4 ms·

100% agree with everything said here. My original plan was to pay for ~100 users accounts and seed the site with content for a proper launch. Given what's happ

by jjcm 3y ago

100% agree with everything said here. My original plan was to pay for ~100 users accounts and seed the site with content for a proper launch. Given what's happening today though, it felt at least pertinent to show off the current state and get some feedback. The balance between splash page on landing / landing on content is a hard one, but I think you're right. I am worried though that without conveying the initial business model, it'll be harder for users to understand that this isn't a direct reddit clone.

biorach 3y ago
maybe make the first 10,000 or 100,000 accounts free for life? you need to build momentum somehow maybe summarise what your users need to understand in a sidebar or closeable top-bar?
- all2 3y ago
  You could also incentivize early adopters. For example, if you're in the first 100k users, your money/upvote goes twice as far. Something like that.
  - aerio 3y ago
    Or something like, seed quality content for rewards (post links that end up getting lots of upvotes = free subscription) sounds pretty close to OPs original idea anyway, just give better terms for early adopters.
PMunch 3y ago
To be honest I don't completely agree. The business model itself is what makes thin interesting, not to users, but to creators. Take me for example, I write tech articles from time to time, and the occasional video, presentation, or coding live stream. As it stands I don't make any money on this, I just do it for fun. But with a site like non.io there's no reason for me _not_ to post my content there. As long as you get some publicity out there (like you're doing with this) creators should hopefully start contributing. And once the creators are there, so will the users be! I agree though that the splash page is a bit strange, maybe throw up a popup over the content for people who aren't logged in and haven't visited the site before? Or at least put this info in a sidebar. The business model is as you say the core value proposition here, so if people don't get it right away the interest could quickly fade. Wish you the best of luck with this. And I'll look into posting my stuff on there as well, as I said there really isn't any reason not to
- yywwbbn 3y ago
  > As it stands I don't make any money on this, I just do it for fun. But with a site like non.io there's no reason for me _not_ to post my content there. I’m obviously not targeting this at you but a business model likes this (paying fractions of a penny per upvote) is not likely to attract high quality content. In fact the opposite it incentives a quantity over quality approach (i.e. content has to be just good enough to get upvoted spending more effort is wasted)
  - jdironman 3y ago
    Niche groups, high quality content, users who don't upvote everything I think is the goal. Not up voting 100 cat videos or memes and then wishing you could upvote a post that really helps you out on something or leads to good discussion. I think it tries to place weight on your upvote to mean more than just ticking something up but remind you that you are putting your money into someone's else's pocket and has what they provided you with worth it? It'd small enough that you don't feel like you're out too much monthly, but probably big enough for posts with upvotes in the thousands to give back to quality content creators (haven't done any math but yeah)
    - PMunch 3y ago
      Exactly. Of course everyone used Reddit differently, but personally I basically never upvoted anything unless I really enjoyed it. The big question for me would be what happens to my funds if I don't upvote anyone in a given month, do they roll-over to the next month? Do they go to server management? Do they go into a separate pool to do something else fun with? In a way Reddit did distinguish their usual "this content is better than the one below" upvote with "this is amazing content" by giving Reddit gold. A similar system could be used here. One thing that made Reddit great was that since people up (and maybe more importantly) downvoted content good stuff would float to the top. It would be pretty bad if upvotes where too meaningful as that would drive away engagement.
  - alvarezbjm-hn 3y ago
    What if there was a large button for upvote, and beside a smaller button for 100x upvote? Regular users can upvote 100 cat pictures for their dopamine hit, and when they find an ACTUALLY VALUABLE post they can look for the small button.
ryandrake 3y ago
I think if the product itself is a web page, then the root www.domain.name needs to point to the product itself, not a description of the product. Imagine if I went to www.amazon.com and instead of the store, that page was a marketing template listing Amazon's business case and a few screenshots of what shopping at Amazon looks like. IMO the only good reason to have a marketing/business-case landing page is if the product itself hasn't been built yet. Once the product exists, move the marketing page over to /about
- pbhjpbhj 3y ago
  For a forum you could have a story/post be your about page and just sticky it initially.
root_axis 3y ago
For sure - striking the right design balance is tough. If it were me, I'd try to keep content in the user's face as much as possible, and maybe inform the user about the unique value-add with non-intrusive sidebars, header/footers or system generated PMs. It's not easy, and the value of an expert UX designer really shines when walking the tight-rope between informing and annoying your users. Also, consider investing in reliable A/B testing infrastructure if you haven't already. One of the biggest mistakes I've seen is trying to grow a product while driving half-blind based on napkin sql queries as metrics. Understand who is using the site, how often, when they are experiencing errors, and which types of changes actually encourage growth KPIs - but be careful, loading up the site with 3rd party trackers and intrusive js will introduce bugs and kill site performance - another balancing act hehe.
spdif899 3y ago
In a way this feels similar to nebula - nebula currently has no comment functionality and points to reddit threads for communities around their videos. Wonder if that group would be interested in experimenting given the heavy overlap in business model.
kokanee 3y ago
An idea I mull over occasionally: what if you could spend your karma points to boost any given post? This would ultimately be another form of paid advertising, except that the currency used would be earned by contributing to the community. Then, allow people to sell their karma points for fiat currency. Companies would buy karma points directly from users in order to promote their self-promotional posts, but those posts would be subject to the same rules and moderation as any other post. That way you're actually paying your best users rather than charging them.
- ric2b 3y ago
  This has been tried in the cryptocurrency space, people start faking accounts to upvote their content and make money. So basically what already happens with reddit/twitter/etc but amplified because you give them a direct financial incentive to upvote low effort crap.
  - z3t4 3y ago
    I think it can be solved by personalizing the top page(s), so you mostly see the kind of stuff you upvote. If there are a few people up-voting crap you wont see it, but they will see all of it.
    - lonk11 3y ago
      I'm building https://linklonk.com https://linklonk.com which works this way - you get content ranked based on what you upvoted. This is to make the incentives for voting aligned and help prevent abuse. I think the problem with karma/reputation systems is that the source of karma are fungible - anyone's upvote has the same effect on the reputation. And this makes it gameable. A personalized system can solve this by replacing global reputation with user-to-user trust. Now it matters who upvoted - a random bot or a user whose past contributions have been useful to you.
      - pbhjpbhj 3y ago
        >Now it matters who upvoted - a random bot or a user whose past contributions have been useful to you. // In that system how do you create a ranked list of content for a user to browse? Isn't it going to be very heavy on processing demand?
sesteel 3y ago
Why not pin your business model as the top post for awhile until it catches on?
- cobbman 3y ago
  This right here is the way to do it.
gremlinsinc 3y ago
you should try and get an API that has full parity with Reddit, an app that does that will replace Reddit because all third party apps simply need to change urls for Reddit to your domain.
- binarysneaker 3y ago
  THIS. This is the pro move.

