
Ask HN: Are you working on a Reddit replacement? What is it? - meesterdude
Interested to see what the HN community is doing in response to the recent reddit events.<p>Post the name, URL, description, and what you&#x27;ll copy from reddit, and what you will not.
======
beowulfey
I really find it fascinating that people are scrambling to make Reddit
replacements. First off, A) there's no guarantee the community will ever
abandon Reddit, even if yours is better, and B) why are we mimicking what
Reddit did, and succeeded greatly at? Of all places, I would think that Hacker
News, a community of start-ups, would recognize that you don't often succeed
by simply trying to improve on what some other company did already. You
succeed by doing something completely new, and filling a gap that wasn't
previously recognized.

Facebook didn't replace Myspace because they tried to do what Myspace did, but
better; they won because they took an entirely different concept, built it,
and eventually evolved into the behemoth we have today. Reddit didn't surpass
Digg in content aggregation intentionally; they had a different community,
with a different focus, and an entirely different strategy that eventually
succeeded.

Over the years, I've gone from getting my web content through AOL portals -->
blogs/geocities --> news sites --> StumbleUpon --> Digg --> reddit, and I've
been on there for 5 years now. I'm definitely ready for something new.

I guess what I'm trying to say here is... if you want to make "the next
reddit", you won't do it by trying to be BETTER than reddit. It's time for the
next wave of content delivery, in whatever form that may be.

~~~
WorldWideWayne
What's "the community"? There doesn't seem to be one community that is going
to act in unison. Regarding point B, I am not sure that anyone said a
replacement has to exactly copy reddit. Arguments aside, I agree with your
final sentiment. Something new would be awesome.

I'd like an anonymous Usenet/distributed-server style system that runs on port
80 - like a BitTorrent for discussions where anybody that can put up a web
server can run a node.

~~~
illyism
Something like Aether? [http://getaether.net/](http://getaether.net/)

~~~
narrowrail
Or, more relevant to this community:

[https://github.com/nehbit/aether-public/](https://github.com/nehbit/aether-
public/)

------
mcphage
My Reddit replacement is Reddit, minus all the people who want to leave
because of Reddit closing r/jailbait, r/thefappening, and r/fatpeoplehate.
It's a pretty cool site, you should check it out.

~~~
Karunamon
That's a remarkably unfair characterization of people who have issues with
Reddit.

~~~
albertoleal
That's pretty much the reality of it. The other group of users who have issues
with Reddit (as we've seen yesterday) are the moderators; in particular the
moderators of really large communities. Many others just seem to jump onto the
bandwagon.

~~~
Karunamon
You don't have to think certain pseudo-religious thought patterns are bad in
order to recognize that reddit has some serious problems.

The default communities are cesspools (consensus seems to be Reddit is better
when they're unsubscribed)

The staff has no idea how to communicate with the userbase, a problem which
has obviously gotten worse in the past few months.

The site hasn't seen a major upgrade in years and still regularly falls over
under its own weight

The moderators of the defaults are all friends with each other and run each
other's communities (++corruption)

Their current CEO has a questionable at best ethical history

------
danbolt
I'm speaking as a bit of an armchair developer here, but I'd be very
interested in seeing a more decentralized alternative to Reddit. A user of one
Reddit-like site could post on another's through some sort of protocol,
perhaps much like email.

It would certainly be more complicated than something centralized, but
considering Reddit's attitude towards user-generated communities and
moderation, I could see it being a good fit. There could be a lot of
opportunities for black/whitelisting, paid/ad-supported servers, etc.

I'd be very keen to hear more discussion on the topic!

~~~
15155
It could be some kind of a network, perhaps, a network of users.

We could call it, "Usenet."

All jokes aside, what you're describing has existed for over 30 years.

~~~
luckydude
Usenet is missing the upvote/downvote part. If it had that and a spam filter
it would be mucho nicer than reddit in my opinion (which is skewed, I was on
Usenet when there was no internet and I was quite fond of it before it got
filled with spam).

