8 ms·

Ask HN: Are you working on a Reddit replacement? What is it?

66 points by meesterdude 11y ago

Interested to see what the HN community is doing in response to the recent reddit events. Post the name, URL, description, and what you'll copy from reddit, and what you will not.

minimaxir 11y ago
Even despite Reddit's troubles, you probably do not want to make a Reddit clone as a business model to capitalize if you don't have one already. One or the reasons for the protest is bad tools.
- zxcvcxz 11y ago
  Reddit is open source so is there any evidence that anything has been done or is planned to improve mod tools? Or have there been any community attempts to push code that was rejected?
  - xq 11y ago
    > have there been any community attempts to push code that was rejected? Apparently yes: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/3bxrxj/lets_discuss_the_recent_incident_where_a_bunch_of/csqiv0t https://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/3bxrxj/lets... > Another great example of how much reddit cares about their assets is reddit companion. Which at the time of writing has around 154,302 installations, is utterly broken and hasn't been updated since February 21, 2013, the most ridiculous thing? It isn't hard to fix people tried to do the work for reddit since it is open source but they simply have been ignoring those pull requests since 2013. Which is silly since those pull request effectively do fix companion, resulting in a perfectly working version.
- Nemcue 11y ago
  Not really. Despite tools you'd still want someone to act like an intermediate with the one doing the AMA. This is about poor communication, and how Reddit treats the ones that actually make it all go around.
billturner 11y ago
Although it does seem to be very slow to respond, https://voat.co/ https://voat.co/ seemed to have stepped in as a replacement at the last big upheaval. They seem to constantly have troubles staying up though.
- akhilcacharya 11y ago
  The problem is voat's population.
  - clavalle 11y ago
    Which Reddit seems determined to solve for them.
    - scarmig 11y ago
      Unfortunately, Reddit is exporting the dredges of its own population. And thus by subtraction we get addition...
      - clavalle 11y ago
        I don't think you can say that about the last two days.
- Mahn 11y ago
  They certainly seem to have momentum, despite having trouble handling the traffic. It's a pity that as it stands it's still pretty much a copy though, an alternative to reddit doesn't have to be, and probably shouldn't be, a 1:1 copy.
  - c_prompt 11y ago
    If you're looking for something different yet similar, I run valME.io which has a very different business model. And because of the business model, it will have significantly less spam and other undesirable content. But the concept it's not for everyone.
faizshah 11y ago
I have been working on one, it's not really ready for prime time yet. The idea is that it's a news aggregator that learns what you like, so it forms a probabilistic model of what it thinks your interests are and applies that model to the network of submitted content to decide what you see. Instead of subreddits the system forms subcommunities by showing users with similar interests similar lists of content. The main thing I'm having a lot of trouble with is figuring out how to do efficient keyword extraction on pictures and video. Otherwise it only supports links that have a lot of text. The other problem is it doesn't have enough of a community feel so that's something else I'm working on. One of the ideas I am about to experiment with is removing user accounts and using browser fingerprints instead. I think if users dont have to sign up it will encourage users to more actively participate in the community.
- meesterdude 11y ago
  As a fellow builder, also with something not ready for prime time, I say: ship that shit. If you're going to strike, now's the time. Any reason it can't be live, end of the month? > Otherwise it only supports links that have a lot of text Sounds good to me! > using browser fingerprints instead By all means experiment; but this has a few problems with it. Some people like (or need) multiple accounts, which would mean separate browsers at the least. Equally, it's trivial to spin up a VM with a browser. So, the users who need multiple usernames can't (or lack the technical understanding), and the ones you don't want having multiple can easily create hundreds.
  - faizshah 11y ago
    Thanks for the support, I can probably make it live by the end of the month I just thought that a lack of image and video support would limit its chances at survival. The browser fingerprinting idea is a bit more involved. The idea is that everyone is anonymous and the types of people who you seem to like, based on factors like leaving your cursor over their comment for a while, are slowly deanonymized to you. The way browser fingerprinting would work in this scenario is that instead of storing usernames attached to models, we store a few different indicators (like browser fingerprints) and create probabilistic models relating these indicators to the aforementioned models. That way even if we have a completely new user we can create a new initial model for them based on what they might like. I have only just started working on this idea though, so I'm not sure how well this would work in practice and I'm not sure what other indicators I might use. With this in mind I don't think there would be a reason to spin up VMs and create new 'accounts' because it would just limit your personal experience.
echeese 11y ago
Truthfully, the subreddits I follow (programming-related) are unaffected, though a few threw up a notice saying they were not going to black out.
- ericcholis 11y ago
  Another solid example of not blacking out is /r/malefashionadvice, one of the more prominent voices in the Male Fashion category. While I can understand the interest in "disrupting the space"; I'm not entirely sure that the current management conditions at reddit are indicative of an opportunity here.
- Buge 11y ago
  /r/netsec, the primary security subreddit is down.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
pcunite 11y ago
For those not in the know: http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/07/03/419756207/ http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/07/03/419756207/
akhilcacharya 11y ago