by jjcm 3y ago

biorach 3y ago

maybe make the first 10,000 or 100,000 accounts free for life? you need to build momentum somehow maybe summarise what your users need to understand in a sidebar or closeable top-bar?

all2 3y ago
You could also incentivize early adopters. For example, if you're in the first 100k users, your money/upvote goes twice as far. Something like that.
- aerio 3y ago
  Or something like, seed quality content for rewards (post links that end up getting lots of upvotes = free subscription) sounds pretty close to OPs original idea anyway, just give better terms for early adopters.

PMunch 3y ago

To be honest I don't completely agree. The business model itself is what makes thin interesting, not to users, but to creators. Take me for example, I write tech articles from time to time, and the occasional video, presentation, or coding live stream. As it stands I don't make any money on this, I just do it for fun. But with a site like non.io there's no reason for me _not_ to post my content there. As long as you get some publicity out there (like you're doing with this) creators should hopefully start contributing. And once the creators are there, so will the users be! I agree though that the splash page is a bit strange, maybe throw up a popup over the content for people who aren't logged in and haven't visited the site before? Or at least put this info in a sidebar. The business model is as you say the core value proposition here, so if people don't get it right away the interest could quickly fade. Wish you the best of luck with this. And I'll look into posting my stuff on there as well, as I said there really isn't any reason not to

