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Show HN: Non.io, a Reddit-like platform Ive been working on for the last 4 years (non.io)
1943 points by jjcm on June 12, 2023 | hide | past | favorite | 590 comments
Heya HN, I've been working on a reddit-like platform as my primary side project for the last few years. Doing a (very) soft launch today, mainly because I want to use it to encourage discussion of alternatives.

How non.io works:

1. Free to browse, paid to interact.

2. Minimum subscription is $2 (though you can choose more). I take $1 to run the servers, everything left gets split evenly between everything you upvote that month.

It's a simple model, but I hope it's a better one than the freemium model we've been relying on for the last few years. Fundamentally I feel like any ad-supported network doesn't have alignment between the needs of the users and the needs of the platform, which is what drove me to make this.

Because this is a soft launch, if you do subscribe I'd encourage you not to pay for the time being. I'm still testing the distribution algorithm for returning funds - you won't get overcharged or anything, but I just want to guarantee your funds are properly distributed at the end of the month. I've opened up free accounts to post and interact in the meantime. If you want to try a test account, use this login:

login: hackernews pw: helloworld

Edit: Loginless browsing here: https://non.io/#all

If you want to browse the code or the api:

https://api.non.io

https://github.com/jjcm/nonio




Congrats on the hard work, and the idea is fine, but the problem is that tech like this is a cheap commodity in a massively oversaturated space, and without a hook that makes the platform exceptional (innovative/clever/beautiful design, unique aggregation features, inherently interesting content, reimagined user/content/moderation dynamics etc etc), this kind of thing is dead in the water because it lacks a network effect. Add in the upfront subscription model and failure to launch is basically assured.

When I visit the root domain I shouldn't be greeted with a marketing splash page, you need interesting content in the user's face right away, entice their curiosity and drive the user to explore the site... even as a fellow developer, my first instinct is to abandon the page as soon as I'm greeted with the cliche startup marketing page. Consider the user experience when I visit reddit.com or news.ycombinator.com or any other link aggregation competitor. What you have now is a tech demo, not a platform. Sorry if that's a little harsh, but I mean well! Good luck!


Mostly agree. The screenshot in the top right looks good, like professional app I might actually use. But I want to actually browse the site and check it out without first slogging through a registration process. If it’s free to view/browse anyway, then enable doing that without registering. Register and pay if you want to post.

Edit: You can browse without registering after all, here’s the link: https://non.io/#all (didn’t see it on the landing page or OP post).


Oof, I clicked one of those posts and immediately lost all back-button functionality to an endless stream of history events.


I tried right clicking to open the link in a new tab, and found I couldn't. What is it with these bespoke browsers written in JavaScript?


Was it the "Daniel's Site" post? There's some weird interactions I'm finding with that iframe'd html upload and the history events.


As someone who dealt with payment iframes in SPAs I'm so happy I don't have to use any iframes nowadays. There are a few articles how you can "kind of track" when the iframe caused extra history entries then you need to increase your back navigation by the count of them, it was a mess back in the days so not sure how is it solved nowadays.


Today you can still use iframes but most gateways now provide a tokenization api that provides the form to produce the tokenized cc. Afaik tokenized cc isn't falling under PCI.

My big issues with iframes is the checkout process which inevitably has to make callbacks to your api with the results of the transaction. If you're behind any sort of firewall (like most businesses are) you're in for a world of http pain.


The payment gateways still use iframes, they just don’t tell you that.

This is also why styling such forms is always some species of wonky.


The gateways I use don't, or at least give me the option not to.

Those iFrames cause all kinds of headaches when the user hits the back button or double clicks a submit button or does any number of other things that happen thousands of times a day on a moderately high traffic site, and when it messes up you either miss out on a sale (ouch) or charge the customer twice (double ouch).


> The gateways I use don't, or at least give me the option not to.

They usually don't tell you they do. For example, both Stripe and Square use iFrames; otherwise it's not possible to hide credit card entry from your main application.

There are gateways that redirect you away and return you back after payment, but that's a whole another story.


You're right, but it's worth noting that the iframes used today are better at hiding the fact that they're iframes, it's usually hidden behind an API call from a library that you import, and that doesn't affect your browsing history, or at least not as bad as those huge forms used in the past that would essentially replace the page you're on for the sake of paying.


Also, when I visit the #all page I get two weird window.alert()’s, first says 5, second says 1. I’m on mobile Safari now so can’t really investigate, but is the site getting script injected??


Yes, the site is vulnerable to XSS, couple of interesting payloads on there so far

The current top post uses this XSS to have users upvote it:

<img src="a" onerror="soci.postData(String.fromCharCode(112,111,115,116,116,97,103,47,97,100,100,45,118,111,116,101),{post:String.fromCharCode(120),tag:String.fromCharCode(120)})">

Which sends a POST request to `posttag/add-vote` for the post labeled `x`


I suppose that makes sense if you get payed for upvotes, stored xss is probably just the most low hanging fruit, if they messed that up I'd expect everything from csrf, clickjacking, sqli and more, everyone has the incentive to look and exploit. They should probably get a thorough white box review.


The marketing page is not readable on mobile either.


On Firefox Android, I could read the landing page and browse afyer creating an account.

I was not able to create an account. (I had to go desktop)


FF iOS here, front page loads but you get a zoomed in desktop view. Zooming out causes reloads.


The fact that this isn't on the landing page doesn't bode well for a 4 year old project.


Too harsh. That's normal if it's only now seeing light of day.


Are you being serious? The landing page had 1 job and it failed at doing it. I'm all for reddit alternatives but c'mon, a page showing off a product that fails to clearly link to said product is just funny.


The ui feels like it was designed for mobile as well, everything is on the far edges of the page and the center is entirely blank space unless you resize the window to be smaller horizontally


Aaanndd it's instantly overrun with spam


I think a lot of this is exactly the kind of constructive critique the OP is looking for, and I upvoted your comment for being high-value.

But I’m currently working on being a little more diplomatic, and too often I regret throwing in low-signal “this is a tech demo” type summaries next to my substantial remarks.

I hope this comes off as “fellow user working on this” and not a person in a glass house with rocks.


Yes! I made a little edit just to make it clear I'm not trying to dismiss the hard work, and even though it's a really hard space to compete in, someone has to try or there will never be alternatives.


If you're open for alternatives, framing it in in a way like "I know you're trying to accomplish X, but due to Y, I think the outcome is more along Z". So something like "I know you're going for a soft launch, but without providing a more concrete and demonstrative user experience, the current status of the project is more of a tech demo".

This approach acknowledges what the person is trying to accomplish, and lays out the obstacles before arriving at the conclusion, which then feels more natural. The recipient is able to follow your thinking and hopefully "arrive" at the conclusion along with you. When you start with the conclusion, you risk having a jarring moment where you start with something unexpected, and that can generate friction.


Hey, you responded better to that feedback than I probably would have!

Serious thank you for leading the way on high-value habits I’m still working on!


This thread is wholesome AF.


As someone who has also built websites alone and on zero budget, I thank you both.


On the flip side, the fact that this is a crowded space means that there’s a demand for it. And this isn’t a Reddit clone, it has a business model which is pretty close to the best anyone could hope for in my opinion. In any case, I applaud any efforts that could unseat Reddit or make them reconsider their greedy hard line.

I encourage the creator of Non.io to identify the key shortcomings of Reddit and improve upon them. Don’t just try to clone Reddit beyond the basic image/link board, otherwise you’ll just be playing their game. Change the game. There is a Folding Ideas video on this topic which has some great insights with respect to YouTube: https://youtu.be/r3snVCRo_bI


> “it has a business model”

What’s that story about the economist who was trying to concentrate but there were kids playing soccer below his window and being noisy, so he went out and offered them $1 each if they come back and played tomorrow. The next day he offered them 50c, then 25c, and after that 5c, and the kids got annoyed “we wouldn’t come here to play for a measly five cents!” and stormed off, and didn’t come back.

I’ve put many hours into Reddit and Stackoverflow for free, but if you take $24 from me for a year and then offer me $0.0193 for my efforts based on upvotes I might feel a bit cheesed off about it.

Being forced to face how insignificant I am feels likely to drive me away, free upvotes at least let me feel important and they cost nothing.

Or the people who knit clothes saying things along the lines of “I’ll do it for a genuine thank you, but $10 is an insult; if this is a transaction, that doesn’t begin to cover my costs let alone my time”.


I’m not sure. I think it’s an interesting experiment at least. My prediction is that it will encourage clickbaity behavior similar to YouTube, which also has a profit sharing mechanism. Long form content has little chance to compete against drive-by laughs and memes. Maybe donations would help.