I've been toying with making one since I realized Reddit has been devolving into a reactionary, hate filled site. I was thinking about having a gimmick of graph based commenting to prevent the "top post guides discussion" effect. Not sure at how feasible or user friendly that could be.
- mingus68040 11y ago
  I would love to see a commenting site with strong, pseudonymous identity support, to create a greater barrier to the racist and misogynistic trolls who infest the default sub-reddits currently. Some options: 1. Register with a phone number (do some basic checks to avoid Google Voice, Twilio, etc.) 2. Accounts cost $1, payable either through Payal or credit card. Accounts are tied to the payment credentials. 3. Participation is restricted to desktop and mobile apps employing strong anti-cracking measures and linking accounts to the current device only by way of unique hardware IDs.
  - ljk 11y ago
    > 2. Accounts cost $1, payable either through Payal or credit card. Accounts are tied to the payment credentials. is that a good idea? If accounts are paid, then "richer" opinions have bigger impact on the site
    - mingus68040 11y ago
      Alright, let's say 10¢. Everyone with a personal Internet-enabled device can most certainly afford that. You could even refund them the money later, as the goal is to obtain the payment identity -- not the cash.
      - captn3m0 11y ago
        Not everyone has a way to pay online, especially if you are accepting credit cards.
        11y ago
sidcool 11y ago
Is Reddit doomed already?
- clavalle 11y ago
  Without a radical turnaround, yeah, I think so. It feels very much like Digg did back in the day. When your userbase is your main asset and you treat them as a given, bad things happen.
  - VieElm 11y ago
    When Digg died it was a combination of unpopular policy and a completely broken v4 upgrade that broke the site for weeks.
  - maccard 11y ago
    Except that reedit had the population before digg crashed. There currently aren't any sizeable alternatives to reedit right now, so the same thing can't possibly happen
    - clavalle 11y ago
      It can absolutely happen. The population is primed. The same scenario doesn't have to play out for the end result to be the same. Digg had some mildly bad policy before their exodus. Reddit policy is failing in a much more dramatic way. If someone comes out with a viable alternative with, perhaps, one or two notable improvements there is enough froth to push people to a new home. I personally hope it fragments. The slacktivists and amateur political wonks to one corner with the news, the popular entertainment to the other, and the learners/hobbyists/special interest associations to yet another. Reddit is the Craigslist of 2015. It is doing too much and it is ready to be picked apart.
tmppppppppp 11y ago
It seems to me that the issue is not making a technically equivalent site, which is "relatively" easy. There's more to it than that.
- Fluid_Mechanics 11y ago
  If it was relatively easy, why don't you just make one yourself. You may learn something useful for a change.
mcphage 11y ago
My Reddit replacement is Reddit, minus all the people who want to leave because of Reddit closing r/jailbait, r/thefappening, and r/fatpeoplehate. It's a pretty cool site, you should check it out.
- Karunamon 11y ago
  That's a remarkably unfair characterization of people who have issues with Reddit.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - zxcvcxz 11y ago
    Well how else are they supposed to push their political narrative that everyone is a sexist/racist? Don't you want a PC version of reddit where everyone constantly sits upon a moral high-horse of self righteousness while pushing authoritarian ideology under the guise of social justice?
  - albertoleal 11y ago
    That's pretty much the reality of it. The other group of users who have issues with Reddit (as we've seen yesterday) are the moderators; in particular the moderators of really large communities. Many others just seem to jump onto the bandwagon.
    - Karunamon 11y ago
      You don't have to think certain pseudo-religious thought patterns are bad in order to recognize that reddit has some serious problems. The default communities are cesspools (consensus seems to be Reddit is better when they're unsubscribed) The staff has no idea how to communicate with the userbase, a problem which has obviously gotten worse in the past few months. The site hasn't seen a major upgrade in years and still regularly falls over under its own weight The moderators of the defaults are all friends with each other and run each other's communities (++corruption) Their current CEO has a questionable at best ethical history
pwnna 11y ago
Just as a side note: reddit is open source (I belive): https://github.com/reddit/reddit https://github.com/reddit/reddit
- cbzink000 11y ago
  It's actually fairly simple to get running. I'm bopping around in a private instance right now. Looks like there would be an insane amount of work to re-brand everything, but it's certainly possible. It's licensed under CPAL, which I am unfamiliar with and do not know if it would allow for commercial use.
TD-Linux 11y ago
The only thing I've used reddit for in recent times are projects (like rust) that use it as their official forum. Otherwise, I tend to find that my needs are better filled by independent, specialized forums (RCGroups, reprap, etc), and imageboards like 4chan or 8chan provide endless entertainment value.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
noname123 11y ago
I want to put Arc to some serious load testing! PG and current sys-admins of HN, open the flood gates, put in this ticket for HN development project: "Create sub-HackNewsies". Also, I think Reddit source code is open source; so people can use that too! A great business idea I think is doing a bannedsubreddits.com/r/{banned}; crawl webarchive.org for the previous archives for all the banned subreddits for continuity...
- krapp 11y ago
  Sub-boards or tags have been discussed multiple times on Hacker News. Unfortunately, the developers seem allergic to modernity when it comes to forum design. That said, here is the software that Hacker News is based on: http://arclanguage.org/ http://arclanguage.org/ so maybe someone can fork a version with those features themselves.
danbolt 11y ago
