4 ms·

It seems like a lot of the suggested alternatives are missing the mark a bit in regards to understanding what Reddit actually is (a community of communities). I

by dsir 3y ago

It seems like a lot of the suggested alternatives are missing the mark a bit in regards to understanding what Reddit actually is (a community of communities). It seems like a lot of the platforms that are popping up are more akin to being just a huge bucket full of posts with tags opposed to being a collection of communities. They are sort of missing out on capturing the community part. I've been building a platform called Sociables which is intentionally not just a Reddit clone. We are trying to create an all in one place for people to create communities first and foremost and not just posts. Here's an example of a community: https://sociables.com/community/Sports/board/trending https://sociables.com/community/Sports/board/trending

ykonstant 3y ago
I like the UI a lot; how does the site fare as a long-form discussion place (capturing the forum-like qualities of old.reddit)? I am also interested in native LaTeX rendering in posts and comments; I have not found this anywhere, and lurking at r/math, r/physics and r/compsci has convinced me LaTeX rendering a la mathstodon.xyz is essential for math/physics communities.
- dsir 3y ago
  Appreciate the feedback. So within each community, the admin can create an unlimited amount of different discussion boards related to the niche of the community. Each post within a board has threaded comment trees similar to reddit where it lends well to long form. We felt that in order to fully capture each aspect of the community space, we needed to include each different type of communication tool. What I mean by that is we have a twitch style IM chatroom, Discord style voice rooms, and Reddit style discussion boards for longer form communication. I'm not familiar with LaTeX rendering, but will definitely check it out to see if it's something that we could integrate into our platform.
cephalization 3y ago
Is the content crawable? Can it be discovered via search engines like reddit?
- dsir 3y ago
  Yeah, that was a key design decision from the start. All posts and comments made on the platform are indexable by search engines.
gnopgnip 3y ago
Somethingawful forums is also a community of communities. Each subforum has it's own culture and norms. And they have a pretty good system for dealing with spam, sock puppets. But its $10, not free.
- darreninthenet 3y ago
  Would you say it's worth it?
  - calmworm 3y ago
    It’s a one time cost iirc. It’s been about 20 years.
  - swivelmaster 3y ago
    It was for me. SA was basically my sole "social media" before Reddit came along. In hindsight, it was probably a much healthier alternative and I kind of wish I'd just stuck with it!
  - gnopgnip 3y ago
    Others mentioned it's a one time cost. You can lurk and read most forums without an account, decide if its a good fit or if it has things that interest you.
Karsteski 3y ago
Sounds very cool, good luck! :) Question though, how will you sustain this platform? I'd be happy to just pay some small fee per month and have some sort of guarantee that my data is not just being sold to the highest bidder. I'd like to be the customer on some social media platform for once
- dsir 3y ago
  Cheers! One of the key design decisions was to bake in different methods for monetization within each community so that the community admins/mods can get paid. We take a minority cut of each transaction to help fund the platform. Each community has the ability to offer tiered monthly membership plans and can optionally gate individual pieces of content, or the entire community behind the memberships (the content gating part is a work in progress). We are also adding the ability for users to pay to bump posts and buy comment awards which the revenue is shared with the community owner. Basically we are looking at adding ways for the communities to make money in ways that don't come at the detriment to the community itself. We are also exploring offering a platform wide subscription fee that would give users some additional benefits as well however we haven't fully fleshed this out yet.
  - agg23 3y ago
    This seems like a really great idea to help deal with the difficulties in moderation.
agg23 3y ago
Is it decentralized? While definitely better UX to remain centralized, I think Reddit is clearly showing why that's a problem.
- 1270018080 3y ago
  Any problem happening on reddit could also happen on a "decentralized" platform. Whoever is paying for the servers gets to call the shots. All federated options should be automatically eliminated from contention if we're taking it seriously as a reddit replacement.
  - agg23 3y ago
    > Whoever is paying for the servers gets to call the shots But if everyone can run a server; if I can run my own server just for me to only fetch the stuff I'm following, then I'm not beholden to some unknown or commercial hosting entity.
    - kaba0 3y ago
      Paying for a server is not a huge cost and being centralized is actually a good thing imo. We wouldn’t be ahead with multiple wikipedias, I believe.
- dsir 3y ago
  Currently we aren't federated however we are looking into protocols such as ActivityPub. It's certainly interesting. It's possible we could federate our posts however one component of our platform is that communities can optionally gate access behind a membership fee. We are actively targeting content creators to get them to host their communities on our platform and some creators like having the option to have private communities. I'm not entirely sure how that model would fit with federation if we go the route of federating our posts, but it's something I'm certainly looking into.
Zetice 3y ago
There's a reason people are missing the mark here; the "community" feature is not what gives Reddit its crazy high value for the vast majority of its users. The ceiling is a lot lower for a community engine than it is for a link aggregator. Google News vs. Google+.
- xeonmc 3y ago
  I wonder if GitHub repository Discussions can serve the need, since people can star individual repositories, each repository acts as its own subreddit which you subscribe to, and granular access permissions can be given to moderators etc. You could even make the repo host a GitHub Pages dummy that just loads Giscus/retrieves the list of threads in the repository Discussions and render it with a more Reddit-like UI. Any deficiencies with the interface you can fix yourself or make a pull request to recommend changes. You could even program moderation bots that runs via GitHub Actions etc, whatever moderation tool were lacking you can just take it into your own hands.
  - tiffanyg 3y ago
    It's an interesting idea, I think. I've seen this (sort of) idea before - I forget exactly when, maybe back when Musk took the helm of the Twittanic and ordered flank speed towards the already visible iceberg. Personally, I'm going to check the project mentioned at the top of this subthread and look at other options that may already be out there. I just saw, also, some mentions of thoughts about leveraging"ATproto" ... I am fairly certain that there are solutions that can fill the void left by Reddit's latest knife in the back of the users and communities that really made it useful and different. It's a little saddening, but not that surprising (aside from how long it stayed user / community friendly before basically declaring war on many users and communities) ... and, at this point, any pathos I would normally experience is being far outweighed by schadenfreude at seeing the site burn (in essence, if not immediately in the most tangible ways, though I suspect the arc of events should shave any potential valuation down to around 75%, perhaps, of the already reduced valuation vs. 2021) and determination to help further reduce its valuation. If Huffman and his milieu (above, adjacent, etc.) have defined everything, at this point, in terms of money, then that's the only language that they will pay any attention to. But, away from the "Io voglio vendetta" thoughts, I like the idea of something like a "co-op" ... something it sounds like this "sociables" (makes me think "lunchables", heh) idea might be touching the edges of ... I definitely think the best of (old) reddit can be transferred successfully elsewhere by people who aren't after some kind of 90s-style SV gold-rush and Reddit itself can be left to rot / fester as it competes with TikTok, Twitter, etc. for the scraps of the divided attentions of mindless media consumers.
joshmarinacci 3y ago
This looks cool. What's your status? Are you in open beta? What's your monetization strategy?
- dsir 3y ago
  Thanks for the feedback. I've been building this with a friend in our free time over the past few years. We are in an open beta right now. We are definitely a bit guilty of delaying promoting it in favour of trying to polish things however the recent Reddit news really pushed us to start getting the word out. This project has really been a labour of love for me. In regards to how we plan to monetize, just gonna repost this message I sent in another comment thread: > One of the key design decisions was to bake in different methods for monetization within each community so that the community admins/mods can get paid. We take a minority cut of each transaction to help fund the platform. > Each community has the ability to offer tiered monthly membership plans and can optionally gate individual pieces of content, or the entire community behind the memberships (the content gating part is a work in progress). We are also adding the ability for users to pay to bump posts and buy comment awards which the revenue is shared with the community owner. Basically we are looking at adding ways for the communities to make money in ways that don't come at the detriment to the community itself. > We are also exploring offering a platform wide subscription fee that would give users some additional benefits as well however we haven't fully fleshed this out yet.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