Medium is a prime example of monetization leading to poor content


>but if you take $24 from me for a year and then offer me $0.0193 for my efforts based on upvotes I might feel a bit cheesed off about it.

is that how it works? I thought it was offering payments based on who creates posts or other community tools, not based on participation.

you are correct that 2 cents would be a pittance to me who doesn't even want to be paid to browse content. But if I and 1000 others gave that 2 cents to what we thought was quality content, that could make someone's day (not career per se. But $20 from random strangers feels good). At scale that's basically how YT/Twitch work, except they don't take money directly from us so much as time (for ads).


It reads to me like:

> "[your subscription fee over my $1 take] gets split evenly between everything you upvote that month."

So if I subscribe and pay $2/month, there's $1/month from me for that, so if I upvote ten things they each get $0.03 from me and if I upvote a ten things a day that's three hundred in a month, they each get $0.0033 from me.

I'm not clear if that covers comments or only top level submissions / posts, but if I comment and get upvoted ten times in a month, presumably I get some money from the upvoters, like $0.03. There are times I've spent well over an hour writing programming comments on Reddit, testing code or trying to explain a concept, things that could have been a blog post. Getting nothing for it is fine, that was the deal. Getting $0.03 for it is more like tipping a waitress a penny, I think. Getting $10 would need into the thousands of votes (which rarely happens on Reddit comments by comparison) and still wouldn't pay for my time wtiting it by minimum wage.


Maybe the solution is to weight upvotes by the number of upvotes cast that month in the "subreddit"

If there are 100K upvotes per month in some small city sub, and 100B in the videos sub, getting 1K upvotes in the city sub would would be the equivalent of 1B in the videos sub (in terms of your distribution)

This would encourage people to participate in smaller communities, which could be really nice for keeping the "small town" vibe of early reddit.


That's an interesting idea. It would need some kind of tweaking for low values otherwise it would be exploitable to generate as much revenue from a 10 people sub then from a bigger one.

> This would encourage people to participate in smaller communities, which could be really nice for keeping the "small town" vibe of early reddit.

Couldn't it also cause a fragmentation of content across different same-ish subs ?


Yeah, I see what you mean, and it's definitely not clear enough to say whether or not this is just for posters or also commenters.

I think this only works if you throttle votes (and assumedly, this only applies to voted on posts, not necessarily every comment), but that was one of the worst parts of Voat (from a technical standpoint, at least). There probably needs to be normal old infinite "I like this" votes and then treat your subscription votes as a form of gilding (except it actually does help pay someone, unlike reddit's gilding).

You can also propose that you do let non-subscribers vote, but a subscriber vote weighs more. Be it explicit* or not.

*(e.g. hover over votes and you see a split of which are "subsciber votes. Which say, counts as 5 votes or something. so A 30 point post with 2 subs votes = 20 normal voters + 2 subs)


I would just tell the bottom 95% of people they aren't getting anything at all. There is no point just paying somebody their subscription back. Now if you are posting your art regularly or similar, that's extra money that can go to you.


I'd rather not make it a winner take all arms race. We know that historically leads to sabatoge being the preferred tool of choice.

But sure, maybe it's better to set a floor for monetization, similar to how a YT channel needs 1000 subs to start being monetized. It's not valuable nor enticing for every user who posts something with 10 votes to collect 10 cents. Someone else did mention something about a $50 minimal withdrawal.


There needs to be a limit on things you can upvote each month based on how much you give as a subscription. Each upvote should be worth at least 1 penny. If you agree to subscribe for $2 a month, that gives you a max of 100 upvotes (1 for each penny over the dollar server costs).

The more you donate, the more upvotes you get ($5 per month would give you 400 votes).


How much do companies buy upvotes for on Reddit (or on HN?) at present? It would be interesting to compare that figure with any proposed pricing structure.


Idt tying upvotes to money is a good community model at all.

Many of the richest people in the world are also the worst kind of people.

You will not see diverse content being upvoted with this model and you will encourage rampant corruption (ie Trump campaign being upvoted using right wing corporate funds/"donations" to promote it).


Look at it more as a way to offset your subscription cost, not a possible side income. If you're a contributing member you get a content service for near free, with much better quality/spam control than something like Reddit.


Daniel Ariely had a great analogy for this:

Your grandmother cooks an amazing dinner each Thanksgiving, for nothing but your love and thanks.

If at the end of the meal you said, “Great dinner, Gran, here’s for your trouble,” and handed her a $20, how do you think she’d react?


Presumably this board is populated by pseudoanonymous people, not my grandma though. I don’t feel weird about paying a stranger to cook my food, I feel weird about paying someone I know because it changes a familial relationship into something it never was: a transactional one.

But this does suggest that it would be different to comment on a board like this. People wouldn’t just be making comments for the joy of discussion, they would be making comments with their hands out for a tip.

I think this incentivizes low investment drive-by comments, but perhaps this could be fixed as well. For example, you don’t have to display the actual upvotes/downvotes score of a comment, you can display and sort by a score which is a function of those things and additional information about the quality of that comment, incentivizing comments which are both popular and insightful.


It's not about how you feel paying your gran; it's about how she feels being paid by you.

The key factor is that people who have a sense of belonging or ownership will donate their time and expertise. People on /r/AskHistorians go to extreme lengths to provide ultra-high-quality answers for free because that's what it takes to be part of that community. The one time I felt like I actually had something to contribute I started my comment (a reply to another comment, there's zero chance I'll ever be qualified to provide a top-level response) with "It's an amazing day, I actually have something to contribute here!" And many people start their comments that way.

A paid environment -- especially one where the compensation is likely to be trivially small -- is far less likely to engender that sort of participation and support.


haha right, the cultural problem is that when one has to pay $24 one should loudly cry how expensive it is tirelessly, again and again, all day, every day, until the server is shut down but when one is paid $24 one should be offended by what little money it is and as elaborately and tirelessly explain that your posts are worth so much more. You took whole minutes worth of valuable time out of your day to write them.

What if you pump it up with VC money?


When you pump it up with VC money, you get Reddit all over again.


Looking over the VC-funded tech landscape, Reddit is close to the best case outcome.


"You see, officer, the reason I was paying children to play outside my house is because I didn't want them there! It's very clever actually! I got the idea from the internet! It's certainly not what it looks like!"


Overjustification effect in action.


That folding ideas video is excellent. I implore anyone who wishes to unseat Reddit or any monopolistic website to watch it, so they don't fall into the trap of creating a clone with the same architectural flaws.


Thanks for the reference on the Folding Ideas, great video!


100% agree with everything said here.

My original plan was to pay for ~100 users accounts and seed the site with content for a proper launch. Given what's happening today though, it felt at least pertinent to show off the current state and get some feedback.

The balance between splash page on landing / landing on content is a hard one, but I think you're right. I am worried though that without conveying the initial business model, it'll be harder for users to understand that this isn't a direct reddit clone.


I think if the product itself is a web page, then the root www.domain.name needs to point to the product itself, not a description of the product. Imagine if I went to www.amazon.com and instead of the store, that page was a marketing template listing Amazon's business case and a few screenshots of what shopping at Amazon looks like.

IMO the only good reason to have a marketing/business-case landing page is if the product itself hasn't been built yet. Once the product exists, move the marketing page over to /about


For a forum you could have a story/post be your about page and just sticky it initially.


An idea I mull over occasionally: what if you could spend your karma points to boost any given post? This would ultimately be another form of paid advertising, except that the currency used would be earned by contributing to the community. Then, allow people to sell their karma points for fiat currency. Companies would buy karma points directly from users in order to promote their self-promotional posts, but those posts would be subject to the same rules and moderation as any other post. That way you're actually paying your best users rather than charging them.


This has been tried in the cryptocurrency space, people start faking accounts to upvote their content and make money.

So basically what already happens with reddit/twitter/etc but amplified because you give them a direct financial incentive to upvote low effort crap.


That doesn't really work when they have to pay for each account they use to upvote though.

Even if they boost their own post a bit for it to get the attention of others, they're still paying $2 per upvote for that. And if their post is no good, people might even just cancel those out with downvotes.


It is essentially a perfect recipe for money laundering.


This would be the most inefficient way to launder money ever. You'd get at most 50% of the money you took in (realistically, more like 30-40% with taxes if you were transferring significant volume), and you'd have to have an active account that posted a lot of legitimate-sounding comments, and at least 10K sockpuppet accounts which you'd then need to script a way to upvote all the posts by the account you're intending to launder it through.