I'm speaking as a bit of an armchair developer here, but I'd be very interested in seeing a more decentralized alternative to Reddit. A user of one Reddit-like site could post on another's through some sort of protocol, perhaps much like email. It would certainly be more complicated than something centralized, but considering Reddit's attitude towards user-generated communities and moderation, I could see it being a good fit. There could be a lot of opportunities for black/whitelisting, paid/ad-supported servers, etc. I'd be very keen to hear more discussion on the topic!
- 15155 11y ago
  It could be some kind of a network, perhaps, a network of users. We could call it, "Usenet." All jokes aside, what you're describing has existed for over 30 years.
  - ci5er 11y ago
    > We could call it, "Usenet." You beat me to it by less than one minute. Dang!
  - danbolt 11y ago
    That's a good point! I guess much of the infrastructure and ideas are already in place. I know little about Usenet apart from some simple research, so perhaps I should take the time to learn more. Regardless, perhaps Usenet is lacking certain bits of accessibility and convenience that Reddit has? Or, part of me feels that Reddit has a large draw because it's not very difficult to create an account and start engaging. Features such as up/downvoting, badges, and the whole default web interface would make a lot of sense too.
  - luckydude 11y ago
    Usenet is missing the upvote/downvote part. If it had that and a spam filter it would be mucho nicer than reddit in my opinion (which is skewed, I was on Usenet when there was no internet and I was quite fond of it before it got filled with spam).
- 13throwaway 11y ago
13throwaway 11y ago
I have been thinking it would be cool to have a Reddit replacement ran by a non profit, similar to Wikipedia. Does anyone here have experience running something like that? I understand non profits are very complex to run.
- starshadowx2 11y ago
  I was thinking maybe something more along the lines of Ello? Combining ideas from Ello and Reddit could be pretty interesting.
- meesterdude 11y ago
  I thought about this for my project, but decided against it, primarily due to associated complexity. Although I hear there are other business types being created that might be more suitable for websites. Personally, I don't think profits are bad. But I think being profit driven is. I also think a company can serve a public role and not have to be a non-profit to do it.
zachwooddoughty 11y ago
I help run Discoverboard, which is a subscription-based discussion community (less of a new aggregator). It's been around for a few months. If you're interested, you can check it out: http://discoverboard.com/code/HN http://discoverboard.com/code/HN
beowulfey 11y ago
I really find it fascinating that people are scrambling to make Reddit replacements. First off, A) there's no guarantee the community will ever abandon Reddit, even if yours is better, and B) why are we mimicking what Reddit did, and succeeded greatly at? Of all places, I would think that Hacker News, a community of start-ups, would recognize that you don't often succeed by simply trying to improve on what some other company did already. You succeed by doing something completely new, and filling a gap that wasn't previously recognized. Facebook didn't replace Myspace because they tried to do what Myspace did, but better; they won because they took an entirely different concept, built it, and eventually evolved into the behemoth we have today. Reddit didn't surpass Digg in content aggregation intentionally; they had a different community, with a different focus, and an entirely different strategy that eventually succeeded. Over the years, I've gone from getting my web content through AOL portals --> blogs/geocities --> news sites --> StumbleUpon --> Digg --> reddit, and I've been on there for 5 years now. I'm definitely ready for something new. I guess what I'm trying to say here is... if you want to make "the next reddit", you won't do it by trying to be BETTER than reddit. It's time for the next wave of content delivery, in whatever form that may be.
- iolothebard 11y ago
  I found reddit in the fall of 2005. It was everything I wished slashdot would have been. Found Digg the same day, wasn't impressed. I'll move on to the next site that supplants it. I have no loyalty to reddit and this Pao chick is a fucking joke.
- WorldWideWayne 11y ago
  What's "the community"? There doesn't seem to be one community that is going to act in unison. Regarding point B, I am not sure that anyone said a replacement has to exactly copy reddit. Arguments aside, I agree with your final sentiment. Something new would be awesome. I'd like an anonymous Usenet/distributed-server style system that runs on port 80 - like a BitTorrent for discussions where anybody that can put up a web server can run a node.
  - illyism 11y ago
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
alakin 11y ago
pier to pier, in-browser reddit
jpgvm 11y ago
I have some ideas for a reddit replacement. In my mind the perfect reddit replacement is run by the users, probably with the assistance of a non-profit foundation setup to support it. Instead of subscriptions providing superficial perks it buys you into voting power within the governing body. Effectively a decentralized network run and owned by the users, in a similar fashion to IRC or Usenet but more modern and without the centralised entities that operated them in the past. (ISPs were usually in charge of "free" Usenet servers or commercial Usenet services were run by corporate entities, IRC is often setup and operated by small cliques of people). You could accomplish this without a fully decentralized technical architecture too though that wouldn't be a bad goal long term. The main goal would be to distance the control of the platform that keeps the community together away from commercial and political interests. It's worth mentioning that reddit gold = $5 which is about the price of a small VPS. If every reddit gold user instead provided a small VPS worth of compute it suddenly becomes pretty simple to replace reddit from a money/infrastructure perspective.
clsec 11y ago
I used to be a huge fan of tribe.net until it got sold and the site started becoming unreliable. http://www.tribe.net/welcome http://www.tribe.net/welcome edit: tribe.net history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tribe.net https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tribe.net
snowwrestler 11y ago