------
billturner
Although it does seem to be very slow to respond,
[https://voat.co/](https://voat.co/) seemed to have stepped in as a
replacement at the last big upheaval. They seem to constantly have troubles
staying up though.

~~~
Mahn
They certainly seem to have momentum, despite having trouble handling the
traffic. It's a pity that as it stands it's still pretty much a copy though,
an alternative to reddit doesn't have to be, and probably shouldn't be, a 1:1
copy.

~~~
c_prompt
If you're looking for something different yet similar, I run valME.io which
has a very different business model. And because of the business model, it
will have significantly less spam and other undesirable content. But the
concept it's not for everyone.

~~~
meesterdude
very cool! this is the kinda thing I wanted to see.

------
rdwallis
Built [http://www.thealetree.com](http://www.thealetree.com) a few years ago
so not related to the current issue. But I'll turn the database on for a few
days if people want to try it out.

The source code is at
[https://github.com/rdwallis/TheAleTree](https://github.com/rdwallis/TheAleTree)

The idea behind it was that the passionate minority on sites like reddit, hn
etc tend to drive the discussion on issues because the less passionate
majority isn't as inclined to upvote / downvote.

So say you've got a website where a small minority of the users are racists
but the racists are very passionate and always upvote racist content. You'll
tend to see a lot of racist posts on the site even if the site as a whole
isn't racist. And over time the passionate racists will drive out the rest.

Wanted to see if I could solve the above without moderation, while keeping
posts completely anonymous.

Probably doesn't work but the idea is that before users vote you divide them
randomly into teams. And then when a user submits a post or a comment the team
votes on it and only if certain percent of the team like it does it get an
upvote. And the passionate racists would most likely end up on different teams
so they'd be less likely to be able to get submissions into the public parts
of the site.

~~~
studentrob
Regardless of how you divide people up, the majority vote is the majority
vote.

What problem are you trying to solve? I don't see any problem with people
voting as long as it is one person, one vote.

~~~
rdwallis
Imagine a site with users who are all absolute experts in their chosen field.
Mathematicians / Writers / Lawyers etc.

The popularity of a post will depend more on how it appeals to the majority
than how it appeals to the experts. So the most popular mathematical posts may
be posts that the actual mathematicians find mundane but that the writers /
lawyers are able to understand. And this is true for all topics in which the
non experts out number the experts.

So even though all the people on your site are experts the actual content on
your site will be at non expert level, which will attract non-experts to your
site who will then tend to vote on content that is at an even lower level.

Eventually the experts find all the content on the site mundane and are driven
out.

Abandoned the Ale Tree because I don't think it is a solution to the problem.
But there are definite problems with a pure majority vote system. The
underlying concept that led me down this path was the difference between a
republic and democracy. The Ale Tree was meant to act more like a republic
where you elect representatives who vote on issues for you instead of voting
on them directly.

------
pwnna
Just as a side note: reddit is open source (I belive):
[https://github.com/reddit/reddit](https://github.com/reddit/reddit)

~~~
cbzink000
It's actually fairly simple to get running. I'm bopping around in a private
instance right now. Looks like there would be an insane amount of work to re-
brand everything, but it's certainly possible.

It's licensed under CPAL, which I am unfamiliar with and do not know if it
would allow for commercial use.

------
akhilcacharya
I've been toying with making one since I realized Reddit has been devolving
into a reactionary, hate filled site.

I was thinking about having a gimmick of graph based commenting to prevent the
"top post guides discussion" effect. Not sure at how feasible or user friendly
that could be.

~~~
robotjosh
Someone should make a version of reddit where your upvote/downvote record is
what shapes the ordering for you. There should be a global rank and an
individual rank that is calculated for each user something like the netflix 5
star system. That way the hateful stuff won't appear unless you upvoted
hateful stuff. Liberals and conservatives could both get the content they want
going to the same politics forum.

It should be assumed that when the professional executive class gets their
hands on the company they will try to arbitrarily censor and ban things. The
system has to be decentralized so the parent company is technically unable to
do this even if north korea were to purchase it.