That's assuming the site lets 10K+ users sign up and pay with crypto, or you have the time to track down and signup for 10K prepaid burner cards. Then, after allo that, you'd have to hope that the site never detects the vote manipulation, since you'd have an account that's getting tons of upvotes from a specific set of users.

Really.. I think this is the worst idea for laundering money I've ever heard of. You'd be better off walking into a casino and putting it all on blackjack until you win a big hand, then reporting the winnings.


Agreed. It's way more efficient to sell $10,000 cabinets named "Julia" on Wayfair.


I think it can be solved by personalizing the top page(s), so you mostly see the kind of stuff you upvote. If there are a few people up-voting crap you wont see it, but they will see all of it.


I'm building https://linklonk.com which works this way - you get content ranked based on what you upvoted. This is to make the incentives for voting aligned and help prevent abuse.

I think the problem with karma/reputation systems is that the source of karma are fungible - anyone's upvote has the same effect on the reputation. And this makes it gameable.

A personalized system can solve this by replacing global reputation with user-to-user trust. Now it matters who upvoted - a random bot or a user whose past contributions have been useful to you.


>Now it matters who upvoted - a random bot or a user whose past contributions have been useful to you. //

In that system how do you create a ranked list of content for a user to browse? Isn't it going to be very heavy on processing demand?


Yes, it requires keeping track of how much each user trusts each other user. And then when you rank content for user A, you use the trust table of user A as weights of upvotes.

This is more computationally intensive than sorting by the raw number of upvotes or weight upvotes by karma/popularity.

But I think this is a useful computation - the user can be more confident that the content they is is not astroturfed and comes from trustworthy users.

Details of how trust is calculated: https://linklonk.com/item/3292763817660940288


You can do the processing in a worker. Maybe even offload it to the client. If there is a live stream a pretrained machine learning model could be used and it could infear who will like what


tweakers.net (a Dutch tech site that's been around since the 1998) allows you to spend your karma points in their Karmastore on things like custom-css, RSS-feeds in tracker and custom newsletter.


To be honest I don't completely agree. The business model itself is what makes thin interesting, not to users, but to creators. Take me for example, I write tech articles from time to time, and the occasional video, presentation, or coding live stream. As it stands I don't make any money on this, I just do it for fun. But with a site like non.io there's no reason for me _not_ to post my content there. As long as you get some publicity out there (like you're doing with this) creators should hopefully start contributing. And once the creators are there, so will the users be! I agree though that the splash page is a bit strange, maybe throw up a popup over the content for people who aren't logged in and haven't visited the site before? Or at least put this info in a sidebar. The business model is as you say the core value proposition here, so if people don't get it right away the interest could quickly fade.

Wish you the best of luck with this. And I'll look into posting my stuff on there as well, as I said there really isn't any reason not to


> As it stands I don't make any money on this, I just do it for fun. But with a site like non.io there's no reason for me _not_ to post my content there.

I’m obviously not targeting this at you but a business model likes this (paying fractions of a penny per upvote) is not likely to attract high quality content. In fact the opposite it incentives a quantity over quality approach (i.e. content has to be just good enough to get upvoted spending more effort is wasted)


Niche groups, high quality content, users who don't upvote everything I think is the goal. Not up voting 100 cat videos or memes and then wishing you could upvote a post that really helps you out on something or leads to good discussion. I think it tries to place weight on your upvote to mean more than just ticking something up but remind you that you are putting your money into someone's else's pocket and has what they provided you with worth it? It'd small enough that you don't feel like you're out too much monthly, but probably big enough for posts with upvotes in the thousands to give back to quality content creators (haven't done any math but yeah)


Exactly. Of course everyone used Reddit differently, but personally I basically never upvoted anything unless I really enjoyed it. The big question for me would be what happens to my funds if I don't upvote anyone in a given month, do they roll-over to the next month? Do they go to server management? Do they go into a separate pool to do something else fun with?

In a way Reddit did distinguish their usual "this content is better than the one below" upvote with "this is amazing content" by giving Reddit gold. A similar system could be used here. One thing that made Reddit great was that since people up (and maybe more importantly) downvoted content good stuff would float to the top. It would be pretty bad if upvotes where too meaningful as that would drive away engagement.


Fractions of a penny from people who upvote a lot. A full dollar if it's someone's only upvote for the month. I'm not convinced quantity wins... although I am very much not convinced that it doesn't, either.


What if there was a large button for upvote, and beside a smaller button for 100x upvote?

Regular users can upvote 100 cat pictures for their dopamine hit, and when they find an ACTUALLY VALUABLE post they can look for the small button.


Medium did this with "claps". Press once for a single clap. Press and hold to add multiple claps proportional to the time you hold it.


Like Reddit gold you mean? (before they created all these silly other awards)


maybe make the first 10,000 or 100,000 accounts free for life?

you need to build momentum somehow

maybe summarise what your users need to understand in a sidebar or closeable top-bar?


You could also incentivize early adopters. For example, if you're in the first 100k users, your money/upvote goes twice as far. Something like that.


Or something like, seed quality content for rewards (post links that end up getting lots of upvotes = free subscription) sounds pretty close to OPs original idea anyway, just give better terms for early adopters.


Why not pin your business model as the top post for awhile until it catches on?


This right here is the way to do it.


For sure - striking the right design balance is tough. If it were me, I'd try to keep content in the user's face as much as possible, and maybe inform the user about the unique value-add with non-intrusive sidebars, header/footers or system generated PMs.

It's not easy, and the value of an expert UX designer really shines when walking the tight-rope between informing and annoying your users.

Also, consider investing in reliable A/B testing infrastructure if you haven't already. One of the biggest mistakes I've seen is trying to grow a product while driving half-blind based on napkin sql queries as metrics. Understand who is using the site, how often, when they are experiencing errors, and which types of changes actually encourage growth KPIs - but be careful, loading up the site with 3rd party trackers and intrusive js will introduce bugs and kill site performance - another balancing act hehe.


you should try and get an API that has full parity with Reddit, an app that does that will replace Reddit because all third party apps simply need to change urls for Reddit to your domain.


THIS. This is the pro move.


In a way this feels similar to nebula - nebula currently has no comment functionality and points to reddit threads for communities around their videos. Wonder if that group would be interested in experimenting given the heavy overlap in business model.


> this kind of thing is dead in the water because it lacks a network effect

Which is why launching any social network is a dice roll. You need that initial momentum to propel it further, or some 'lucky break' to get it popular. Many social networks got popular accidentally, typically because some VIP joined the platform and everyone went to follow the VIP, increasing DAUs / MAUs which is the only metric social media networks care about.


Also back in the day tech was moving fast (i.e. UX and frontend would become outdated in a year if not months) and you didn’t to compete with multi-billion dollar companies.


Another minor nit: the homepage isn’t really very mobile friendly. I think any Reddit replacement needs good mobile usability and the homepage not being too mobile friendly isn’t a great sign.

I absolutely love the project though! Will check it out now.


If you ask me to make an account before I can see your content (even if it looks interesting) that's a turn off and I'll go somewhere else. Maybe have a button at the top that says "explore as guest" or something like that?

Also you should advertise that this is an open-source project on the landing page, as that may cause more people to be interested in trying it out.


https://non.io/#all


> without a hook that makes the platform exceptional (innovative/clever/beautiful design, unique aggregation features, inherently interesting content, reimagined user/content/moderation dynamics etc etc), this kind of thing is dead in the water because it lacks a network effect

I think the ONLY value any of these these have is network effect. All those other things you listed are either irrelevant or come after the network effects kick in. The only other important thing is the visual/practical UX.


I hear your point, but I think in some ways the network effect is intrinsically linked to the capabilities of the platform, they are kind of like two sides of the same coin. Consider a platform like discord where the quality and capabilities of the software product have allowed many massive communities to be built because of the beautiful design (for its niche) and the empowering community features. Platforms like teamspeak and ventrillo had the network effect but were eventually crushed by discord because of the product's capabilities.


For a site to work it either needs to

a) seed itself with tons of j referring links. At the end of the day people come for the content not the platform.

b) target moderation groups and convince individual smaller communities to transport themselves wholesale. Go down the dark list and start marketing to each mod team one by one.


Option b would work so well this month. Hundreds of thousands of motivated users and moderators just waiting for that better option.