Reddit's core problem is that they don't make much money, and all the things they might do to make money are things that will piss off the user base. It's the exact same problem that Digg had. And if Reddit experiences the same outcome, I don't know why anyone would rush to replicate that model a 3rd time. Look at the history of 4chan: you can grow a large audience by allowing people to say whatever they want, anonymously. But no one has effectively monetized that yet, because it turns out that such a site collects a lot of objectionable content.
- Artemis2 11y ago
  I don't know, if you don't earn enough money, not giving away 10% of your ad revenue would be a good start towards becoming profitable. That sounds cynical, but that's all PR and trying to get people to unblock ads. http://www.redditblog.com/2014/02/decimating-our-ads-revenue.html http://www.redditblog.com/2014/02/decimating-our-ads-revenue...
- noinsight 11y ago
  This image portraying reddit gold proceeds got posted earlier: http://i.imgur.com/fcfseA4.png http://i.imgur.com/fcfseA4.png
rdwallis 11y ago
Built http://www.thealetree.com http://www.thealetree.com a few years ago so not related to the current issue. But I'll turn the database on for a few days if people want to try it out. The source code is at https://github.com/rdwallis/TheAleTree https://github.com/rdwallis/TheAleTree The idea behind it was that the passionate minority on sites like reddit, hn etc tend to drive the discussion on issues because the less passionate majority isn't as inclined to upvote / downvote. So say you've got a website where a small minority of the users are racists but the racists are very passionate and always upvote racist content. You'll tend to see a lot of racist posts on the site even if the site as a whole isn't racist. And over time the passionate racists will drive out the rest. Wanted to see if I could solve the above without moderation, while keeping posts completely anonymous. Probably doesn't work but the idea is that before users vote you divide them randomly into teams. And then when a user submits a post or a comment the team votes on it and only if certain percent of the team like it does it get an upvote. And the passionate racists would most likely end up on different teams so they'd be less likely to be able to get submissions into the public parts of the site.
- meesterdude 11y ago
  This is an interesting idea! Why isn't the database turned on?
  - rdwallis 11y ago
    It got a lot of spam. Not sure if that shows that it doesn't work or if it needs a certain threshold of users before it can work properly. The database is on at the moment so you can try it out. I'll only turn it off if the spam comes back.
- studentrob 11y ago
  Regardless of how you divide people up, the majority vote is the majority vote. What problem are you trying to solve? I don't see any problem with people voting as long as it is one person, one vote.
  - 11y ago
bazillion 11y ago
If you're working on a reddit replacement, I have an answer to the question of how to monetize your site. See this video featuring Victoria: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MhpB6QDOxCI&feature=youtu.be https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MhpB6QDOxCI&feature=youtu.be The way it would work is that you'd install our plugin onto your site and make all of the images hoverable and linkable. Then, when people purchase through those links, you make an affiliate commission. The way we'd envision it working is that users would get a percent of the commission of whatever purchases they drove, and your site would also get a percent of the commission.
- cphoover 11y ago
  Why do it as a plugin?? Why not just straight JS embedded in the site. Then you don't have to ask users to download it.
  - bazillion 11y ago
    As a plugin, it works on sites that don't have it installed natively (Facebook, Pinterest, etc.). PLEENQ is both -- we offer a plugin that lets regular users use it on any site, as well as an embeddable version for website owners who want to monetize their image content.
ajdecon 11y ago
Philosophically, I'd like to see more non-connected link aggregation sites built around specific communities. I.e., there's no reason /r/askhistorians can't be www.askhistorians.whatever and serve the same purpose. HN is a good example of this kind of community-specific site; IMO lobste.rs is an even better example, given that it maintains a more consistent focus. Community-specific websites have all kinds of advantages over "just another subreddit", including the fact that the community can literally own its own site, and build moderation policies and tools appropriate to whatever it feels its norms are. It can also throw up whatever barriers it feels are appropriate to keep out marauding trolls. (I'm a big fan of Metafilter's $5 account fee, as an example.) It ought to be relatively easy to automate the process of spinning up such a site on a generic VPS. I'm very tempted to build something along those lines with Ansible or something. Of course, in practice, the "one big site" model has tons of advantages in terms of barrier to entry, network effects, costs, discovery, and so on. So I doubt the idea would ever gain any traction. But one can dream. :) (edit: fix wording slightly)
meesterdude 11y ago
I'm working on the rebolder, a social news site for amplifying the best behavior and discussions humanity has to offer. It's something of a cross between reddit/craigslist/nyt; really I guess it's my vision for newspapers in the web era, because I'm crazy enough to think I know better. The gist is: unwavering loyalty to users, voteable tags, "no" shills or bot armies, powerful search, various efforts to donate to charity, username obscurement, and lastly unwavering loyalty to users; which is important enough to mention twice.
drig 11y ago
There have been some posts on this thread saying that reddit is losing users for bad reasons. The users want to make hiring decisions, or approve of hate boards. That might be true, but there's one damn good reason to leave. https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/3byaei/reddit_alternatives_other_subs_going_private_to/csr0by6 https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/3byaei/reddit_alt... The CEO went on reddit to explain her decision. It comes down to "the software is bad, and we'll release better software". She did not acknowledge her mistakes. Nor did she explain why she reacted before the fix was ready. Instead, she blamed it on the developers. This is cowardly and self-serving. If reddit is in the hands of a person with no loyalty to her customers, they're going out of business. If Pao is still CEO by Monday night, reddit is done. I'm moving on.

