[newsy-combi]

It's weird for reddit clones to pretend they're anything but a small subreddit in scale. This site has a "discover" feature, "topics" (its own subreddits), "tuning" (huh?), user following, probably dms too, and it displays an extremely truncated version of every thread's top comment as you scroll by - so you don't waste your time going to the discussion page?

All of these features result in atomization of an already tiny content pool. This is the opposite of what you need to jumpstart a reddit clone. This is a mental exercise in "how much better could I make reddit if I had its user base?" You don't have the users though, so you're doing the wrong thing.

You want people to comment on each other's posts, right? Then you should basically show every post to every user... the bitter reality is that you need users to engage with content they didn't plan to engage with. That doesn't mean outrage farming, it can/should mean being a high quality source of info, questions, culture - all on one page.

Hackernews understands this, or - if it doesn't - it at least plays by the rule of "have ONE good frontpage." That's also how reddit started.