[dilap]

Rather than shut down, it would be a great time for all these clients to get together and decide on an official alternative site to reddit, and start supporting that. If they did it en-masse and in a coordinated fashion, it might be enough social momentum to achieve escape velocity on the new site.

[jjcm]

I have an unlaunched open source reddit alternative. Before I go into that too much though, note that there are a bunch: https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/

My vision:

Free to browse, subscription to interact. You choose your subscription amount. I take $1 to run the server, anything beyond that gets split evenly between everything you upvote that month.

For the $1, I give 30% of the cut to any 3rd party app that user is using.

With this model, creators make money, and the site hopefully is self-sufficient without ads.

Right now I have a working website, backend, payments, and payouts. What I don't have is a mobile app. If anyone is interested and wants to partner, my email is in my profile.

Site: https://non.io (feel free to play around with login hackernews, pw: helloworld)

Github: https://github.com/jjcm/nonio

API: https://api.non.io (slightly outdated, I need to do an update pass here)

[guptaneil]

Really love that you’re trying a unique business model! I suspect you’ll struggle to gain traction on anything that requires a credit card to interact with, even if the price is only $1, due to the very high barrier to entry for most of the world but I hope this works!

One idea I’d love to see somebody implement: weight content that a user spent longer typing + editing higher as a proxy for thoughtfulness. Unfortunately this specific client-side metric can realistically only work on a native-only service with device attestation and no API, so that the metric can be trusted, but would be cool to think about other solutions to surfacing higher quality content (like TikTok did), as well as solving the inevitable authenticity problem as more and more online content will be astroturfed by LLM’s.

[jjcm]

So I actually think this model does weigh for better content, but I'd love your thoughts here since it seems like you're thinking about this as well.

Part of the reason why I want engagement to be paid only, is because when you factor in the "anything beyond [the $1 server fee taken from your subscription] gets split evenly between everything you upvote that month" aspect, you have to be more choosy with what you upvote.

Take a scenario where I subscribe for $10/mo. That means $9 gets split between everything I upvote. If the first thing I upvote in a month is an extremely engaging and insightful article that clearly had hours poured into it, as of that time the author of that article will be scheduled to get all $9 of my subscription pool at the end of the month. If I stumble upon a low effort meme that made me chuckle, will I upvote it knowing that it will reduce the amount of the pool that is going to the first article? If I do they'll each get $4.50 at the end of the month, but are the two of them equal? On reddit votes are free and require nothing, but now that there's an aspect of "voting on this takes a little away from my previous votes", there's another factor at play.

My hypothesis is that this will lead to more conscientious voting. No clue if it'll actually work, but again since you're thinking along the same lines I'd love your take.

[midnitewarrior]

The way you replace Reddit is by making its business model obsolete with a better model.

The problem with Reddit is that the interests of the users, mods, shareholders, and advertisers are not aligned. Their interests are being pitted against one another in order to generate profit through enshittification.

The way you make a better Reddit is by creating a cooperative model where the users, advertisers, and mods interests are aligned, and there isn't a profit motive for a shareholder group that takes precedence over the quality and governance of the site.

The web site and free app are ad-sponsored. Paid subscriptions first give you an ad-free experience, and secondly, give you and API key you can use in any 3rd party app. 3rd party apps make revenue from the subscriptions, giving them an incentive to create an ever-better user experience.

Mods earn a fee based on traffic and interactions with their subreddit. Not enough to call it a job, but enough for the community to show appreciation.

As a cooperative model, there are no investment shareholders, the site sells bonds to fund it that pay a deferred, fixed yield to get it started. Bondholders, have a vested interest in the success of the site, but have no say in its operation. Without shareholders demanding profits and growth, the interests of the users, the mods, the advertisers, the bondholders and the non-profit that administers the site are aligned.

The best things in this world aren't for profit, the hug of a child, a national park, a sunset and the stars at night. If you want a Reddit-like experience to stay pure, it needs to upset the apple cart and be a tech entity of a completely different model in order to avoid enshittification.

[cyclotron3k]

Seems like it's not really a drop-in replacement for Reddit - looks more like a Deviant Art or a YouTube replacement to me?

A lot of Reddit (like HN) is linking to 3rd party content, and not much of it is actually user-generated OC.

Nice site though - it looks really nice.

[jjcm]

This is 100% correct! I'm prioritizing self-hosted OC over external linking, mainly because my priority was finding a way to reward creators.

