
A Guide to Unbundling Reddit - nreece
https://latecheckout.substack.com/p/the-guide-to-unbundling-reddit
======
Mediterraneo10
It is curious that the author suggests Goodreads is a place for people to move
to from r/books, when recent press coverage of Goodsreads tends to focus on
how that site’s time has come and gone. Activity on Goodreads is down, and
spammer accounts choke real activity like the place has gone to the weeds.
Goodreads’ owner Amazon is reportedly no longer investing in the development
of the site, so GR strikes young people today as an antiquated grandpa-era
design and longstanding bugs have never been fixed.

Maybe there really isn’t any business case any more for a standalone community
for book lovers, and so I wonder how many of his other examples are not sound.

~~~
CaptArmchair
> Maybe there really isn’t any business case any more for a standalone
> community for book lovers, and so I wonder how many of his other examples
> are not sound.

Maybe there really isn't any profitable business case.

The author of this article tends to focus on "unbundling" as a shift from a
central platform towards many platforms whose primary mission is creating a
profitable business.

Whereas the analog world also has plenty of examples of small and larger
formal and informal communities of book lovers i.e. reading groups, libraries,
writing classes, groups exchanging books,... that aren't profit based. People
simply want to get together to share their experiences about that awesome book
they read, right?

I think that platforms such as Reddit or Goodreads enabled those groups to
converge in a single place not just because of the content, but primarily
because of the cost of digital infrastructure, or lack thereof.

Outside of the technology community, few communities are willing to invest
time and money in their own standalone private platform if there's an
alternative who provides that core functionality to communicate and share
information, and the complex infrastructure that supports it, for, seemingly,
free and with a extremely low entry bar: just create an account, create a new
group, invite others: you're done.

Scaling towards millions sounds like a great proposition, but non-paying users
don't even cover operational costs of building and running infrastructure. The
difficulty here is looking towards alternative sources of revenue.

As far as Amazon is concerned, the value of GR is that it's simply another
sales funnel. That's why Amazon only invests minimally in GR: just to keep
enough potential customers around. Which is a far cry from hosting communities
book lovers in their own right. The other examples in the article each have
their own business model in which non-paying users aren't really the immediate
customers.

Going back to small communities of book lovers themselves, you could imagine a
small non-profit offering a platform to its several hundreds of members. It's
clear that such a non profit could never pool the financial resources together
to hire a team of experts to build a dedicated platform that could rival with
the likes of Goodreads. Nor would they want to do that since that would be
clearly overkill.

Maybe it's interesting to broaden the focus beyond vast high-profile, for-
profit services and look towards hidden communities on the Internet which are
very much alive, such as mailing list servers or very small, independently
operated bulletin boards and forums (such as there still are around).

I suspect there are a plenty of small, independent, active communities hidden
under the surface that are never really seen. Much like famous dark matter in
the Universe.

~~~
Mediterraneo10
> such a non profit could never pool the financial resources together to hire
> a team of experts to build a dedicated platform that could rival with the
> likes of Goodreads.

In fact, they could. A lot of the work on Goodreads has always been done by
volunteers – adding new books, fixing bibliographic errors, and deleting
certain instances of spam is crowdsourced. If those same volunteers were able
to delete obviously spam accounts, than they would do that as well.

That means that only the website’s technology would require skilled staff, but
Goodreads’ platform is antiquated and these days what it offers would easily
be seen as within the reach of a small team of hackers.

The ultimately difficulty is the decline in reading books in the age of
snackable content, and the dwindling interest in standalone review sites. That
would make it difficult for any new competitor to grow membership regardless
of how solid the site is technically.

> I suspect there are a plenty of small, independent, active communities

I wish. In most of my own hobbies, standalone forums have hollowed out
drastically as people moved to Facebook or Reddit, there are no secret
Shangri-Las left. Those who remain on the old forums skew heavily towards the
elderly, and also the sort of cranks who want to trade zingers or fuel flame
wars instead of contribute to on-topic discussion. It is like traveling
through one of those many whole regions on earth where all the young people
have left to the big city.

~~~
CaptArmchair
Those are good points.

Your first point regarding differentiating between volunteers who manage
content and skilled experts maintaining expert expresses my sentiment as well.

I've been a board member of several non profits and my (anecdotal) experience
is that finding a small team of hackers who would do the work pro bono is a
hard challenge.

Your comment on the 'snackable entertainment' is a take on the increased
competition and pressure between hobbies and activities. In a world with so
many fast changing options and rapidly changing expectations, it's hard to
keep people's attention for a prolonged time.

So, more often then not, if an organisation or a community doesn't have the
resources, access to expertise or the time to focus on setting up
infrastructure, things rather quickly get relegated to centralised platforms
because of their non-existent entry bar.

Your last comment is also on point: outsourcing and leveraging existing
infrastructure at marginal costs is an engrained strategy in younger
generations: don't waste time building technology, if you could readily use
tools that are available to you.

Maybe the big differentiator that makes captivating communities a success or a
bust is just plain old day-to-day governance. Rather then pushing a particular
business model that's often at odds with the interests of the communities
present on a platform.

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mebr
The author appears to forcefully prove his theory about reddit in order to
sell a website he's an advisor at. I wish the disclaimer was at the top of the
text.

~~~
jimhi
That's not really fair. If you bother you click into the website he is an
advisor at and see it is an app for finding and investing in new companies,
you will see it has nothing to do with this article.