The font on the root domains is also really small, at least on a desktop FF. You also can't really interact with anything except for the (very small) "log in" and "register" buttons at the top right corner, which is really frustrating if you are looking for some actual content. In fact, there seems to be no way of getting to the content at all via link. Lastly, the image in the top right is distracting, because it drags the user's focus there and away from the left side where the text starts; your eyes aren't really sure where they should be looking.


> cheap commodity in a massively oversaturated space, and without a hook that makes the platform exceptional (innovative/clever/beautiful design)

instead do unimaginative, stupid and ugly design. Reddit will shut down old.reddit within the next 16 months and when that happens there will be a gap in the market to grab the most dedicated of reddit's audience with something that looks as ugly but works as great as old.reddit does.


Only start charging when the sub or channel becomes large enough (something like boosts)

But yes, it needs a new capability that is the hook.


Maybe it's the ol' HN hug-of-death but I'm getting a mostly blank screen on the #ALL page with a single post from 'Krazy', contents a single < symbol, and nothing else. Browsing tabs doesn't change the main screen, seems to be no content here.

If it helps, I'm on Edge v.114.0.1823.43, Windows 10.

Great concept though, I like the idea of subscription money going to popular content creators but worry this simply encourages lazy posting of popular meme content, basically a monetised karma farm. The capitalists that we are, many will find a way to optimise post engagement against the algorithm and many will be pursuing hard cash rather than social interaction.


> .. but the problem is that tech like this is a cheap commodity in a massively oversaturated space, and without a hook that makes the platform exceptional (innovative/clever/beautiful design, unique aggregation features, inherently interesting content, reimagined user/content/moderation dynamics etc etc), this kind of thing is dead in the water because it lacks a network effect.

How about said hook being? "absence of dark patterns" .. which is possible because of stable funding, so there's no enshittification dynamic needed to make money.


This is definitely the idea, but are there enough educated consumers willing to spend money to avoid being trapped in shittified experiences? That's the question that matters.


“Enough” is relative, how many do you really need to sustain the site?


Paying the servers is not enough. For it to have a future, it really needs paid employees. See also: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZpDnRCeef2CLEFeKM/money-the-...


Couldn't disagree more, both on future vision of what this could be, as well as the implication that I said, "paying the servers is enough." "Sustain the site" involves growing the site, but none of that involves obtaining millions of users.

Also lesswrong is a cesspool of pseudointellectual bullshit. Eliezer Yudkowsky's ideas don't stand up to reality on average, and the people who "follow" him tend not to understand the relationship between methods of thinking about the world and methods of predicting how the world will behave.


I agree about LW in general, but I also found the idea of paying people to get things done to be a good one nonetheless.


Funneling money toward karma farmers is a dark pattern.


What is it about insanely great user experience design that's hard to "open source" in the same sense that engineers are able collaborate on software, like Linux, and achieve massive distribution?


I dont think UX is "harder". But the kinds of people that can realize a launch like this need to be technically minded, tend to work alone, and lean a lot more on the "Linux" side of this than the UX side. It's like trying to find the perfect Programmer/Artist hybrid to make a game with; it's simply two different mindsets that rarely get taught together.

As an example, look at most of Linux Distro's UX since you brought it up. They aren't meant for the layman the way Mac/Windows was. the deeply technical audience, for better or worse, puts up with a lot of UX issues for their tools. That doesn't work the same way for a general audience website or app.

----

But that's from the "why can't programmers art" side of the argument. Of course, that begs the question "why can't programmers find artists to work with them?"... well, there's a dozen different reasons. Culturally, historically, socially, and so on.

But to list the one big reason; there aren't stereotypes about programmers being short on cash and needing to commissions out programs after their full time job just to get by. (a few) programmers do all that just for their own self-fulfillment or for their own goals, with no expectations of a big payment most of the time. Because many are already financially comfortable.


Design is artistic and artists don't collaborate well due to art being a personal endeavor? Unless it has a 'decision maker' at the helm like a film or it is intensely personal like a band.

Just a idea to get some ideas from others -- this does not necessarily represent how art or artists feel or operate since I am not one and don't actually know.


The difference is that you can see it. If you have two highly skilled contributors with very different programming styles, they can still collaborate within the same codebase given a goal and the end-result is the same for your users. When a code contribution is marginally better or worse in its approach than another the difference is negligible to the project as a whole. By contrast, users notice when a single color is different for design elements. And they complain extremely loudly about it.

On the contributor side:

- Visual style guides require much more time and skill to create (relative to style guides for code) and still generally fail to achieve anywhere near the aesthetic unity of a single great designer with total control.

- If you commoditize your design elements to the point where it is easy to contribute them, then it is no more difficult to do it yourself to begin with.

- Delegation of design work still requires that you funnel it somewhere to be judged on qualitative measures, rather than the pass/fail nature of code

Generally the best you can do is collaborate very, very tightly and then funnel it through a single person in the end anyway a la Python's BDFL in a very trial and error fashion.


The difference is that you can see it. If you have two highly skilled contributors with very different programming styles, they can still collaborate within the same codebase given a goal and the end-result is the same for your users. When a code contribution is marginally better or worse in its approach than another the difference is negligible to the project as a whole. By contrast, users notice when a single color is different for design elements. And they complain extremely loudly about it.

On the contributor side:

- Visual style guides require much more time and skill to create (relative to style guides for code) and still generally fail to achieve anywhere near the aesthetic unity of a single great designer with total control.

- If you commoditize your design elements to the point where it is easy to contribute them, then it is no more difficult to do it yourself to begin with.

- Delegation of design work still requires that you funnel it somewhere to be judged on qualitative measures, rather than the pass/fail nature of code

Generally the best you can do is collaborate very, very tightly and then funnel it through a single person in the end anyway a la Python's BDFL in a very trial and error fashion.


100% -- I'm not creating an account if I can't use the app, demo the app, or otherwise get a proper idea of what I'm signing up for, in order to see if it'll be worth my time to begin with.


There is https://non.io/#all


Should be the homepage.


yes


HIre writers and or friends and create tons of posts with tons of comments ... true or not. Though nowadays you could get something like Chat GPT to create all the fake posts and comments until you marketed where a few users come and interact with the AI content then a few more and more and more and then less AI fake crap and more authenticity.

Im pretty sure this is how Reddit and many popular sites started. Fake it before you make it! Without interesting content you DOA.


Not to mention the marketing page is not responsive for mobile. Doesn't really feel like a modern design, either. Doesn't tell good about the site's mobile UX.


The hook is that it's not run by spez, IMO.

And I'm not trying to pile on, I'm just saying there's value to people in that fact.


That being said, how far can you drive a service purely based on "we don't have <person> working here"?

I'd be willing to wager a good chunk of people don't care who runs their platforms so long as they can talk to the majority of their friends / see large swathes for new content / etc. - see Facebook, for example.


It doesn't even work on mobile.


Indeed. At this point, you need a reason to not put that $2 in the ChatGPT subscription bin.


I love the idea. Reddit was the best of the social media platforms. That it's open source, means we can help fix these things. I'd love to help.


Instead of a splash page, I'd recommend making a box that shows as like, top 2 posts introducing the site and welcoming the user to create an account and stuff.


Charging to post is also pretty much a non-starter.


Twitter is edging on charging to post if we consider exposing content related to blue checkmarks.


Twitter has a massive existing user base and still isn't there yet.


The hook is called „Reddit becoming more ans more aggressive with monetisation”

Its really enough for ppl to start looking for alternatives.


I agree with most of it and the mobile layout sucks for the marketing page.


The paid upvotes idea is unique.


Also, don’t neglect the role of moderation.

I tried browsing, but the top post is a photo of Hitler with the title “A man who did nothing wrong” and several upvotes.


The idea of posters getting real money instead of fake internet points when their posts do well seems interesting, but maybe an unintentional experiment in unintended consequences. Moderation will be extremely important to prevent low-effort memes and content regurgitation and the like from saturating your main channels. Have you considered how you will encourage moderation and keep it free from the corrosive influence of quid quo pro? (hey moderator, you overlook this spam post and maybe I cut you in on the profits)

When real money is involved on the internet the worst kinds of stuff results, and it takes a lot of effort to avoid it. How's that going to work?

None of this is to take away from your accomplishments here, by the way. The exact opposite in fact, you've got an interesting enough idea that it prompts interesting questions of the mechanics.

P.S. do you have any long-term plans to IPO this if it becomes successful? If not, some kind of guarantee that this platform is immune to enshittification would probably be very, very popular.


> maybe an unintentional experiment in unintended consequences

Just charging $2 might be a huge improvement over reddit because it makes sock puppets cost too much to scale.

