[opportune]

I’m lazily designing a Reddit replacement, can’t really build one while I’m still employed and may never build it.

If you’re not chasing infinite growth, or even if you are but want to set the right culture at the outset, I think the HN moderation model is ideal. Just delete low quality and blatantly offensive posts and ban repeat offenders. You don’t need some complicated mechanism for implementing restorative justice or scaling moderation via community moderation teams, you just don’t want those users to post

4chan is filled with people asking easily googleable questions and the user base generally seems to be about 17. I know that’s the age when I visited the site the most (thank god it was before the 2016 election which irrevocably ruined the site). It has a very low bar for discussion and the signal/noise ratio is terrible unless you’re willing to wade through piles of shit to find a gem here and there.

4chan for sure has useful insights like a very low (captcha) barrier to use the site and a very low-ego culture. But the discussion quality is actually abysmal

[prox]

I hope you get your chance to build one.

I think a central aggregator that is Reddit still produces the less friction. I haven’t felt compelled to sign up for any alternatives sofar. It’s an interesting field at the moment, and with Twitter in flux, a smart player might be able to take advantage of the unique opportunity.

[opportune]

I do too! It’s not just Reddit and Twitter I want to replace. I think Quora and Stack Overflow, even Wikipedia, had some good social ideas as well. Most of these were ruined by chasing growth (diluting out the good original user base) and trying to juice out as much revenue per user as possible. They’ve all been enshittified unnecessarily - even though not all are profitable, in most cases where they aren’t, it’s because of over-hiring. Running a website isn’t that hard

Unfortunately I will need to switch to a non-pseudonymous account to launch and really talk about it, so can’t get into too much detail on this one.

I honestly think that, if these sites had been ok with measly 9 figure valuations and didn’t go chasing 11 figure valuations (or, a huge nonprofit treasure chest, or allowed petty busybodies to exert undue influence on the site), none of them would have gone to shit.