddit client" would actually just be a fancier kind of RSS reader that also knows how to post to individual communities' servers. But each server would still be "sovereign" over its own administration, being able to ban or approval-queue users, etc.
quaintdev 3y ago
People keep suggesting Lemmy but I think decentralized social media is preferred by technical people like us. But in real world only centralized social media seems to work. So why not adopt a model that will be good in the long run, how about something like Wikipedia non-profit Reddit alternative? Someone already did this [1] as stackoverlflow alternative [0]: https://codidact.com/ https://codidact.com/
- holler 3y ago
  There already is a wikipedia social network created by Jimmy Wales himself. https://wt.social https://wt.social
  - kkarakk 3y ago
    Serves a 500 error if you try to sign up
samstave 3y ago
And thus, 'reaperman's law was born.

s1k3s 3y ago

I have a 1:1 clone of old.reddit in my PC already, I built it for fun a few months ago. It's a one week task for a senior web developer anyway. The thing is though, most people don't care about these changes and will continue to use reddit with their official apps. It's just not worth the stress IMO.

KingOfCoders 3y ago
And then there is IP blacklisting, prevent login after 5 tries, rate managing, all the edge cases ...
mandmandam 3y ago
> most people don't care about these changes and will continue to use reddit with their official apps. Yeah that's probably what the Digg execs said, and StumbleUpon, and the Myspace guys before that. "Most people" will take notice when the people who made Reddit worth looking at leave. It might linger for a while, with rehashed posts from bots and the like, but it's walking dead right now.
- riku_iki 3y ago
  > Yeah that's probably what the Digg execs said, and StumbleUpon, and the Myspace guys before that. it was early days when audience consisted of internet geeks. Today its also a lot of casual users who may not care about api drama much.
- polski-g 3y ago
  Reddit was worth looking at because the creators were literally starting up fake accounts to ask/answer questions. This could probably be automated with GPT in today's age to make Lemmy or whatever a possible migration path.

derefr 3y ago

Why would building it require running it? It's just software. There can be a separate installation of it per community. Like WordPress, or any old phpBB forum. > The people who want to run a reddit, shouldn't. The people who want to run something that's like Reddit.com, shouldn't, sure. I don't see why e.g. a YouTube content creator shouldn't be able to have "a Reddit" (i.e. a single-subreddit installation of Reddit) in the same sense that they have "a blog" or "a Discord." The whole point there is that it's a cult of personality, so the moderation incentives align with the user expectations. I also don't see why a community like /r/AskHistorians wouldn't be excellent at running "a Reddit" of their own. (In fact, that would be much better than currently, as they could run a very heavily modified fork of Reddit that uses a moderation queue for comments; requires that toplevel comments on posts are either follow-up questions [according to some LLM] or come from verified historian accounts; allows questions to be merged; etc. ...Hey, wait, that's just StackExchange!) Also, did you know that LessWrong.com used to be "a Reddit"? That is, it was a single-subreddit fork — I believe the only one ever allowed, as some one-off gesture — of the proprietary Reddit codebase. It worked pretty okay for that community! (Though it never received updates from "upstream", so it code-rotted, which is most of the reason they moved away from it. This wouldn't happen in an open-source Reddit project.)

ris58h 3y ago
> There can be a separate installation of it per community. "Reddit - Dive into anything". You will kill the UX with such separation.
- derefr 3y ago
  I don't know what you think of Reddit as, but I think of it as two things: - a collection of independent niche communities that are just using Reddit for hosting, whose members don't think of themselves as visiting "Reddit" but rather as visiting those specific community forums. This is the valuable part of Reddit, that generates and gathers original content and novel discussions that can't be found anywhere else on the Internet. This is the part everyone's rushing to preserve/archive or migrate elsewhere. - a Usenet-like set of generic default-subscribed "category" subreddits, that just act as content aggregators to bubble up the "least controversial" stuff in each category from across the Internet. Nobody cares much about this (other than Reddit's investors), since it's just another view on the same content that gets surfaced through every other social network one way or another. If you think of Reddit as just the valuable part, and forget about the junk, then you can reinterpret the Reddit UX like so: Reddit just happens to have a single-pane-of-glass view for a feed of multiple communities' posts, just like Twitter has a single-pane-of-glass view for a feed of multiple accounts' posts. But 1. this isn't crucial to how users engage with these communities; and 2. you could preserve this property anyway, by having a shared SSO system (like how WordPress.com works) and by making Reddit-the-software federate its posts through ActivityPub. Then a "Reddit client" would actually just be a fancier kind of RSS reader that also knows how to post to individual communities' servers. But each server would still be "sovereign" over its own administration, being able to ban or approval-queue users, etc.

quaintdev 3y ago

People keep suggesting Lemmy but I think decentralized social media is preferred by technical people like us. But in real world only centralized social media seems to work. So why not adopt a model that will be good in the long run, how about something like Wikipedia non-profit Reddit alternative? Someone already did this [1] as stackoverlflow alternative [0]: https://codidact.com/ https://codidact.com/

holler 3y ago
There already is a wikipedia social network created by Jimmy Wales himself. https://wt.social https://wt.social
- kkarakk 3y ago
  Serves a 500 error if you try to sign up

samstave 3y ago

And thus, 'reaperman's law was born.