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API: https://api.non.io (slightly outdated, I need to do an update pass here)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