[Deimorz]

I worked at reddit for 4 years but quit in 2016, largely because they were clearly beginning to switch from a small, fairly independent company (despite being owned by Advance/Conde) to one that was going to become completely dependent on venture capital and I knew what that would end up doing to the site (which, like you mentioned, is manifesting through the redesign, the dark patterns, and so on). They've now taken $500M in VC since I left.

A few months later, I decided to start a non-profit with the goal of building a site that would actually be able to stick to its principles and address a lot of the issues that I think are hurting online communities: https://blog.tildes.net/announcing-tildes (HN discussion of the announcement here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17103093)

It's in private alpha and is still fairly small, but it focuses on higher-quality non-fluff content and discussions, and gets several hundred posts/comments a day. If you (or anyone else) is interested in an invite, please read the blog post I linked above and send me an email at the address listed in there and I'll be happy to give you one.

[baroffoos]

I was going to mention tildes but who better to do it than you!

I have been using tildes for about 6 months so far. I love the technical side of the website. Its fast and its minimal and doesn't seem to be sucking up my data. I also love the interactions I have had while using it.

What its missing is the specialty stuff. On reddit I can find a whole community focused on one programming language. On tildes I'm lucky to see a programming post.

But this leaves me with an interesting problem, how can you have a website that has enough users to make up a group for specialty interests without it becoming big enough that it turns in to reddit. It almost seems like the only way is to have totally separate sites for every interest.

[Deimorz]

Yeah, agreed. That's mostly just due to the small userbase, and hopefully we'll be able to build up specialized communities as the site grows (and the hierarchical group system should work very well for them).

It's worth remembering that reddit didn't even have user-created subreddits until it was over two and a half years old, and only had a handful of admin-created ones before that. It takes quite a bit of growth and time to be able to support specialized communities.

[nindalf]

This comment would have been fine without the preceding humblebrag. "Oh its so difficult dealing with massive interest from HN, but oh well I'll take the hit for your sake". Admit it, if a bunch of folks from HN join it's great for you.

[Deimorz]

It was more that I already spent about 6 hours between yesterday and today replying to emails instead of doing the things that I'd prefer to, but you're right, I wouldn't be posting if I didn't want the attention.

I'll remove that line, it was just me sighing and didn't add anything of value.

[knolax]

Having just tried Tilde, I think a bunch of users HN going to Tilde would probably be equivalent to a bunch of Reddit users going to HN. The quality of discussion is going to go down as the forum gets bigger.

[sublupo]

Can you at least make it public for lurkers?

[Deimorz]

Yes, that should be happening within the next week (but it will still require an invite to register/participate).