Paying out for upvotes, I fear will incentivize lowest-common-denominator content. If you go to a quality tech subreddit and sort by "Top" comments, they will mostly be memes. They won't be from an expert solving your very specific problem. And more generally, I worry it will reward that twitter-style, shrill political dunking, binary thinking, maximalism and in-group point scoring. This may be a recipe for an even more toxic r/politics.

Very interesting trying to puzzle out how a given incentive structure will play out in practice.


I wonder though whether people will upvote differently knowing that there's real money involved.


I keep thinking there should be two upvotes. One that is just internet points and one that is a paying-upvote.

That way you can interact with the site and upvote shitty memes as you normally would, but when it is time to be serious you'll using the paying-upvote instead.

Reddit kinda landes on a similar formula with Reddit gold.


I remember back in the Slashdot days their moderation system didn’t give out Karma points for “+1 Funny” moderations so you could make fun of a hysterical or simply wrong comment by upvoting. Also you could stack negative mods with funny mods to really nail their karma.


Maybe for the better. I think personally I’d be more inclined to upvote posts/content that I enjoy if I knew it directly supported them.

Same reason I buy albums that I love despite me already having Spotify—to give back to the creators.


I was thinking this too. I'd be even less inclined to upvote low-effort posts, knowing that I'd also be paying them for that low effort. And more inclined to upvote high effort, less visible posts - both because I think they deserve my money more, and because being more upvoted = being more seen = getting paid more by others as well.

I'd also give out upvotes more sparingly overall, since upvoting a post reduces the amount my previously upvoted posts will get paid.


If I pay to upvote I’m not pushing meme for sure. Only content that I actually read and that I enjoy.


You don't pay to upvote, you pay to use the site and then upvoting changes where your money goes. It doesn't affect you are much you are paying.


> If you go to a quality tech subreddit and sort by "Top" comments, they will mostly be memes. They won't be from an expert solving your very specific problem.

Wouldn't it be highly coincidental if the Top posts contain a solution to your specific problem.


Do you actually think sock puppets will be too expensive? The value of the bot only has to be more than $2 to justify paying it for the bot operator, and if there is monetary incentive to get upvotes/attention seems like it could pencil out (if N bots can generate some multiplier of attention)


Actually, yes. many trolls do it simply because it's easy to do. adding even a $1 barrier to entry would cull a lot.

Ofc there are determined and financuially comfortable trolls out there that would still make a few dozen, but those few are easier to stamp out without the noise of low effort trolls.

>if there is monetary incentive to get upvotes/attention seems like it could pencil out

worst case, it helps pay for the server. But yes, this is the equivalent of a KS campaign being partially self-funded to make it seem like others are interested. There are likely dozens of other tricks that such a community would reveal.


> financuially comfortable trolls out there that would still make a few dozen

No, tens of thousands.

Nation state actors have troll armies, and $2 extra per astro turfing account would be coffee money compared to the salaries they already pay their trolls.

Websearch for 50 cent army


This doesn't work well. How do you pay the $2? With a credit card? Tens of thousands of accounts all with the same one? Tens of thousands of credit cards?

In a 50 army, one individual can be paid a third world wage to register free accounts all day long to post comments. The cost of $2 per comment would massively outweigh their wages.


China is not a third world country any longer. It's competing with the US and Xi is doing fine.

Tens of thousands of credit cards or phone numbers or whatever - why not, do you think that would be a problem for such a nation state actor


> China is not a third world country any longer.

You miss the point. A 50 cent army is feasible when you are paying third world wages. If Chinese wage increases price them out of the market, then you can just hire people from somewhere else. But it's the low wages that make such an attack possible. Low wages vs high wages don't matter much when you are spending $200/hr per soldier on Reddit account fees.

If China wants to launch a state-level attack on Reddit they are probably better off pressuring Tencent to pressure Reddit to just do what they want.


$200/h per person, you guessed.

I don't think it's a good guess,

nevertheless, for 10 000 people, it's nothing, it's coffee money for the CCP.

Interesting anyway to have heard your thoughts. Have a nice day (probably won't reply any more)


Sounds like I prime example of Moral Hazard where people would justify shitty behavior because they pay for it. It's also more difficult to ban people in one way or another because they are paying customers now.


Another moderation risk is that whoever is moderating has an incentive to delete people’s potentially successful posts and repost under their own or a friend’s alt account


People attach a lot of value to fake internet points, so these bad behaviours are already incentivised.

What will be interesting is how they are incentivised differently. Different people attach different relative value to fake internet points and less-fake currency points, so you'll get different behaviour from different sets of people.


Well, if there's money attached, it will be guaranteed to be constantly gamed and abused.


Whereas if there are fake internet points attached, it is only almost certain to be gamed and abused.


But it will be gamed and abused by people that care about fake internet points. Those are very different people from those who want to extract as much money by any means available


If it gets successful enough that people really want to game it, the creator will have proven their concept and can try to tweak it as necessary. I think that would be a fine problem to have.

The basic incentive of money drives all sorts of things. Maybe the best “exploit” will be to find interesting and novel links.


I think the simplest around that is to pay the moderators. So given the $2

- $1 goes to the server

- $.67 goes to the users you upvote

- $.33 goes to the moderator(s) of the group you upvoted in.

So there's actual incentive to want to mod to begin with, and less incentive to risk that by trying to game for post votes as well.

Now ofc I already see a half dozen issues here, so we'd need to deviate strongly from reddit to make this work:

- you can't just create subs willy-nilly. You don't even want that in the beginning anyway because you shouldn't splinter a small community. There would need to be a formal way to talk to an admin and request any new sub. Or at least, we need to delineate from a monetized sub vs. non-monetized, with ways to transition from one to the other.

- This encourages small mod groups and you don't want mods to be able to pick/kick at will now that money is involved. Again, new mods would need some more admin intervention for moderator changes.

- As you can assume, A senior mod won't be equal to a newly recruited mod. So it probably isn't the best idea to spread that mod fund equally per se.

- Mod posts would need to be taken into account as well. Maybe moderators (and possible alts) can't make money off their own posts to avoid double dipping

Lot of interesting ideas to go about. So I hope this site does at least get some visibility


I think that split sounds ripe for abuse. If a mod earns for every upvote, the incentive to just allow memes is just to high.


That sounds good on paper, but I can only imagine it would lead to even worse lowest-common-denominator chasing than exists on reddit right now. Why would the moderators choose to enforce quality standards when crappy (but highly upvoted) memes make them more money?


Ideally that's up to the community. The ideal counter-reaction of this is "Well I'll make my own sub, and attract people tired of memes". In this model, there will hopefully be a sizeable subscriber community, so you don't need to appeal to the masses if the ones willing to put their money where they mouths make the move.

But if not, and if memes are what subscribers want to use all their votes on, well... the experiment fails in my eyes (even if it may be a success as a business).

That's also why I feel we need at least two tiers of votes, personally. There will be times where you want to vote on a cheap but funny meme but you don't exactly want to say "yes, this is the content I pay for". A version of vote that says "I don't mind it but obviously you shouldn't make money on this" may help curb that as more of the super votes go to actual quality content. But nothing is bullet proof when you let the people decide.


Pay all mods of all subs a fixed amount no matter what. Solved


Perhaps meta-moderation would work in this scenario? Randomly assign previous moderation choices (anonymizing the moderator) for users to rank. This could to identify moderators that are out of line. It could also lead to echo chambers though.


If meta-moderation powers were assigned randomly and uniformly, this could be gamed by just spam-creating tons of accounts. Any system that accepts user input needs to have a robust answer to the question "What if a significant percentage of my users are actually bots under control of a single person?"


You could disincentivize them by having access to the metamoderation queue behind the subscription. Thus it's $2/mo/user account.


I wonder how much would a government intelligence or defense department who controls millions of bot accounts be willing to pay per month in order to have even a small percentage of power over who gets to mod (for example) r/ukraine?


Considering 1 patriot missile costs several millions, it would be pocket change.


Yes, and to some extent, what's at stake is to get to choose the next president (or future dictator) in the US.

What's that worth for, say Xi in China - look at how much he is ok with spending on invading Taiwan. And how much he'd save, if a to him a more friendly person (Trump) became the president. Then compare that with $2


I do like /. meta-moderation, but I also feel that the ones contributing the most, interacting the most (via votes/comments) should have a vote to who they want their moderators to be on a regular basis.


Man: We're an anarcho-syndicalist commune. We're taking turns to act as a sort of executive-officer-for-the-week--

Arthur: (uninterested) Yes...