Allowing external links would be fairly trivial, but I'd have to think through the monetization aspects of that. Not sure if I have the right model, but my hope is that since it's open source even if I go wrong someone else can find the right one.

Also thank you for the kind words about the design - it's been a fun labor of love.

[cl1nk]

Start promoting this soon, if you gain traction in the NSFW subreddits, this would blow up

[jjcm]

High risk high reward! I do have nsfw tags and logic baked into the site, but it is risky if the site is perceived as being for nsfw content. Having it is fine, it being the main use case though means I wouldn’t be able to use Stripe as a payment provider.

[qingcharles]

Login needs an email address? (hackernews is rejected)

[anlaw]

I would ditch user logins and user comments. Let OPs post a wallet or something and otherwise remain anon.

Avoid the hypernormalizing of commentary and costly moderation by forcing scrollers to comment elsewhere; cut and paste a link is not hard. Not every social media product needs the normalized set of features.

Social by default is exhausting. It’s the biggest downside to the internet and society these days. Yes we’re social creatures but we also evolved over centuries of social interaction being difficult to come by given slow travel across fast distances. We did not evolve around 24/7 consumption of human inane and repetitive first world gibberish.

[jjcm]

Doh! You’d think I’d know my own login requirements. [e-mail] is the email I used for that test account

[qingcharles]

Thank you. It's a nice UI. I know you've put a log of hours into this.

[dicknuckle]

Same issue for me. Tried [e-mail] as well.

[jjcm]

Yea my bad there - fwiw I added a hot patch to the frontend to accept hackernews as a valid "email" since I couldn't update the parent comment. It should work now, but [e-mail] was the email used.

[qingcharles]

Ah, the beautiful advantages of being a lone dev on a hobby project - live updates to the production code!

[jjcm]

And I only brought prod down for 15s or so when I missed a bracket in the production server frontend package I was editing in vim! I call that a success.

[mort96]

Building an alternative to Reddit is actually incredibly hard, especially if you suddenly get a huge influx of new users. Not talking about the technical side of things, but the community. How should the developers of these clients feel certain that whatever alternative they decide to endorse won't end up like Voat?

[ranger_danger]

Not only that but who (and how) is all of this hardware getting paid for? Running a large web service is not cheap and nobody wants to front those costs for practically no gain.

[johnnyanmac]

>How should the developers of these clients feel certain that whatever alternative they decide to endorse won't end up like Voat?

Make sure the community has proper and sane moderators/admins and stamp that down before it flairs up. Because it's the internet, it will always flare up if unchecked.

But I get it, that involves trust in judgement, and the internet attracts some very zealous personalities that don't have that. You'd need someone with a proven record to champion that cause. I'm not sure who that is.

[x0x0]

Building an alternative to reddit generally is quite hard.

Building a single subreddit (or handful, if they're interrelated) alternative seems way more doable. See eg thedonald which transitioned to an external forum until a mod shut it down because of (not really sure, I didn't follow, but it was a working site for a couple years.)

[johnnyanmac]

I'd be interested. If there was something that was even 1% as large as r/games I'd be fine weaning off. Hopefully a community that isn't hellbent on bashing anything that isn't a console game.

Most of my tech subs are covered pretty well here, but not media.

[wincy]

It’s still there. It’s just at patriots.win now. Although upvotes vary between 100 and 1,000 so, much smaller than it was on Reddit where you’d easily get 10,000+ upvotes.

[brookst]

So like 1 to 10 real people, where it used to be 100?

[wincy]

Sure whatever makes you feel better about depersonalizing the millions of people who voted for Trump.

[willcipriano]

Build a alternative reddit api that is 1:1 and then wire that up to alternative content sources? RSS to start as a POC?

[intothemild]

Not the worst idea.... Build an API that sits as a middleman to reddits api, it's paid for... But caches requests to cut costs.

Possibly use some amount of web scraping too

[jelling]

The problem with Reddit as a business is that they have the least profitable users of any social platform. So one would have to build a backend, incentive the app makers to switch, get advertisers and do it all more cost efficiently than Reddit does it.

That’s a small needle to thread.

[brookst]

The business model can't be "become a giant social network that makes billions and employs tens of thousands of people."

If the whole thing is lean, with minimal costs, no account reps, and essentially non-profit, it's a lot easier.

Of course, that means it goes one of two ways:

1. Never gets traction, dies after a bunch of work

2. Takes off and the people controlling it (rightfully) want to be compensated for their hard work, so they start adding advertising and focusing on monetization, which requires hiring more people, which requires a more mature business model, which heads towards IPO.