by dsir 3y ago

ykonstant 3y ago

I like the UI a lot; how does the site fare as a long-form discussion place (capturing the forum-like qualities of old.reddit)? I am also interested in native LaTeX rendering in posts and comments; I have not found this anywhere, and lurking at r/math, r/physics and r/compsci has convinced me LaTeX rendering a la mathstodon.xyz is essential for math/physics communities.

dsir 3y ago
Appreciate the feedback. So within each community, the admin can create an unlimited amount of different discussion boards related to the niche of the community. Each post within a board has threaded comment trees similar to reddit where it lends well to long form. We felt that in order to fully capture each aspect of the community space, we needed to include each different type of communication tool. What I mean by that is we have a twitch style IM chatroom, Discord style voice rooms, and Reddit style discussion boards for longer form communication. I'm not familiar with LaTeX rendering, but will definitely check it out to see if it's something that we could integrate into our platform.

cephalization 3y ago

Is the content crawable? Can it be discovered via search engines like reddit?

dsir 3y ago
Yeah, that was a key design decision from the start. All posts and comments made on the platform are indexable by search engines.

gnopgnip 3y ago

Somethingawful forums is also a community of communities. Each subforum has it's own culture and norms. And they have a pretty good system for dealing with spam, sock puppets. But its $10, not free.

darreninthenet 3y ago
Would you say it's worth it?
- calmworm 3y ago
  It’s a one time cost iirc. It’s been about 20 years.
- swivelmaster 3y ago
  It was for me. SA was basically my sole "social media" before Reddit came along. In hindsight, it was probably a much healthier alternative and I kind of wish I'd just stuck with it!
- gnopgnip 3y ago
  Others mentioned it's a one time cost. You can lurk and read most forums without an account, decide if its a good fit or if it has things that interest you.

