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Fair point on the active moderation. I've never moderated a community before so I have no idea how much work goes into it, perhaps I'm drastically underestimati

Fair point on the active moderation. I've never moderated a community before so I have no idea how much work goes into it, perhaps I'm drastically underestimating it. For example I posted this before going to sleep and woke up to see that someone had spammed the site with 300+ throwaway posts. Forgot there are people like that. I agree on the value of subreddits as private communities. I suppose private communities and tagging can still co-exist. Many different ways to design that.

sverhagen 3y ago
You are probably monumentally underestimating it, and with that it's not really a Reddit alternative... maybe rather a toy version of it? Not only is moderation going to be a huge task, but it would be so, even without worrying about much of the most basic spam, which I have to assume Reddit catches automatically, without moderator intervention. Your 300+ throwaway poster may be a malicious user, but on the other hand they may have set out to answer an obvious and important question about this Reddit "alternative", by seeing if it's up for the job :) See it as free user acceptance testing (fail).
- JSavageOne 3y ago
  Yea that's why I'm not even mad about it. I think the route to go if the spam persists would be making it invite-only, and so that uninvited user registrations would have to be manually approved. Wouldn't eliminate the problem, but would potentially dramatically reduce the amount of moderation work vs. making it a free-for-all. Not getting enough usage now to justify it, but just an idea. I think with the right people, the platform doesn't really matter at all. I mean the best communities now are probably in random Telegram group chats. The main challenge is attracting a community of the right people in the first place, and that challenge is more marketing than technical. I think maybe the right approach here might just be creating and curating high quality content, then the people come. This is how most communities are built I think (eg. Indie Hackers). I'm admittedly more focused on other projects at the moment that I think have more obvious utility though (working on a self-hosted open source Notion clone at the moment)

sverhagen 3y ago

You are probably monumentally underestimating it, and with that it's not really a Reddit alternative... maybe rather a toy version of it? Not only is moderation going to be a huge task, but it would be so, even without worrying about much of the most basic spam, which I have to assume Reddit catches automatically, without moderator intervention. Your 300+ throwaway poster may be a malicious user, but on the other hand they may have set out to answer an obvious and important question about this Reddit "alternative", by seeing if it's up for the job :) See it as free user acceptance testing (fail).

JSavageOne 3y ago
Yea that's why I'm not even mad about it. I think the route to go if the spam persists would be making it invite-only, and so that uninvited user registrations would have to be manually approved. Wouldn't eliminate the problem, but would potentially dramatically reduce the amount of moderation work vs. making it a free-for-all. Not getting enough usage now to justify it, but just an idea. I think with the right people, the platform doesn't really matter at all. I mean the best communities now are probably in random Telegram group chats. The main challenge is attracting a community of the right people in the first place, and that challenge is more marketing than technical. I think maybe the right approach here might just be creating and curating high quality content, then the people come. This is how most communities are built I think (eg. Indie Hackers). I'm admittedly more focused on other projects at the moment that I think have more obvious utility though (working on a self-hosted open source Notion clone at the moment)