~~~
bmh100
What you are essentially describing, also used by Netflix, is a "collaborative
filtering" machine learning algorithm [1]. It is a fascinating sparse-matrix
problem that could be applied to many situations dependent upon individual
preferences.

[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collaborative_filtering](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collaborative_filtering)

~~~
c_prompt
For my site, I coded a recommendation engine based on cosine similarity. I
initially tried Bayes' Theorem and conditional probabilities but abandoned the
effort when I didn't see results that made a lot of sense (probably due to a
lack of training data). Instead, I used
[https://github.com/aoiaoi/CosineSimilarity](https://github.com/aoiaoi/CosineSimilarity)
as a base and then modified. If the results prove effective over time, I'm
going to make the algorithm an option for users to select for generating their
front page instead of upvotes.

------
pcunite
For those not in the know: [http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-
way/2015/07/03/419756207/](http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-
way/2015/07/03/419756207/)

------
echeese
Truthfully, the subreddits I follow (programming-related) are unaffected,
though a few threw up a notice saying they were not going to black out.

~~~
ericcholis
Another solid example of not blacking out is /r/malefashionadvice, one of the
more prominent voices in the Male Fashion category.

While I can understand the interest in "disrupting the space"; I'm not
entirely sure that the current management conditions at reddit are indicative
of an opportunity here.

------
minimaxir
Even despite Reddit's troubles, you probably do not want to make a Reddit
clone as a business model to capitalize if you don't have one already. One or
the _reasons_ for the protest is bad tools.

~~~
zxcvcxz
Reddit is open source so is there any evidence that _anything_ has been done
or is planned to improve mod tools? Or have there been any community attempts
to push code that was rejected?

~~~
xq
> have there been any community attempts to push code that was rejected?

Apparently yes:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/3bxrxj/lets...](https://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/3bxrxj/lets_discuss_the_recent_incident_where_a_bunch_of/csqiv0t)

> Another great example of how much reddit cares about their assets is reddit
> companion. Which at the time of writing has around 154,302 installations, is
> utterly broken and hasn't been updated since February 21, 2013, the most
> ridiculous thing? It isn't hard to fix people tried to do the work for
> reddit since it is open source but they simply have been ignoring those pull
> requests since 2013. Which is silly since those pull request effectively do
> fix companion, resulting in a perfectly working version.

------
ajdecon
Philosophically, I'd like to see more non-connected link aggregation sites
built around specific communities. I.e., there's no reason /r/askhistorians
can't be www.askhistorians.whatever and serve the same purpose. HN is a good
example of this kind of community-specific site; IMO lobste.rs is an even
better example, given that it maintains a more consistent focus.

Community-specific websites have all kinds of advantages over "just another
subreddit", including the fact that the community can literally own its own
site, and build moderation policies and tools appropriate to whatever it feels
its norms are. It can also throw up whatever barriers it feels are appropriate
to keep out marauding trolls. (I'm a big fan of Metafilter's $5 account fee,
as an example.)

It ought to be relatively easy to automate the process of spinning up such a
site on a generic VPS. I'm very tempted to build something along those lines
with Ansible or something.

Of course, in practice, the "one big site" model has tons of advantages in
terms of barrier to entry, network effects, costs, discovery, and so on. So I
doubt the idea would ever gain any traction. But one can dream. :)

(edit: fix wording slightly)

------
jpgvm
I have some ideas for a reddit replacement.

In my mind the perfect reddit replacement is run by the users, probably with
the assistance of a non-profit foundation setup to support it. Instead of
subscriptions providing superficial perks it buys you into voting power within
the governing body.

Effectively a decentralized network run and owned by the users, in a similar
fashion to IRC or Usenet but more modern and without the centralised entities
that operated them in the past. (ISPs were usually in charge of "free" Usenet
servers or commercial Usenet services were run by corporate entities, IRC is
often setup and operated by small cliques of people).

You could accomplish this without a fully decentralized technical architecture
too though that wouldn't be a bad goal long term. The main goal would be to
distance the control of the platform that keeps the community together away
from commercial and political interests.

