[scotty79]

Have you seen moltbook? One dude coded reddit clone for bots in less the a week. How is it not at least 10x of what was achievable in pre-ai world?

Granted he left the db open to public, but some meat powered startups did exactly the same few years ago.

[coldtea]

Any semi-capable coder could build a Reddit clone by themselves in a week since forever. It's a glorified CRUD app.

The barrier to creating a full blown Reddit the huge scaling, not the functionality. But with AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and backends like S3, CF etc, this hasn't been a barrier since a decade or more, either.

[scotty79]

What I could do in a week is maybe set up an open source clone of reddit (that was written by many people for many months) and customize it a little bit.

And I have a pretty decent career behind me as a aoftware developer and my peers percieved me as kinda good.

[spiderfarmer]

I think you’re wrong in several ways.

Even capable coders can’t create a Reddit clone in a week. Because it’s not just a glorified CRUD app. And I encourage you to think a bit harder before arguing like that.

Yes you can create a CRUD app in some kind of framework and style it like Reddit. But that’s like putting lines on your lawn and calling it a clone of the Bernabeu.

But even if you were right, the real barrier to building a Reddit clone is getting traction. Even if you went viral and did everything right, you’d still have to wait years before you have the brand recognition and SEO rankings they enjoy.

[coldtea]

>Because it’s not just a glorified CRUD app

In what way (that's not related to the difficulty of scaling it, which I already addressed separately)?

The point of my comment was:

"Somebody with AI cloning Reddit in a week is not as special as you make it to be, all things considering. A Reddit clone is not that difficult, it's basically a CRUD app. The difficult part of replicating it, or at least all the basics of it, is its scaling - and even that wouldn't be as difficult for a dev in 2026, the era of widespread elastic cloud backends".

The Bernabeu analogy handwavingly assumes that Reddit is more challenging than a homegrown clone, but doesn't address in what way Reddit differs from a CRUD app, and how my comment doesn't hold.

And even if it did, it would be moot regarding the main point I make, unless the recent AI-clone also handles those differentiating non-CRUD elements and thus also differs from a CRUD app.

>But even if you were right, the real barrier to building a Reddit clone is getting traction.

True, but not relevant to my point, which is about the difficulty of cloning Reddit coding-wise, not business wise, and whether it's or isn't any great feat for someone using AI to do it.

[spiderfarmer]

Calling Reddit a CRUD app isn’t wrong, it’s just vacuous.

It strips away every part that actually makes Reddit hard.

What happens when you sign up?

A CRUD app shows a form and inserts a row.

Reddit runs bot detection, rate limits, fingerprinting, shadow restrictions, and abuse heuristics you don’t even see, and you don’t know which ones, because that knowledge is their moat.

What happens when you upvote or downvote?

CRUD says “increment a counter.”

Reddit says “run a ranking algorithm refined over years, with vote fuzzing, decay, abuse detection, and intentional lies in the UI.” As the number you see is not the number stored.

What happens when you add a comment?

CRUD says “insert record.”

Reddit applies subreddit-specific rules, spam filters, block lists, automod logic, visibility rules, notifications, and delayed or conditional propagation.

What happens when you post a URL?

CRUD stores a string.

Reddit fingerprints it, deduplicates it, fetches metadata, detects spam domains, applies subreddit constraints, and feeds it into ranking and moderation systems.

Yes, anyone can scaffold a CRUD app and style it like Reddit.

But calling that a clone is like putting white lines on your lawn and calling it the Bernabeu.

You haven’t cloned the system, only its silhouette.

[Ma8ee]

Why do you think the app they call a clone of Reddit do all of those things, or most, or any?

[carlmr]

I was thinking the exact same thing. Moltbook isn't that sophisticated. We're moving goal posts a lot here.

However, I do think 1 week is ambitious, even for a bad clone.

[bodge5000]

> Reddit runs bot detection, rate limits, fingerprinting, shadow restrictions, and abuse heuristics you don’t even see, and you don’t know which ones, because that knowledge is their moat.

> Reddit says “run a ranking algorithm refined over years, with vote fuzzing, decay, abuse detection, and intentional lies in the UI.” As the number you see is not the number stored.

> etc...

The question is; is moltbook doing this? That was the original point, it took a week to build a basic reddit clone, as you call it the silhouette, with AI, that should surely be the point of comparison to what a human could do in that time

[spiderfarmer]

"A basic Reddit clone"

So as we have established, it's not even a basic Reddit clone.

And anyone who says they can build one in a week is giving HN a bad reputation.

[csande17]

Moltbook didn't do any of that stuff either, though!

[spiderfarmer]

So if Reddit is just a CRUD app, what is Moltbook

[coldtea]

Sorry, but this reads like AI slop.

[rsynnott]

Remember the Ruby on Rails hype? You could make a twitter clone in an afternoon! It obviously wouldn't work properly, but, y'know...

This is, like, not the industry's first run-in with "this makes you 10x more productive!"

[Ygg2]

Have you seen the shitshow moltbook was?

Anyone could insert themselves AI or not. Anyone could post any number of likes.

This isn't a Reddit clone. This is Reddit written by Highschoolers.

[bodge5000]

I mean as has already been pointed out the fact that its a clone is a big reason why, but then I also think I could probably churn out a simple clone of reddit in less than a week. We've been through this before with twitter, the value isnt the tech (which is relatively straightforward), its the userbase. Of course Reddit has some more advanced features which would be more difficult, but I think the public db probably tells you that wasn't much of a concern to Moltbook either, so yeh, I reckon I could do that.

[scotty79]

Double your estimate and switch the unit or time to next larger one. That's how programmers time estimate tend to be. So two months and I'm right there with you.

[bodge5000]

That only counts if its something you care about. If you throw maintenance out the window (eg you dont close off your db) it gets a lot easier

[jimbokun]

1. Do you have insider knowledge of the Reddit code base and the Moltbook code base and how much it reproduced?

2. Copying an existing product should take a minuscule fraction of the time it took to evolve the original.

3. I glanced at some of the Moltbook comments which were meaningless slop, very few having any replies.

[Krei-se]

Because its a clone.