[vanilla_nut]

Combining tons of disparate web forums under a single toxic leadership is what caused these issues in the first place. I would far prefer either something federated (in the Fediverse sense) or a decent lightweight reddit alternative with no shared accounts, and thus less incentive for karma farming and voting manipulation.

Coincidentally, the forum we're commenting on right now uses a fork of the original Reddit codebase, and shares a small amount of DNA with old.reddit.com. I'd love to see something like HN for all of my favorite hobbies. But I'd also settle for a return to a healthy ecosystem of web forums. What is old is new again!

[robocat]

> Coincidentally, the forum we're commenting on right now uses a fork of the original Reddit codebase

The current codebase was developed from scratch - zero forking - from what I can see.

HN is written in ARC http://www.paulgraham.com/arc.html which is a language designed by Paul Graham.

Here’s a thread talking about the early days of HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27452276 and it mentions “The earliest version of HN I can find; 166 LOC” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=723767

Here’s Paul talking about the release of HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/hackernews.html

AFAIK this is the latest public copy of the HN code, but it is significantly outdated: https://github.com/wting/hackernews/blob/master/news.arc

[robocat]

https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit1.0

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36367241

[brookst]

It's an interesting idea. If it were going to work in just a few weeks, I think you'd need a replacement that is API-compatible with Reddit, so clients can just change their URI and have everything just work. I can't think of anything too difficult there.

The hard part would probably be the anti-spam and other anti-abuse stuff that lives entirely server side. Maybe all it is IS the API endpoint, at least to start, so only the mobile clients can access? Doesn't solve abuse but mitigates it.

[mikae1]

> an official alternative site to reddit

It's important that it's not an alternative, or else we'll be in this situation again a few years from now. https://join-lemmy.org will allow us to create a network of sites (or instances) that are still able speak to one another.

[duxup]

Their apps are great but I don’t think the issues of funding, advertising, moderation, and content are things that they aren’t necessarily good at.

[ekanes]

100% -- the only reason reddit might get away with such terrible behavior is if people have nowhere to go. :(

[YetAnotherNick]

The simple fact is that you need money to host a site, to have moderation, to develop and maintain features etc.

The problem apps are shutting down is because they don't want to loose money. If they make a new site, they will likely loose even more money. And they likely can't get profitable without resorting to same scummy behaviour as reddit.

[johnnyanmac]

>The problem apps are shutting down is because they don't want to loose money. If they make a new site, they will likely loose even more money.

Given the quotes I heard, I'd be very surprised if you lost more money in say, 2 years of building and hosting a new site than trying to even support a month of API calls from reddit c. July 2023.

You can certainly make a decent front end for little cost (even if we're talking about paying competitive rates to a few talented mobile devs) and a small backend won't cost much more. It's always about the community to gather to make all that work. That's the hard part.

[peanuty1]

Reddit moderators are unpaid volunteers.

[elbigbad]

And among the worst sorts of people imaginable. Maybe they should be paid positions that are interviewed for and regularly undergo performance reviews.

[graypegg]

What’s out there? I genuinely don’t know of any that would fit the Reddit data model.

[gs17]

There's Lemmy, not perfect but it is designed to be Reddit-ish.

[fencepost]

The comments I've seen have included Lemmy (caveat: apparently some concerns about the devs, default instance and policies) or kbin both of which are ActivityPub capable.

[dilap]

Yeah I don't know either. How hard could it be to build though? I say that half-jokingly...

Is the reddit API complex?

[1270018080]

I doubt the API would be complicated, the issue will be in all of the little QoL/scaling features: moderator settings, automoderation bots, hosting photos and videos in a scalable way. I imagine behind the scenes bot/spam detection is an entire engineering team.

[graypegg]

Yep, definitely. The API was only a small sample of the actual business logic inside the Reddit site as a whole.

[alvarezbjm-hn]

You are talking in past tense. Reddit is not dead, yet. The couple communities I participate in ("top 5%") aren't aware of anything happening

[nullindividual]

Reddit already purchased one of these apps and 'improved' upon it over the years. I don't see why they would feel the need to purchase another app.

[dilap]

I meant go the other way -- the apps band together and all decide to support some alternative backend, instead of the official reddit. Ultimately it's the users that make a site valuable, and the clients seem to have a lot more goodwill than reddit itself right now.

Of course, "just add a backend" is easier said than done!

But not unachievable.