66 points by meesterdude 11y ago

Interested to see what the HN community is doing in response to the recent reddit events. Post the name, URL, description, and what you'll copy from reddit, and what you will not.

minimaxir 11y ago

Even despite Reddit's troubles, you probably do not want to make a Reddit clone as a business model to capitalize if you don't have one already. One or the reasons for the protest is bad tools.

zxcvcxz 11y ago
Reddit is open source so is there any evidence that anything has been done or is planned to improve mod tools? Or have there been any community attempts to push code that was rejected?
- xq 11y ago
  > have there been any community attempts to push code that was rejected? Apparently yes: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/3bxrxj/lets_discuss_the_recent_incident_where_a_bunch_of/csqiv0t https://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/3bxrxj/lets... > Another great example of how much reddit cares about their assets is reddit companion. Which at the time of writing has around 154,302 installations, is utterly broken and hasn't been updated since February 21, 2013, the most ridiculous thing? It isn't hard to fix people tried to do the work for reddit since it is open source but they simply have been ignoring those pull requests since 2013. Which is silly since those pull request effectively do fix companion, resulting in a perfectly working version.
Nemcue 11y ago
Not really. Despite tools you'd still want someone to act like an intermediate with the one doing the AMA. This is about poor communication, and how Reddit treats the ones that actually make it all go around.

billturner 11y ago

Although it does seem to be very slow to respond, https://voat.co/ https://voat.co/ seemed to have stepped in as a replacement at the last big upheaval. They seem to constantly have troubles staying up though.

akhilcacharya 11y ago
The problem is voat's population.
- clavalle 11y ago
  Which Reddit seems determined to solve for them.
  - scarmig 11y ago
    Unfortunately, Reddit is exporting the dredges of its own population. And thus by subtraction we get addition...
    - clavalle 11y ago
      I don't think you can say that about the last two days.
Mahn 11y ago
They certainly seem to have momentum, despite having trouble handling the traffic. It's a pity that as it stands it's still pretty much a copy though, an alternative to reddit doesn't have to be, and probably shouldn't be, a 1:1 copy.
- c_prompt 11y ago
  If you're looking for something different yet similar, I run valME.io which has a very different business model. And because of the business model, it will have significantly less spam and other undesirable content. But the concept it's not for everyone.

faizshah 11y ago

I have been working on one, it's not really ready for prime time yet. The idea is that it's a news aggregator that learns what you like, so it forms a probabilistic model of what it thinks your interests are and applies that model to the network of submitted content to decide what you see. Instead of subreddits the system forms subcommunities by showing users with similar interests similar lists of content. The main thing I'm having a lot of trouble with is figuring out how to do efficient keyword extraction on pictures and video. Otherwise it only supports links that have a lot of text. The other problem is it doesn't have enough of a community feel so that's something else I'm working on. One of the ideas I am about to experiment with is removing user accounts and using browser fingerprints instead. I think if users dont have to sign up it will encourage users to more actively participate in the community.

meesterdude 11y ago
As a fellow builder, also with something not ready for prime time, I say: ship that shit. If you're going to strike, now's the time. Any reason it can't be live, end of the month? > Otherwise it only supports links that have a lot of text Sounds good to me! > using browser fingerprints instead By all means experiment; but this has a few problems with it. Some people like (or need) multiple accounts, which would mean separate browsers at the least. Equally, it's trivial to spin up a VM with a browser. So, the users who need multiple usernames can't (or lack the technical understanding), and the ones you don't want having multiple can easily create hundreds.
- faizshah 11y ago
  Thanks for the support, I can probably make it live by the end of the month I just thought that a lack of image and video support would limit its chances at survival. The browser fingerprinting idea is a bit more involved. The idea is that everyone is anonymous and the types of people who you seem to like, based on factors like leaving your cursor over their comment for a while, are slowly deanonymized to you. The way browser fingerprinting would work in this scenario is that instead of storing usernames attached to models, we store a few different indicators (like browser fingerprints) and create probabilistic models relating these indicators to the aforementioned models. That way even if we have a completely new user we can create a new initial model for them based on what they might like. I have only just started working on this idea though, so I'm not sure how well this would work in practice and I'm not sure what other indicators I might use. With this in mind I don't think there would be a reason to spin up VMs and create new 'accounts' because it would just limit your personal experience.

echeese 11y ago

Truthfully, the subreddits I follow (programming-related) are unaffected, though a few threw up a notice saying they were not going to black out.

ericcholis 11y ago
Another solid example of not blacking out is /r/malefashionadvice, one of the more prominent voices in the Male Fashion category. While I can understand the interest in "disrupting the space"; I'm not entirely sure that the current management conditions at reddit are indicative of an opportunity here.
Buge 11y ago
/r/netsec, the primary security subreddit is down.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

pcunite 11y ago

For those not in the know: http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/07/03/419756207/ http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/07/03/419756207/

akhilcacharya 11y ago

I've been toying with making one since I realized Reddit has been devolving into a reactionary, hate filled site. I was thinking about having a gimmick of graph based commenting to prevent the "top post guides discussion" effect. Not sure at how feasible or user friendly that could be.