Man: But all the decisions of that officer 'ave to be ratified at a special bi-weekly meeting--

Arthur: (perturbed) Yes I see!

Man: By a simple majority, in the case of purely internal affairs--

Arthur: (mad) Be quiet!

Man: But by a two-thirds majority, in the case of more major--

Arthur: (very angry) Be quiet! I order you to be quiet!


A moderator who does this consistently will be crucified, and no one will want to post in the community while they remain.


when you dont rely on advertiser support you arent beholden to their desires of moderation

when a sub-forum crosses a threshold of insensitivity, just remove it from search and let those fans direct link

sub forums can remain popularity contests where community decides if anything there is a good fit. theyre already echo chambers and nobody is aiming to solve that so just run it that way


Yeah, earning money for posting on a service like this sounds good at first, but it's often a magnet for folks that don't really care about contributing to the platform beyond that. These usually fall into 2 categories:

1. Hustlers and schemers, who want to get rich quick (usually the folks that like spam, blackhat SEO and 'hustle culture').

2. Folks in 3rd world countries who see this as a ticket out of poverty.

The former are a disaster for any good community site or service, and the latter have the potential to become the former, since 'spam the crap out of a service for the chance to make more money' becomes an enticing proposition. A big digital marketing forum shut down its revenue sharing because these folks flooded it with low quality crap, the likes of Medium and Quora have become hellholes due to the same incentives, and crypto based 'pay to earn' games have literally led to people starting up sweatshops to make money in them.

Having it also cost money to use the site will help a bit, but it'll also filter out many good users due to not wanting to spend money on a subscription, and create a mental calculus of "can I make more from my content than it'll cost me to sign up", which isn't ideal in itself.


>Having it also cost money to use the site will help a bit, but it'll also filter out many good users due to not wanting to spend money on a subscription

from my experience, there will be a LOT more ne'er do wells being filtered than good users. Not because there aren't a lot of good users, but simply because there are a lot more low effort ne'er do wells attracted to internet forums.

Other users can still browse at the very least. I think this will capture that nice medium of "good user who doesn't mind a little incentive". Because ofc the highest quality users aren't posting their ideas on public forums at all


> Because ofc the highest quality users aren't posting their ideas on public forums at all

I don't think that's true. I published some of my privat projects only on reddit because I want to put them out there, but do not expect people to interact too much.


are these projects you pitched to acedemia? ones you would post in white papers? One you may consider selling on some sort of asset store for profit?

Not saying your project isn't high quality, but generally the most consistent stream of high quality projects has someone paying for them.


> are these projects you pitched to acedemia? ones you would post in white papers? One you may consider selling on some sort of asset store for profit?

No, for privat projects I am mostly reinventing wheels. But, in some sense, I actually pitched them collectively during my job hunt.

My interests are spread pretty far, so my hobby projects range from building ambisonic microphones over reimplementing interesting algorithms like WFC to implementing Navient Stokes equations in JAX to optimize airfoils in a differentiable CFD simulator.

My new job reflects that, I am pretty happy with that :-)


If everyone chips in $1, and their $1 is split between all the things they’ve upvoted, isn’t the financial incentive to produce posts that are upvoted by people who don’t typically upvote? That actually seems like a pretty interesting incentive.


Yes it seems quite clever. People who upvote zero effort memes willy nilly will spread their share thin.


There are a lot more people who upvote zero effort memes though.


But you see, intuitively we think that the number of upvotes in that model is a “dollar payout” for this post. But actually it isn’t! In a meme community, a post with 1000 upvotes would bring its author 1000 * (1/1000) = 1 dollar, but in a hardcore geek community it would be something like 1000 * 1 = 1000 dollars.

It makes me think, what if the upvote counter was the same, i.e. you have only one upvote per month, and it gets split between all upvoted posts. And maybe it would be nice if you could accumulate your upvotes over several months...


If upvote count results in higher visibility, having visibility and payout governed by two different equations might make it harder to optimize, which seems good.


Completely disagree re: moderation. The goal for sites like this is never "high quality content", it's "maximum traffic".

If he can get 50k paying users, he's a millionaire. If that means low effort meme posts, who are you to slap those dollars out of his hand?

The "intelligentsia" of the Internet need to get a grip on what people want; these sites are for entertainment not elucidation and discovery.


Given the popularity of searching for things like product reviews or good restaurants in a new town by appending “Reddit.com” to the search query, I think elucidation and discovery are at least part of what drives people to such platforms.


Not really a given, that’s just how you use the platform.

You’d have to show thats a substantial part of Reddit’s traffic and therefore revenue, for it to actually be given.


To be clear, that’s not how I use the platform (I’m not sure I’ve ever searched that way). But it’s a common enough pattern that there have been widely read articles referencing it:

> This means you’ll no longer have to add “Reddit” to your searches when you’re looking for thoughts from actual humans, not empty answers from websites just trying to get clicks.

https://www.theverge.com/2022/4/20/23034024/brave-search-fea...

> It turns out that almost 70% of polled readers add 'Reddit' to their search results at least sometimes.

https://www.androidauthority.com/reddit-web-search-queries-p...

I can’t say that it’s a substantial portion of Reddit’s traffic, of course. But clearly it’s not just a mrtranscendence idiosyncrasy.


Then I don't think what you've said is a given. Maybe many people do it, but does that matter to Reddit? That's not certain, and it is even less clear that such a thing would be relevant to Non.io.

Besides, there are many routes to profitability here that have absolutely nothing to do with replicating all of Reddit's value for a user. Presuming this needs to be a 1:1 clone of Reddit seems needlessly reductive.


If it’s true that a fair portion of those who search Google specify “reddit.com” at least sometimes, as seems likely, I’m comfortable that users looking for “elucidation and discovery” are at least somewhat relevant to Reddit or those who wish to compete with Reddit.

I’m not saying this needs to be a clone of Reddit; I don’t think I implied that, or intended to at least.


> If he can get 50k paying users, he's a millionaire.

How did you reach that conclusion?


Multi-millionaire as the typical valuations of start-ups go. Getting 50K paying users would be absolutely amazing out of the gate. Many web properties with a fraction of that are worth in the millions.


Estimation skills and general understanding that the exact value is less important than the larger point.


> The goal for sites like this is never "high quality content", it's "maximum traffic".

so how do you feel about HN personally?

>If that means low effort meme posts, who are you to slap those dollars out of his hand?

If so, congrats. I'll keep searching and be glad some rags to riches site came about in a time of multibillion dollar empires.

>these sites are for entertainment not elucidation and discovery.

put it this way. I've been on the internet for decades, and I know that to really find quality content you gotta either pay for it in money behind a paywall, or in a lot of time digging through the muck. I have done both.

I'm not going to pretend there won't be a lot of muck to dig through here, even with the idea of a paid subscription site. But the goal here is that there will be enough nuggets underneath to make it worth it. And currently, that line is pretty low given what I dig through reddit to find.


You are not a very desirable user for a company to attempt to sell ads to. You don’t fall for tricks, you don’t click on bait, you don’t generate value easily for the sites you use.

The people who like memes are a lot easier to make money off of than you, and as much as people pretend to hare money, it’s the way we survive in this world.


>You are not a very desirable user for a company to attempt to sell ads to.

hence why a website that is not attempting to sell ads to me but has a sound monetization scheme is appealing. Not that I mind a site that uses ads (I have adblock but I wouldn't mind subscribing to something of value to get rid of ads), but one trying to rely on "non-desirable monetization" may have less memes in such a community.

I can certainly be wrong, but again: it's an interesting experiment I wouldn't mind trying out.


Why are we talking about selling ads on a thread entirely about a website whose whole shtick is that they don't sell ads.


I liked someone's idea in non.io #feedback of subscribing to multiple moderators, whose filters are applied to your view. Makes the moderator's job easier too, if its more distributed.

I could subscribe to a couple moderator's idea of "low effort", a few more for "spam" moderation, etc . Could even have "#racist" and "#woke" mods, whatever bubble you choose to subscribe to.


Have you considered a limit on user interactions per day? 10 posts/comments a day and 10 upvotes a day?

It seems counterintuitive to restrict users interacting with your platform, but I could also see it working the other way (I want to login and use my daily allowance instead of losing it).


I really do love the idea. But in addition to the moderation risks others have mentioned, are you prepared to issue tax documents to every jurisdiction where you might be rendering payments?


Yes ish, as currently I'm doing payouts via Stripe Connect (and likewise only paying out in countries that Stripe Connect supports, as it takes care of that aspect). Everything is theoretical until battle-tested however.


