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Do we need, and does the web want, a new reddit-like site?
I've considered making a new reddit style site, incorporating a variety of improvements (probably like many readers here). Is there strong demand for such a service? How hard would it be to replicate the strong and thoughtful community reddit initially created today?
- ed 19y agoI think you can effectively fake the appearance of community in the beginning, assuming you have the resources. A more important question is: how would you create value for a potential user beyond what the existing communities offer?
- palish 19y agoJudging from the comments, PG is considering launching one, so I don't know if you'd want to be in direct competition with him. But it'd be an interesting fight. It seems there will always be demand for clusters of intelligent people. If you can cater to that, go for it!
- nreece 19y agoCan you please refer me to some comments which highlight PG's intention on launching such a site?
- rms 19y agoSomeone submitted a question asking PG what philosophy books he recommended. He answered the question and killed the thread... I said that he should spin off an off-topic part of the site, and he said that he was seriously considering launching it on a separate domain. I can't find it with any of the searches because it was marked dead...
- dfranke 19y agoHere it is: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30048 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30048 Found by taking the text from the copy of Paul's response to the question that he put on his RAQ page and googling it.
- pg 19y agoHere's one. The goal would be to make a site that would never become super popular, but just have the kind of people who used reddit in the first year. It wouldn't make sense for a startup to deliberately make something that wasn't meant to be popular. For something like this to exist it has to be done by someone doing it as a hobby.
- nreece 19y agoIt's an excellent idea Paul. Reddit and Digg have become polluted. A fresh, simple, laid-back approach will surely be worth daily reading among a small group of followers.
- thingsilearned 19y agohttp://www.grupl.com http://www.grupl.com has the same functionality as reddit. It was started by my friend Zach and has now morphed into a facebook app. Its still small. If you post something there it will probably make the front page shortly.
- paulgb 19y agoJudging from the content, that site targets a different audience than what the poster/commenters are looking for. Case in point: "Cats + Crazy Captions = Comedy Gold!".
- zaidf 19y agoThis is something specialized underground forums have managed to do by using referrals. Like you said, you can't do this for a start-up but if you add members one by one, it is possible to build a concentrated community of few hundred members.
- srini 19y agoI think a social news site can be super-popular and still avoid the associated problems if it transparently split its user base in a clever way. For example, you could weight the votes by how close the voter's registration date is to yours.
- johnrob 19y agoI don't really see how you can improve upon yc news with a new reddit clone. The community here is like minded with its startup interest. Here is what would be nice: more yc news like sites for all my other interests.
- jgamman 19y agoi think there's plenty of room in the ynews/reddit model to go. don't think of it as the website, but in terms of the users. i think a big step forward will be the blogger of news aggregators. allow people to make a submission+vote page and bookmarklet as easy as it is to make a blog. add on a few preferences and bingo, an aggregator focusing on round the world blue-water cruising in ketch style 42fts internet access issues. for instance. i'd rather be plugged into 10 niche communities than a couple of generics.