mingus68040 11y ago
I would love to see a commenting site with strong, pseudonymous identity support, to create a greater barrier to the racist and misogynistic trolls who infest the default sub-reddits currently. Some options: 1. Register with a phone number (do some basic checks to avoid Google Voice, Twilio, etc.) 2. Accounts cost $1, payable either through Payal or credit card. Accounts are tied to the payment credentials. 3. Participation is restricted to desktop and mobile apps employing strong anti-cracking measures and linking accounts to the current device only by way of unique hardware IDs.
- ljk 11y ago
  > 2. Accounts cost $1, payable either through Payal or credit card. Accounts are tied to the payment credentials. is that a good idea? If accounts are paid, then "richer" opinions have bigger impact on the site
  - mingus68040 11y ago
    Alright, let's say 10¢. Everyone with a personal Internet-enabled device can most certainly afford that. You could even refund them the money later, as the goal is to obtain the payment identity -- not the cash.
    - captn3m0 11y ago
      Not everyone has a way to pay online, especially if you are accepting credit cards.
      - 11y ago

sidcool 11y ago

Is Reddit doomed already?

clavalle 11y ago
Without a radical turnaround, yeah, I think so. It feels very much like Digg did back in the day. When your userbase is your main asset and you treat them as a given, bad things happen.
- VieElm 11y ago
  When Digg died it was a combination of unpopular policy and a completely broken v4 upgrade that broke the site for weeks.
- maccard 11y ago
  Except that reedit had the population before digg crashed. There currently aren't any sizeable alternatives to reedit right now, so the same thing can't possibly happen
  - clavalle 11y ago
    It can absolutely happen. The population is primed. The same scenario doesn't have to play out for the end result to be the same. Digg had some mildly bad policy before their exodus. Reddit policy is failing in a much more dramatic way. If someone comes out with a viable alternative with, perhaps, one or two notable improvements there is enough froth to push people to a new home. I personally hope it fragments. The slacktivists and amateur political wonks to one corner with the news, the popular entertainment to the other, and the learners/hobbyists/special interest associations to yet another. Reddit is the Craigslist of 2015. It is doing too much and it is ready to be picked apart.

tmppppppppp 11y ago

It seems to me that the issue is not making a technically equivalent site, which is "relatively" easy. There's more to it than that.

Fluid_Mechanics 11y ago
If it was relatively easy, why don't you just make one yourself. You may learn something useful for a change.

mcphage 11y ago

My Reddit replacement is Reddit, minus all the people who want to leave because of Reddit closing r/jailbait, r/thefappening, and r/fatpeoplehate. It's a pretty cool site, you should check it out.

Karunamon 11y ago
That's a remarkably unfair characterization of people who have issues with Reddit.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- zxcvcxz 11y ago
  Well how else are they supposed to push their political narrative that everyone is a sexist/racist? Don't you want a PC version of reddit where everyone constantly sits upon a moral high-horse of self righteousness while pushing authoritarian ideology under the guise of social justice?
- albertoleal 11y ago
  That's pretty much the reality of it. The other group of users who have issues with Reddit (as we've seen yesterday) are the moderators; in particular the moderators of really large communities. Many others just seem to jump onto the bandwagon.
  - Karunamon 11y ago
    You don't have to think certain pseudo-religious thought patterns are bad in order to recognize that reddit has some serious problems. The default communities are cesspools (consensus seems to be Reddit is better when they're unsubscribed) The staff has no idea how to communicate with the userbase, a problem which has obviously gotten worse in the past few months. The site hasn't seen a major upgrade in years and still regularly falls over under its own weight The moderators of the defaults are all friends with each other and run each other's communities (++corruption) Their current CEO has a questionable at best ethical history

pwnna 11y ago

Just as a side note: reddit is open source (I belive): https://github.com/reddit/reddit https://github.com/reddit/reddit

cbzink000 11y ago
It's actually fairly simple to get running. I'm bopping around in a private instance right now. Looks like there would be an insane amount of work to re-brand everything, but it's certainly possible. It's licensed under CPAL, which I am unfamiliar with and do not know if it would allow for commercial use.

TD-Linux 11y ago

The only thing I've used reddit for in recent times are projects (like rust) that use it as their official forum. Otherwise, I tend to find that my needs are better filled by independent, specialized forums (RCGroups, reprap, etc), and imageboards like 4chan or 8chan provide endless entertainment value.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

noname123 11y ago

I want to put Arc to some serious load testing! PG and current sys-admins of HN, open the flood gates, put in this ticket for HN development project: "Create sub-HackNewsies". Also, I think Reddit source code is open source; so people can use that too! A great business idea I think is doing a bannedsubreddits.com/r/{banned}; crawl webarchive.org for the previous archives for all the banned subreddits for continuity...

krapp 11y ago
Sub-boards or tags have been discussed multiple times on Hacker News. Unfortunately, the developers seem allergic to modernity when it comes to forum design. That said, here is the software that Hacker News is based on: http://arclanguage.org/ http://arclanguage.org/ so maybe someone can fork a version with those features themselves.

danbolt 11y ago

I'm speaking as a bit of an armchair developer here, but I'd be very interested in seeing a more decentralized alternative to Reddit. A user of one Reddit-like site could post on another's through some sort of protocol, perhaps much like email. It would certainly be more complicated than something centralized, but considering Reddit's attitude towards user-generated communities and moderation, I could see it being a good fit. There could be a lot of opportunities for black/whitelisting, paid/ad-supported servers, etc. I'd be very keen to hear more discussion on the topic!