Personally, if i signed up, i would not be interested in getting payouts. I'd have to declare them on my tax return, and it's just not worth it for such small amounts. So a checkbox to donate any payouts to a charity (the EFF, perhaps?) would be great.


How about doing this _instead_ of paying out to the creators? When you sign up, you choose which charity should get the payouts for your created content? Maybe start with a searchable list of well-known charities, let users propose new as the site grows.

I think that might stem a lot of the potential abuse of the system to earn money, and it gives users a good feeling.


A really great idea. Love that as well. I've also considered adding a threshold for payouts (i.e. $50 withdrawal minimum) to help with the reporting aspects.


Are you dead set on paying out directly? Internet communities always get worse when there's money involved. It will be a constant fight between moderation and clickbait. People will make it their job to game the system. You could, instead, have votes go toward paying a user's subscription fee instead of cash.


Another option is to have a "play it forward" option, where your earnings are passed on to things that you voted for during the month.


> I've also considered adding a threshold for payouts (i.e. $50 withdrawal minimum) to help with the reporting aspects.

Do this anyway. You don't want to be paying out every cent immediately to people reposting things that otherwise warrant moderation.


This is the way. Minimum threshold. That's how Adsense works.


Earning money from this site doesn't particularly interest me. Raising money for charities, and using that as a fun bragging metric to friends totally does. If you want the community to have a great vibe to it, seeing top level users who have donated thousands to charities is a great way to start that. It's a bit hard to troll the community when your raising money for sick kids at the same time.


In every jurisdiction where tax exists a receipt would suffice, which even the most ghetto payment implementation will have (it being the case that the receipt is essentially how the total is made).


> do you have any long-term plans to IPO this if it becomes successful? If not, some kind of guarantee that this platform is immune to enshittification would probably be very, very popular.

This is a solid call out. Part of me wants to keep things private in order to maintain the "user is the customer" alignment. One issue with going public is it then means shareholders become your primary customer, with your users becoming second tier. I'm not quite sure what the answer is.

This also brings me to the question of funding - on one hand, proper funding here would help drastically with launching, on the other hand it comes with expectations and requirements.

Part of the reason why I want paid users though is it means the site can be self-sustaining without that funding, if it can get past the network effect threshold.

Lots to think about.


The thing to keep in mind that alignment is often good initially but deviates over time. Funds have horizons that they want to respect lest they get in trouble with the LPs or end up with piles of money allocated but not turning a profit for them (because of the sunset clauses on management fees). Shareholders may see eye to eye - for a while - and then split up due to unforeseen development (that's when you'll find out how good that shareholder agreement really is). All in all this is a tricky thing and you will want to get yourself very well informed before pulling the trigger on any investment.


Please make it possible to pay without a credit card. I want to support the site but without sacrificing privacy or anonymity.


Literally the only way to have those things and still give money is to support monero, which is a giant pita for a first draft. Creditcards and other major payment gateways are very easy. If you're serious about services offering such things, you should think about offering such an easy payment integration for folks that maintain services.


>Moderation will be extremely important to prevent low-effort memes and content regurgitation and the like from saturating your main channels

This idea more or less surfaces in the book "Fall; or, Dodge in Hell", where in the not-too-distant future the internet is so polluted that you are pretty much expected to hire a full-time "editor" to curate your social media feed. This doesn't scale particularly well, of course, so in reality particularly wealthy families hire an editor to present a cohesive stream of social media to their whole family-tree. Meanwhile the masses typically subscribe to an "off the shelf" stream (or several?) that most closely matches their tastes.


> The idea of posters getting real money instead of fake internet points when their posts do well seems interesting, but maybe an unintentional experiment in unintended consequences.

I foresee some company suing because their content is being monetised by other people.


I would say reward "good posters" with additional free time vs the $2 per year or whatever it would otherwise charge.

That puts an upper limit on how much of an "attention whore" you can reasonably be.


I can already see people justifying gaming the system with multiple paid accounts if they know that farming those upvotes back to themselves will recoup costs. Especially if the farmed votes get more attention from other paid votes.


I want a social site where you: Pay to sign up ($10.00), pay to upvote ($0.01 = 1 vote), get paid when your content is upvoted. There's no advertising system because everything is an ad.


Stacker News has succesfully use satoshis instead of fake internet points.


Ditto. I hate this idea. We all know the type of content that revenue drives: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc. I want a site that rewards quality, not view counts.


> I want a site that rewards quality, not view counts.

That's what the objective of the site is. Viewing doesn't reward anything (whereas views do reward in the video you just linked). My hope as well is that for nonio, knowing you're contributing a share of your monthly pool will make people more conscientious about what they upvote, thus improving quality.


As an option, to rank items, you can use the amount of money that the item has earned instead of just the number of upvotes. You can even replace upvotes number in the UI as well. This way frequent meme-upvoters will have less sway over more picky users. It'd be easier to register astroturfing accounts and to promote something to the top, though.


One issue is that the amount per upvote is only known at the end of the month - only then you know how many upvoted to split the $1 over.


You could keep updating the weight you give to each upvote. That would mean upvotes you make at the start of each month are valued too highly before getting valued less, but as long as the creation date of all the accounts are distributed evenly across the month that should even out.

Alternatively you could base it on the number of upvotes a user gave last month, before correcting it at the end of the month, although that system might be easy to game.


The use of tags vs discrete communities keeps it from being a viable alternative to Reddit for me.

I have a real disdain for tags for user generated content. Every site I have seen use tags I end up having to wade through a ton of spam or vaugly related content to whatever tag I am looking for. The only exception I can think of is Hashtags for twitter but that is due to the character limit.

I understand that people see tages as a solution to crossposting but I think people overlook the benefits of crossposting. Being able to have seperate conversations on AI art in an art community vs programming community is more useful to me than having a single post that both communities comment on.


It's a hybrid model, and I'd be curious if people like this or not as it's been something I'm fiddling with.

Note that when you vote, you upvote the tag itself. The vote within the tag determines its order when browsing the tag itself. So if something is tagged with #formula1 and has 483 upvotes for the tag, it will appear high in the #formula1 list view. If it's also tagged with #funny with 1 upvote, it will appear low in the #funny list despite the high votes on #formula1.


That is a pretty good solution to the relevant tags and spam issues I was worried about. Good thinking there. One half of my issues gone.

The single conversation is still a big problem for me. I really like being able to have conversations within a specific community and get specific angles on a topic. I also like to look at a conversation on the same topic in different subreddits to see how different communities react. It's not to say that one way is inhertly better but more of a personal preference.


Maybe if you could tag the root comments the same way? So when you come from browsing #formula1 you see #formula1 tagged comments first? And when you start a new root comment it defaults to being tagged from where you came from? But you could also add #funny if it is a funny comment? That could be cool


To get two conversations it could just be posted twice with different tags? It's then up to the poster to decide in that case, not sure if that solves your problem.


There's still no incentive here to keep tags at a minimum. What if you'd use the lowest upvote score of all tags, for all tags? Optionally corrected for sub size. So min(corrected(upvotes in #formula1), corrected(upvotes in #funny)).


Yah the main feature I'm looking for on your site is to be able to create my own subs for different topics like I have on Reddit. I like the pay to vote feature, but missing subs is really a deal breaker.


Except that’s kind of the whole problem with Reddit; little fiefdoms developed where some users controlled the content other users consumed.

It’s not how anyone would actively choose to create a network now, knowing what we know about how often people abuse power online.


Out of interest if you vote for the same content multiple times (for its multiple tags), does that count as one vote or many in the payment calculation?


I like hashtags - but, like you, I don't think they work as the primary means of content discovery.


Honestly I believe that hashtags only work on twitter due to the character limit. If hashtags were exempt from the character limit it would be a complete mess.


It works well for content focused platforms. Booru type websites come to mind, they are famous for their excellent community tagging.

Danbooru even has community sourced translations overlaid to pictures.


I think an option to only show comments from people subscribed to the same communities as you, or the community you're viewing the content from could solve this.


What do you do when there are comment threads between subscribers of different tags. Or what if somebody is subscribed to both tags but wanting to comment based more on the viewpoint of one of the tags.

I'm not saying it couldn't work but I don't think it would be as trivial as that.

I also like that subreddits were able to foster their own communities with different expectations and cultures. I feel like using tags you are more or less forced to have a single overall community vs many smaller ones.


I took a stab at this a long time ago and I came up with two solutions,

The first is an account setting for the user that allows them to hide all comments from people that arent part of any community that the post shows up in: https://github.com/kraftman/TenTags.io/blob/bc6f3046dda4815b...