It's worth mentioning that reddit gold = $5 which is about the price of a
small VPS. If every reddit gold user instead provided a small VPS worth of
compute it suddenly becomes pretty simple to replace reddit from a
money/infrastructure perspective.

------
noname123
I want to put Arc to some serious load testing!

PG and current sys-admins of HN, open the flood gates, put in this ticket for
HN development project: "Create sub-HackNewsies".

Also, I think Reddit source code is open source; so people can use that too! A
great business idea I think is doing a bannedsubreddits.com/r/{banned}; crawl
webarchive.org for the previous archives for all the banned subreddits for
continuity...

~~~
krapp
Sub-boards or tags have been discussed multiple times on Hacker News.
Unfortunately, the developers seem allergic to modernity when it comes to
forum design.

That said, here is the software that Hacker News is based on:
[http://arclanguage.org/](http://arclanguage.org/) so maybe someone can fork a
version with those features themselves.

------
clsec
I used to be a huge fan of tribe.net until it got sold and the site started
becoming unreliable.

[http://www.tribe.net/welcome](http://www.tribe.net/welcome)

edit: tribe.net history
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tribe.net](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tribe.net)

------
drig
There have been some posts on this thread saying that reddit is losing users
for bad reasons. The users want to make hiring decisions, or approve of hate
boards. That might be true, but there's one damn good reason to leave.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/3byaei/reddit_alt...](https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/3byaei/reddit_alternatives_other_subs_going_private_to/csr0by6)

The CEO went on reddit to explain her decision. It comes down to "the software
is bad, and we'll release better software". She did not acknowledge her
mistakes. Nor did she explain why she reacted before the fix was ready.
Instead, she blamed it on the developers.

This is cowardly and self-serving. If reddit is in the hands of a person with
no loyalty to her customers, they're going out of business. If Pao is still
CEO by Monday night, reddit is done.

I'm moving on.

------
faizshah
I have been working on one, it's not really ready for prime time yet.

The idea is that it's a news aggregator that learns what you like, so it forms
a probabilistic model of what it thinks your interests are and applies that
model to the network of submitted content to decide what you see. Instead of
subreddits the system forms subcommunities by showing users with similar
interests similar lists of content.

The main thing I'm having a lot of trouble with is figuring out how to do
efficient keyword extraction on pictures and video. Otherwise it only supports
links that have a lot of text. The other problem is it doesn't have enough of
a community feel so that's something else I'm working on.

One of the ideas I am about to experiment with is removing user accounts and
using browser fingerprints instead. I think if users dont have to sign up it
will encourage users to more actively participate in the community.

~~~
meesterdude
As a fellow builder, also with something not ready for prime time, I say: ship
that shit. If you're going to strike, now's the time. Any reason it can't be
live, end of the month?

> Otherwise it only supports links that have a lot of text Sounds good to me!

> using browser fingerprints instead

By all means experiment; but this has a few problems with it. Some people like
(or need) multiple accounts, which would mean separate browsers at the least.
Equally, it's trivial to spin up a VM with a browser. So, the users who need
multiple usernames can't (or lack the technical understanding), and the ones
you don't want having multiple can easily create hundreds.

~~~
faizshah
Thanks for the support, I can probably make it live by the end of the month I
just thought that a lack of image and video support would limit its chances at
survival.

The browser fingerprinting idea is a bit more involved. The idea is that
everyone is anonymous and the types of people who you seem to like, based on
factors like leaving your cursor over their comment for a while, are slowly
deanonymized to you. The way browser fingerprinting would work in this
scenario is that instead of storing usernames attached to models, we store a
few different indicators (like browser fingerprints) and create probabilistic
models relating these indicators to the aforementioned models. That way even
if we have a completely new user we can create a new initial model for them
based on what they might like. I have only just started working on this idea
though, so I'm not sure how well this would work in practice and I'm not sure
what other indicators I might use.

With this in mind I don't think there would be a reason to spin up VMs and
create new 'accounts' because it would just limit your personal experience.

------
zachwooddoughty
I help run Discoverboard, which is a subscription-based discussion community
(less of a new aggregator). It's been around for a few months.

If you're interested, you can check it out:
[http://discoverboard.com/code/HN](http://discoverboard.com/code/HN)

------
TD-Linux
The only thing I've used reddit for in recent times are projects (like rust)
that use it as their official forum. Otherwise, I tend to find that my needs
are better filled by independent, specialized forums (RCGroups, reprap, etc),
and imageboards like 4chan or 8chan provide endless entertainment value.

------
13throwaway
I have been thinking it would be cool to have a Reddit replacement ran by a
non profit, similar to Wikipedia. Does anyone here have experience running
something like that? I understand non profits are very complex to run.