15155 11y ago
It could be some kind of a network, perhaps, a network of users. We could call it, "Usenet." All jokes aside, what you're describing has existed for over 30 years.
- ci5er 11y ago
  > We could call it, "Usenet." You beat me to it by less than one minute. Dang!
- danbolt 11y ago
  That's a good point! I guess much of the infrastructure and ideas are already in place. I know little about Usenet apart from some simple research, so perhaps I should take the time to learn more. Regardless, perhaps Usenet is lacking certain bits of accessibility and convenience that Reddit has? Or, part of me feels that Reddit has a large draw because it's not very difficult to create an account and start engaging. Features such as up/downvoting, badges, and the whole default web interface would make a lot of sense too.
- luckydude 11y ago
  Usenet is missing the upvote/downvote part. If it had that and a spam filter it would be mucho nicer than reddit in my opinion (which is skewed, I was on Usenet when there was no internet and I was quite fond of it before it got filled with spam).
13throwaway 11y ago

13throwaway 11y ago

I have been thinking it would be cool to have a Reddit replacement ran by a non profit, similar to Wikipedia. Does anyone here have experience running something like that? I understand non profits are very complex to run.

starshadowx2 11y ago
I was thinking maybe something more along the lines of Ello? Combining ideas from Ello and Reddit could be pretty interesting.
meesterdude 11y ago
I thought about this for my project, but decided against it, primarily due to associated complexity. Although I hear there are other business types being created that might be more suitable for websites. Personally, I don't think profits are bad. But I think being profit driven is. I also think a company can serve a public role and not have to be a non-profit to do it.

zachwooddoughty 11y ago

I help run Discoverboard, which is a subscription-based discussion community (less of a new aggregator). It's been around for a few months. If you're interested, you can check it out: http://discoverboard.com/code/HN http://discoverboard.com/code/HN

beowulfey 11y ago

I really find it fascinating that people are scrambling to make Reddit replacements. First off, A) there's no guarantee the community will ever abandon Reddit, even if yours is better, and B) why are we mimicking what Reddit did, and succeeded greatly at? Of all places, I would think that Hacker News, a community of start-ups, would recognize that you don't often succeed by simply trying to improve on what some other company did already. You succeed by doing something completely new, and filling a gap that wasn't previously recognized. Facebook didn't replace Myspace because they tried to do what Myspace did, but better; they won because they took an entirely different concept, built it, and eventually evolved into the behemoth we have today. Reddit didn't surpass Digg in content aggregation intentionally; they had a different community, with a different focus, and an entirely different strategy that eventually succeeded. Over the years, I've gone from getting my web content through AOL portals --> blogs/geocities --> news sites --> StumbleUpon --> Digg --> reddit, and I've been on there for 5 years now. I'm definitely ready for something new. I guess what I'm trying to say here is... if you want to make "the next reddit", you won't do it by trying to be BETTER than reddit. It's time for the next wave of content delivery, in whatever form that may be.

iolothebard 11y ago
I found reddit in the fall of 2005. It was everything I wished slashdot would have been. Found Digg the same day, wasn't impressed. I'll move on to the next site that supplants it. I have no loyalty to reddit and this Pao chick is a fucking joke.
WorldWideWayne 11y ago
What's "the community"? There doesn't seem to be one community that is going to act in unison. Regarding point B, I am not sure that anyone said a replacement has to exactly copy reddit. Arguments aside, I agree with your final sentiment. Something new would be awesome. I'd like an anonymous Usenet/distributed-server style system that runs on port 80 - like a BitTorrent for discussions where anybody that can put up a web server can run a node.
- illyism 11y ago

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

alakin 11y ago

pier to pier, in-browser reddit

jpgvm 11y ago

I have some ideas for a reddit replacement. In my mind the perfect reddit replacement is run by the users, probably with the assistance of a non-profit foundation setup to support it. Instead of subscriptions providing superficial perks it buys you into voting power within the governing body. Effectively a decentralized network run and owned by the users, in a similar fashion to IRC or Usenet but more modern and without the centralised entities that operated them in the past. (ISPs were usually in charge of "free" Usenet servers or commercial Usenet services were run by corporate entities, IRC is often setup and operated by small cliques of people). You could accomplish this without a fully decentralized technical architecture too though that wouldn't be a bad goal long term. The main goal would be to distance the control of the platform that keeps the community together away from commercial and political interests. It's worth mentioning that reddit gold = $5 which is about the price of a small VPS. If every reddit gold user instead provided a small VPS worth of compute it suddenly becomes pretty simple to replace reddit from a money/infrastructure perspective.

clsec 11y ago

I used to be a huge fan of tribe.net until it got sold and the site started becoming unreliable. http://www.tribe.net/welcome http://www.tribe.net/welcome edit: tribe.net history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tribe.net https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tribe.net

snowwrestler 11y ago

Reddit's core problem is that they don't make much money, and all the things they might do to make money are things that will piss off the user base. It's the exact same problem that Digg had. And if Reddit experiences the same outcome, I don't know why anyone would rush to replicate that model a 3rd time. Look at the history of 4chan: you can grow a large audience by allowing people to say whatever they want, anonymously. But no one has effectively monetized that yet, because it turns out that such a site collects a lot of objectionable content.