yywwbbn 3y ago
> As it stands I don't make any money on this, I just do it for fun. But with a site like non.io there's no reason for me _not_ to post my content there. I’m obviously not targeting this at you but a business model likes this (paying fractions of a penny per upvote) is not likely to attract high quality content. In fact the opposite it incentives a quantity over quality approach (i.e. content has to be just good enough to get upvoted spending more effort is wasted)
- jdironman 3y ago
  Niche groups, high quality content, users who don't upvote everything I think is the goal. Not up voting 100 cat videos or memes and then wishing you could upvote a post that really helps you out on something or leads to good discussion. I think it tries to place weight on your upvote to mean more than just ticking something up but remind you that you are putting your money into someone's else's pocket and has what they provided you with worth it? It'd small enough that you don't feel like you're out too much monthly, but probably big enough for posts with upvotes in the thousands to give back to quality content creators (haven't done any math but yeah)
  - PMunch 3y ago
    Exactly. Of course everyone used Reddit differently, but personally I basically never upvoted anything unless I really enjoyed it. The big question for me would be what happens to my funds if I don't upvote anyone in a given month, do they roll-over to the next month? Do they go to server management? Do they go into a separate pool to do something else fun with? In a way Reddit did distinguish their usual "this content is better than the one below" upvote with "this is amazing content" by giving Reddit gold. A similar system could be used here. One thing that made Reddit great was that since people up (and maybe more importantly) downvoted content good stuff would float to the top. It would be pretty bad if upvotes where too meaningful as that would drive away engagement.
- alvarezbjm-hn 3y ago
  What if there was a large button for upvote, and beside a smaller button for 100x upvote? Regular users can upvote 100 cat pictures for their dopamine hit, and when they find an ACTUALLY VALUABLE post they can look for the small button.

ryandrake 3y ago

I think if the product itself is a web page, then the root www.domain.name needs to point to the product itself, not a description of the product. Imagine if I went to www.amazon.com and instead of the store, that page was a marketing template listing Amazon's business case and a few screenshots of what shopping at Amazon looks like. IMO the only good reason to have a marketing/business-case landing page is if the product itself hasn't been built yet. Once the product exists, move the marketing page over to /about

pbhjpbhj 3y ago
For a forum you could have a story/post be your about page and just sticky it initially.

root_axis 3y ago

For sure - striking the right design balance is tough. If it were me, I'd try to keep content in the user's face as much as possible, and maybe inform the user about the unique value-add with non-intrusive sidebars, header/footers or system generated PMs. It's not easy, and the value of an expert UX designer really shines when walking the tight-rope between informing and annoying your users. Also, consider investing in reliable A/B testing infrastructure if you haven't already. One of the biggest mistakes I've seen is trying to grow a product while driving half-blind based on napkin sql queries as metrics. Understand who is using the site, how often, when they are experiencing errors, and which types of changes actually encourage growth KPIs - but be careful, loading up the site with 3rd party trackers and intrusive js will introduce bugs and kill site performance - another balancing act hehe.

spdif899 3y ago

In a way this feels similar to nebula - nebula currently has no comment functionality and points to reddit threads for communities around their videos. Wonder if that group would be interested in experimenting given the heavy overlap in business model.

kokanee 3y ago

An idea I mull over occasionally: what if you could spend your karma points to boost any given post? This would ultimately be another form of paid advertising, except that the currency used would be earned by contributing to the community. Then, allow people to sell their karma points for fiat currency. Companies would buy karma points directly from users in order to promote their self-promotional posts, but those posts would be subject to the same rules and moderation as any other post. That way you're actually paying your best users rather than charging them.

ric2b 3y ago
This has been tried in the cryptocurrency space, people start faking accounts to upvote their content and make money. So basically what already happens with reddit/twitter/etc but amplified because you give them a direct financial incentive to upvote low effort crap.
- z3t4 3y ago
  I think it can be solved by personalizing the top page(s), so you mostly see the kind of stuff you upvote. If there are a few people up-voting crap you wont see it, but they will see all of it.
  - lonk11 3y ago
    I'm building https://linklonk.com https://linklonk.com which works this way - you get content ranked based on what you upvoted. This is to make the incentives for voting aligned and help prevent abuse. I think the problem with karma/reputation systems is that the source of karma are fungible - anyone's upvote has the same effect on the reputation. And this makes it gameable. A personalized system can solve this by replacing global reputation with user-to-user trust. Now it matters who upvoted - a random bot or a user whose past contributions have been useful to you.
    - pbhjpbhj 3y ago
      >Now it matters who upvoted - a random bot or a user whose past contributions have been useful to you. // In that system how do you create a ranked list of content for a user to browse? Isn't it going to be very heavy on processing demand?

sesteel 3y ago

Why not pin your business model as the top post for awhile until it catches on?

cobbman 3y ago
This right here is the way to do it.

gremlinsinc 3y ago

you should try and get an API that has full parity with Reddit, an app that does that will replace Reddit because all third party apps simply need to change urls for Reddit to your domain.

binarysneaker 3y ago
THIS. This is the pro move.