~~~
meesterdude
I thought about this for my project, but decided against it, primarily due to
associated complexity. Although I hear there are other business types being
created that might be more suitable for websites.

Personally, I don't think profits are bad. But I think being profit driven is.
I also think a company can serve a public role and not have to be a non-profit
to do it.

------
meesterdude
I'm working on the rebolder, a social news site for amplifying the best
behavior and discussions humanity has to offer. It's something of a cross
between reddit/craigslist/nyt; really I guess it's my vision for newspapers in
the web era, because I'm crazy enough to think I know better.

The gist is: unwavering loyalty to users, voteable tags, "no" shills or bot
armies, powerful search, various efforts to donate to charity, username
obscurement, and lastly unwavering loyalty to users; which is important enough
to mention twice.

------
snowwrestler
Reddit's core problem is that they don't make much money, and all the things
they might do to make money are things that will piss off the user base.

It's the exact same problem that Digg had. And if Reddit experiences the same
outcome, I don't know why anyone would rush to replicate that model a 3rd
time.

Look at the history of 4chan: you can grow a large audience by allowing people
to say whatever they want, anonymously. But no one has effectively monetized
that yet, because it turns out that such a site collects a lot of
objectionable content.

~~~
noinsight
This image portraying reddit gold proceeds got posted earlier:
[http://i.imgur.com/fcfseA4.png](http://i.imgur.com/fcfseA4.png)

------
sidcool
Is Reddit doomed already?

~~~
clavalle
Without a radical turnaround, yeah, I think so. It feels very much like Digg
did back in the day.

When your userbase is your main asset and you treat them as a given, bad
things happen.

~~~
maccard
Except that reedit had the population before digg crashed. There currently
aren't any sizeable alternatives to reedit right now, so the same thing can't
possibly happen

~~~
clavalle
It can absolutely happen. The population is primed. The same scenario doesn't
have to play out for the end result to be the same.

Digg had some mildly bad policy before their exodus. Reddit policy is failing
in a much more dramatic way.

If someone comes out with a viable alternative with, perhaps, one or two
notable improvements there is enough froth to push people to a new home.

I personally hope it fragments. The slacktivists and amateur political wonks
to one corner with the news, the popular entertainment to the other, and the
learners/hobbyists/special interest associations to yet another.

Reddit is the Craigslist of 2015. It is doing too much and it is ready to be
picked apart.

------
tmppppppppp
It seems to me that the issue is not making a technically equivalent site,
which is "relatively" easy. There's more to it than that.

------
bazillion
If you're working on a reddit replacement, I have an answer to the question of
how to monetize your site. See this video featuring Victoria:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MhpB6QDOxCI&feature=youtu.be](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MhpB6QDOxCI&feature=youtu.be)

The way it would work is that you'd install our plugin onto your site and make
all of the images hoverable and linkable. Then, when people purchase through
those links, you make an affiliate commission. The way we'd envision it
working is that users would get a percent of the commission of whatever
purchases they drove, and your site would also get a percent of the
commission.

~~~
cphoover
Why do it as a plugin?? Why not just straight JS embedded in the site. Then
you don't have to ask users to download it.

~~~
bazillion
As a plugin, it works on sites that don't have it installed natively
(Facebook, Pinterest, etc.). PLEENQ is both -- we offer a plugin that lets
regular users use it on any site, as well as an embeddable version for website
owners who want to monetize their image content.

------
alakin
pier to pier, in-browser reddit