Artemis2 11y ago
I don't know, if you don't earn enough money, not giving away 10% of your ad revenue would be a good start towards becoming profitable. That sounds cynical, but that's all PR and trying to get people to unblock ads. http://www.redditblog.com/2014/02/decimating-our-ads-revenue.html http://www.redditblog.com/2014/02/decimating-our-ads-revenue...
noinsight 11y ago
This image portraying reddit gold proceeds got posted earlier: http://i.imgur.com/fcfseA4.png http://i.imgur.com/fcfseA4.png

rdwallis 11y ago

Built http://www.thealetree.com http://www.thealetree.com a few years ago so not related to the current issue. But I'll turn the database on for a few days if people want to try it out. The source code is at https://github.com/rdwallis/TheAleTree https://github.com/rdwallis/TheAleTree The idea behind it was that the passionate minority on sites like reddit, hn etc tend to drive the discussion on issues because the less passionate majority isn't as inclined to upvote / downvote. So say you've got a website where a small minority of the users are racists but the racists are very passionate and always upvote racist content. You'll tend to see a lot of racist posts on the site even if the site as a whole isn't racist. And over time the passionate racists will drive out the rest. Wanted to see if I could solve the above without moderation, while keeping posts completely anonymous. Probably doesn't work but the idea is that before users vote you divide them randomly into teams. And then when a user submits a post or a comment the team votes on it and only if certain percent of the team like it does it get an upvote. And the passionate racists would most likely end up on different teams so they'd be less likely to be able to get submissions into the public parts of the site.

meesterdude 11y ago
This is an interesting idea! Why isn't the database turned on?
- rdwallis 11y ago
  It got a lot of spam. Not sure if that shows that it doesn't work or if it needs a certain threshold of users before it can work properly. The database is on at the moment so you can try it out. I'll only turn it off if the spam comes back.
studentrob 11y ago
Regardless of how you divide people up, the majority vote is the majority vote. What problem are you trying to solve? I don't see any problem with people voting as long as it is one person, one vote.
- 11y ago

bazillion 11y ago

If you're working on a reddit replacement, I have an answer to the question of how to monetize your site. See this video featuring Victoria: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MhpB6QDOxCI&feature=youtu.be https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MhpB6QDOxCI&feature=youtu.be The way it would work is that you'd install our plugin onto your site and make all of the images hoverable and linkable. Then, when people purchase through those links, you make an affiliate commission. The way we'd envision it working is that users would get a percent of the commission of whatever purchases they drove, and your site would also get a percent of the commission.

cphoover 11y ago
Why do it as a plugin?? Why not just straight JS embedded in the site. Then you don't have to ask users to download it.
- bazillion 11y ago
  As a plugin, it works on sites that don't have it installed natively (Facebook, Pinterest, etc.). PLEENQ is both -- we offer a plugin that lets regular users use it on any site, as well as an embeddable version for website owners who want to monetize their image content.

ajdecon 11y ago

Philosophically, I'd like to see more non-connected link aggregation sites built around specific communities. I.e., there's no reason /r/askhistorians can't be www.askhistorians.whatever and serve the same purpose. HN is a good example of this kind of community-specific site; IMO lobste.rs is an even better example, given that it maintains a more consistent focus. Community-specific websites have all kinds of advantages over "just another subreddit", including the fact that the community can literally own its own site, and build moderation policies and tools appropriate to whatever it feels its norms are. It can also throw up whatever barriers it feels are appropriate to keep out marauding trolls. (I'm a big fan of Metafilter's $5 account fee, as an example.) It ought to be relatively easy to automate the process of spinning up such a site on a generic VPS. I'm very tempted to build something along those lines with Ansible or something. Of course, in practice, the "one big site" model has tons of advantages in terms of barrier to entry, network effects, costs, discovery, and so on. So I doubt the idea would ever gain any traction. But one can dream. :) (edit: fix wording slightly)

meesterdude 11y ago

I'm working on the rebolder, a social news site for amplifying the best behavior and discussions humanity has to offer. It's something of a cross between reddit/craigslist/nyt; really I guess it's my vision for newspapers in the web era, because I'm crazy enough to think I know better. The gist is: unwavering loyalty to users, voteable tags, "no" shills or bot armies, powerful search, various efforts to donate to charity, username obscurement, and lastly unwavering loyalty to users; which is important enough to mention twice.

drig 11y ago

There have been some posts on this thread saying that reddit is losing users for bad reasons. The users want to make hiring decisions, or approve of hate boards. That might be true, but there's one damn good reason to leave. https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/3byaei/reddit_alternatives_other_subs_going_private_to/csr0by6 https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/3byaei/reddit_alt... The CEO went on reddit to explain her decision. It comes down to "the software is bad, and we'll release better software". She did not acknowledge her mistakes. Nor did she explain why she reacted before the fix was ready. Instead, she blamed it on the developers. This is cowardly and self-serving. If reddit is in the hands of a person with no loyalty to her customers, they're going out of business. If Pao is still CEO by Monday night, reddit is done. I'm moving on.