Karsteski 3y ago

Sounds very cool, good luck! :) Question though, how will you sustain this platform? I'd be happy to just pay some small fee per month and have some sort of guarantee that my data is not just being sold to the highest bidder. I'd like to be the customer on some social media platform for once

dsir 3y ago
Cheers! One of the key design decisions was to bake in different methods for monetization within each community so that the community admins/mods can get paid. We take a minority cut of each transaction to help fund the platform. Each community has the ability to offer tiered monthly membership plans and can optionally gate individual pieces of content, or the entire community behind the memberships (the content gating part is a work in progress). We are also adding the ability for users to pay to bump posts and buy comment awards which the revenue is shared with the community owner. Basically we are looking at adding ways for the communities to make money in ways that don't come at the detriment to the community itself. We are also exploring offering a platform wide subscription fee that would give users some additional benefits as well however we haven't fully fleshed this out yet.
- agg23 3y ago
  This seems like a really great idea to help deal with the difficulties in moderation.

agg23 3y ago

Is it decentralized? While definitely better UX to remain centralized, I think Reddit is clearly showing why that's a problem.

1270018080 3y ago
Any problem happening on reddit could also happen on a "decentralized" platform. Whoever is paying for the servers gets to call the shots. All federated options should be automatically eliminated from contention if we're taking it seriously as a reddit replacement.
- agg23 3y ago
  > Whoever is paying for the servers gets to call the shots But if everyone can run a server; if I can run my own server just for me to only fetch the stuff I'm following, then I'm not beholden to some unknown or commercial hosting entity.
  - kaba0 3y ago
    Paying for a server is not a huge cost and being centralized is actually a good thing imo. We wouldn’t be ahead with multiple wikipedias, I believe.
dsir 3y ago
Currently we aren't federated however we are looking into protocols such as ActivityPub. It's certainly interesting. It's possible we could federate our posts however one component of our platform is that communities can optionally gate access behind a membership fee. We are actively targeting content creators to get them to host their communities on our platform and some creators like having the option to have private communities. I'm not entirely sure how that model would fit with federation if we go the route of federating our posts, but it's something I'm certainly looking into.

Zetice 3y ago

There's a reason people are missing the mark here; the "community" feature is not what gives Reddit its crazy high value for the vast majority of its users. The ceiling is a lot lower for a community engine than it is for a link aggregator. Google News vs. Google+.

xeonmc 3y ago
I wonder if GitHub repository Discussions can serve the need, since people can star individual repositories, each repository acts as its own subreddit which you subscribe to, and granular access permissions can be given to moderators etc. You could even make the repo host a GitHub Pages dummy that just loads Giscus/retrieves the list of threads in the repository Discussions and render it with a more Reddit-like UI. Any deficiencies with the interface you can fix yourself or make a pull request to recommend changes. You could even program moderation bots that runs via GitHub Actions etc, whatever moderation tool were lacking you can just take it into your own hands.
- tiffanyg 3y ago
  It's an interesting idea, I think. I've seen this (sort of) idea before - I forget exactly when, maybe back when Musk took the helm of the Twittanic and ordered flank speed towards the already visible iceberg. Personally, I'm going to check the project mentioned at the top of this subthread and look at other options that may already be out there. I just saw, also, some mentions of thoughts about leveraging"ATproto" ... I am fairly certain that there are solutions that can fill the void left by Reddit's latest knife in the back of the users and communities that really made it useful and different. It's a little saddening, but not that surprising (aside from how long it stayed user / community friendly before basically declaring war on many users and communities) ... and, at this point, any pathos I would normally experience is being far outweighed by schadenfreude at seeing the site burn (in essence, if not immediately in the most tangible ways, though I suspect the arc of events should shave any potential valuation down to around 75%, perhaps, of the already reduced valuation vs. 2021) and determination to help further reduce its valuation. If Huffman and his milieu (above, adjacent, etc.) have defined everything, at this point, in terms of money, then that's the only language that they will pay any attention to. But, away from the "Io voglio vendetta" thoughts, I like the idea of something like a "co-op" ... something it sounds like this "sociables" (makes me think "lunchables", heh) idea might be touching the edges of ... I definitely think the best of (old) reddit can be transferred successfully elsewhere by people who aren't after some kind of 90s-style SV gold-rush and Reddit itself can be left to rot / fester as it competes with TikTok, Twitter, etc. for the scraps of the divided attentions of mindless media consumers.

joshmarinacci 3y ago

This looks cool. What's your status? Are you in open beta? What's your monetization strategy?

dsir 3y ago
Thanks for the feedback. I've been building this with a friend in our free time over the past few years. We are in an open beta right now. We are definitely a bit guilty of delaying promoting it in favour of trying to polish things however the recent Reddit news really pushed us to start getting the word out. This project has really been a labour of love for me. In regards to how we plan to monetize, just gonna repost this message I sent in another comment thread: > One of the key design decisions was to bake in different methods for monetization within each community so that the community admins/mods can get paid. We take a minority cut of each transaction to help fund the platform. > Each community has the ability to offer tiered monthly membership plans and can optionally gate individual pieces of content, or the entire community behind the memberships (the content gating part is a work in progress). We are also adding the ability for users to pay to bump posts and buy comment awards which the revenue is shared with the community owner. Basically we are looking at adding ways for the communities to make money in ways that don't come at the detriment to the community itself. > We are also exploring offering a platform wide subscription fee that would give users some additional benefits as well however we haven't fully fleshed this out yet.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]