It is literally just the footer at the bottom of all his articles.

~~~
derision
It's literally putting 2 and 2 together. The article is about how to start new
companies based off reddit communities, and he's an advisor for an app for
finding and investing in new companies. This is nothing more than a marketing
piece trying to boost their funnel

~~~
im3w1l
While it _is_ a marketing piece trying to boost their funnel, it does provide
value for HN readers too.

~~~
netsharc
I skimmed through it and I wasn't convinced by his idea (I think he thinks if
he says it long enough it will come true), so it did not provide value to me.

------
anon98356
The author uses discord as the prime example and then fails to explain the
link. They talk about the large r/LoL community but then identify that Discord
replaced TeamSpeak. Is r/LoL now dead? I'm failing to see in what way this
actually relates to reddit. It looks more like a team identifying a poorly
served market (in game chat) and making a better product that's it. Maybe they
used reddit to expand their reach, I don't know. But it's a massive stretch to
say that Discord is replacing a subreddit.

~~~
CM30
As someone who uses both Reddit and Discord quite a bit, I can definitely see
the latter eating a lot of the former's marketshare, especially in communities
for entertainment related topics like gaming, TV, music, etc.

In the case of r/LoL it's replaced TeamSpeak, and for quite a few other
communities it's replaced IRC or other chat systems, but a lot of subreddits
and old school forums have been replaced with Discord servers too.

For instance, many speedrunning communities are now primarily focused around
Discord servers, as are communities for the Mario RPGs, the Luigi's Mansion
series and most game mods/fan projects. An awful lot of communities focused
around YouTube and Twitch personalities have made that jump too.

So while the article may have not given the best example, there are definitely
a lot of instances where Discord has replaced, or at least significantly hurt
the activity of a subreddit.

------
tbran
I came across this article when I was grabbing some links for this comment [0]
I wrote that talked a little about unbundling.

I didn't find the article very meaty, but I agree with the main point of it -
that there is probably a lot opportunity in taking a Reddit community and
creating something tailored to those users. I don't know for sure, but I
suspect that Reddit's attempt to become a social network will be one of the
things that make it less cool/usable.

For an indie hacker, unbundling is one of the better concepts to keep in mind
if you're looking for business ideas. Maybe you can't build a massive startup
from a slice of Reddit, but you could have a pretty nice lifestyle biz.

[0]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23428138](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23428138)

------
msla
It's like a Douglas Adams bit:

"We need to unbundle Reddit."

"I'm with you there."

"It's a silo, and it's toxic."

"Indeed."

"Now, how do we do that?"

"Slap a better UI on Usenet and completely de-silo everything. I think we're
calling it Mastodon now."

"I got a great idea! Move everyone out! Out! Far out! Out to dozens of silos,
each topic-specific!"

"No. That doesn't solve the underlying problem."

"Indeed! Move everyone out to a network. A network where users will be free to
be siloed."

"How is that any better?"

"It's much better! It's ten silos instead of one! Surely ten individual
platforms can't possibly all go bad."

And then he went off to talk into his phone wearing a face mask and gloves.

------
csb6
I had never heard of unbundling before. I wonder what value taking something
like Craigslist and breaking it up into dozens of areas really adds. I guess
Indeed, Airbnb, etc. have some proprietary systems for matching people with
jobs/rentals, but aren’t a lot of these services location-based anyway? If I
am looking for a job, is Indeed’s algorithm orders of magnitude more effective
than just filtering by city and occupation in a simple Craiglist search? I can
see these unbundled sites adding some value, but enough value to be
cumulatively worth way, way more than Craigslist? It seems doubtful to me,
even if they do offer some benefits. It just seems like it would be a lot
easier if we all just used a simple classified ads site instead of dozens of
closed platforms with hype/marketing behind what is not really a new service.

------
bawolff
The title led me to believe there was supposed to be a guide here?

All it claims is that sometimes small specialist companies can swoop in and
outcompete big companies in a specific niche. Certainly true. Has nothing to
do with technology or websites. The opposite is true of course too, that big
companies can benefit from efficiencies of scale and pooling resources across
different niches. This is literally business 101.

------
agustif
As a non-regular reddit user, I would rephrase it as.

Be a part of a big community, find a niche you like in it, engage and listen
closely, and try to build and cater to that specific audience.

A version of this is what I did as a 16 year old when a community I was part
of was sold to a new owner, I forked a new one with my own content in it, and
deleted my content from the older one, and redirected any users that would
contact me via DM

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alexmingoia
For any given topic, you will probably find business(es) connected to it.
Isn’t that... obvious? There were businesses related to gardening, cars,
games, etc. regardless of whether or not Reddit or Craigslist ever existed.

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tetris11
The point of reddit is* not to find a sub where people advertise their
products, but to find a place to speak with like minded individuals in an
anonymous environment without ulterior motives.

That is* the beauty of anonyminity, where your worth is* measured by the merit
of your words and arguments, and not by what you can do for someone else.

This blog post screams of vulture capitalism.

*was

~~~
MickerNews
>This blog post screams of vulture capitalism.

This is Hacker News?

------
ciarannolan
Can anyone suggest a good alternative to r/books besides Goodreads?

------
jiofih
> Discord is "Slack for Gaming"

Gaaa. This makes my skin crawl. Slack came out _yesterday_ and did not invent
chat. Saying things like this shows a profound lack of knowledge about the
internet and devalues the entire article.

~~~
Semaphor
But Slack is what people know. Saying "IRC for gaming", "MUC for gaming" would
win the author 3-4 people (including you) and lose the vast majority of them.