The second is to allow filtering all of the comments by the communities the comments came from: https://github.com/kraftman/TenTags.io/blob/dev/api-cdn/view...


In this case, what is the community? There are only tags.


I think having a single "sub" in the beginning is fundamental int he beginning. Otherwise you just have dozens of sub-forums that are ghost towns. Eventually moving to discreet sub-forums when traffic increases seems like a reasonable compromise.


But that would mean that initially, I have to wade through all kinds of worthless annoying stuff. I suspect it will be 40% politics, 30% sportsball, 20% Kardashians, 9% car culture, and 1% other. I'm going to give up before we ever get to sub-forums.


I'm concerned about the `#` character in the URL.

# means fragment and that's kept local and not sent to the server unless client side Javascript sends it to the server. I would use an identifier that doesn't already mean something to the URL.

See the URL spec here: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3986#section-3.5 We are using this in a lot of our projects, like https://github.com/Cyphrme/URLFormJS#query-parameters-fragme... (and https://github.com/Cyphrme/Path)

For an example where this is relevant: https://cyphr.me/ed25519_tool/ed.html#?msg_encoding=Text&msg...


The main page shouldn't be login-walled. I don't want to create an account just to find out what kind of content this community has and how active it is.


Fair. I removed login requirements for browsing. You should be able to see all posts here: https://non.io/#all

As a disclaimer, this is truly me just launching today, there's only 4 posts currently.


I just went to http://non.io and see something that is/looks like an ad "a platform for supporting creators", and some documentation/sales pitch, rather than content. This is not remotely like reddit.com, or hacker news. Why don't I see content?

This is a very bad user experience, for a main page to go directly to, what should be, http://non.io/about. Don't give me a long pamphlet explaining mundane details that I can't comprehend who would care about, let me see what it actually is, and test drive it, without having to know/type some magic url.

I suggest sitting someone new down, who isn't excited to be there, and have them type http://non.io, and carefully observe what happens.


People want to see the UI, doesn't matter how few posts there are.

The content will come later; most of the Reddit alternatives I've looked at look godawful, yours is the only one I've liked. So many people get the compact and minimal comments look wrong.


Appreciate the kind words! I put a lot of sweat into the design details, so that really means a lot to me.


Maybe you should automatically cross post top posts from your favorite reddit subs and maybe HN... Just to have a bit of content


I like the concept, though I agree with a lot of the comments about people content farming and reposting comments for upvotes and I think that would kill the site (since Reddit already has enough of a problem with this and that's just for fake internet points).

The thing that I think a lot of people are missing about Reddit is that it's not a content aggregation site like HN or Digg or your site, Non.io; it's a community of communities.

I've seen so many reddit-likes which switch from 'subreddits' to hashtags, but that doesn't work for what makes Reddit great. On Reddit, you can create your own communities and control who is in them, set rules for them, moderate them how you want, and so on. For example, /r/AskHistorians has some extremely specific rules and moderation; /r/GirlGamers is a community of like-minded (typically female) individuals. /r/Trans is (in theory?) a safe place for the trans community to interact with one another. /r/BreakingMom is a place where mothers can vent without repercussions and non-mothers are not welcome to contribute content.

None of that is possible in this hashtag design. The #trans hashtag will be a shitshow of offensive, triggering, and deliberately abusive content, and there's nothing the trans community could do about that.

Toxic users on your platform will drive out anyone they don't like, and the only recourse users will have is to ask you (the admins/moderators) to ban those users - and now you have to make the decision of all of the content that is allowed on the site. Are you going to allow transphobic jokes on the site? If so, you're going to drive away trans people (and anyone with a sense of decency). If not, you're going to have to constantly be banning people from the whole site and not just part of it.

I think it's a cool site, but I think this software could be used to replace only one subreddit and not all of Reddit itself.


Yeah one key missing feature is subreddit creation and moderation.

Without all the free labor from moderators curating content for topics with different tastes and ideas about what the community should be, it's going to be a struggle to build a community.


Yeah, creating a community is hard work, all those free moderators made it possible, if not perfect.

Also, I'm mainly on sites like Reddit for the discussion, so those people creating millions of comments in communities are the main draw for me. Finding the perfect karma model was never the solution, we only ever needed one that was "good enough". And that's actually very easy, provided you aren't trying to frankenstein the algo-feed to serve advertisers.


Maybe that extra dollar should go to the mods? And the communities get to elect their mods so they can be held accountable. Maybe we won't get the MrBabyMan or POTATO_IN_MY_ANUS situation.


I am both amused by those names you cited, and absolutely not asking what they are.


Mobile browser support is a little problematic.

A couple of things I noticed immediately, that you may want to consider.

  - landing page is not responsive, hard to read on Safari on iOS
  - login screen in-app couldn’t be closed, had to navigate away to exit, perhaps a hidden icon somewhere?
  - comment threads seemed to have the same issues on iOS as the landing page
Definitely like the direction you took for the UI, looks like with a little bit of work it’ll become a great platform though!


Definitely problematic. I have a local branch that has mobile css that's ~60% complete. Designs for it are here: https://www.figma.com/file/DStwulDd9Vd3TLjrMuxZ9y/nonio-desi...

Aiming to have mobile css in a couple weeks time. Apologies for the poor experience!


Ah yes, Webkit on mobile continues to be the bane of every web dev's existence.


Same for Firefox on Android


I didn't realize anyone cared about that one since unlike webkit, it's not something people are forced to use with no alternatives.


Well, with Firefox sync I am. I'll use ublock and noscript :)


When I load the all page, I get an alert that just says "1", which feels like it's probably a successful XSS attack. Given that, I can't justify putting my credit card number directly into the site. If it took Paypal, Apple Pay, or similar I would absolutely give it a try for a few months.

Screenshot of the alert (imgur marked it as nsfw because it includes a thumbnail of a post that is mildly nsfw): https://imgur.com/a/TmwO1jg

The likely culprit: https://imgur.com/a/rJrLxfn


It appears that it is the post at https://non.io/xss


To be blunt, this had enough bugs out of the gate that I nearly didn't even finish registering! It feels like you rushed this out to capitalize on the reddit collapse, which I understand, but it may flop entirely because of these problems.

The registration kept failing with no indication as to why, just a red X on the button. I finally figured out that it simply didn't like my email address, trying a different one worked.

Then I tried to change my profile picture. That was failing completely silently; I guess .PNG files aren't excepted? I tried the same avatars that I use on every other site without issue. I did try a random .JPG, and that worked.

Opening the videos tab, none of the posts show the video, clicking on them doesn't expand anything, and the text isn't aligning, some of them randomly have the title in the center of the bar. I can't even figure out how to view the video.

This is on Firefox, latest version, no extensions.

EDIT: On further exploration, the submission description box has a bug. The first letter I wanted to type somehow got stuck as the last letter, and there was no way to delete/move it. "y description looked like this.M"


The fact that I had to register at all to see the content (unless I am missing something obvious) was nearly a turn-away point for me. But I ran into the same thing. But it seems to be an issue with the site on Firefox. I was able to register with Chrome just fine.


You should post this on /r/RedditAlternatives/ as well if you haven't already. Also, clickable link: https://non.io/#all


I did, but they weren't a fan of the paid model for interaction: https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/147qzfb...


I swear, the current protests have shined a very odd light on the average commenting Redditor, they want

* The website to be free

* The API to be cheap

* The ability to use a 3rd party app that does not track, advertise, or monetize you in any way

* VCs to continue to pour hundreds of millions of dollars to run the site and never ask for an ROI

Good luck kids


People will always want free things; that's nothing new! Especially on an Internet that was born free (aside from the cost to connect).

The average "Reddit" business is pretty odd; they want:

* Paying subscribers _and_ advertising revenue

* Free content: posts & comments

* Free moderation: voting & ToS enforcement

* The ability to monopolize said content

* Contributors to continue to pour millions of man-hours to make content for the site and never ask for anything like ad-free viewing, an enjoyable user-experience, tooling, etc.

Social platforms present a difficult balance between the users, contributors, moderators, and business - all within a very hostile internet (in terms of security, spam, etc).

For payment to happen, users do demand significant value to be parted from their $. In Reddit's case, the 3rd party apps are strongly desired because the 1st party app does not meet their needs (users _pay_ for these apps!). Reddit doesn't want to compete on UX, as they're demonstrably bad at it; partially due to lack of skill and due to mismatched incentives.

It seems like they incorrectly assume that they own the community, rather than the other way around. Reddit's primary value is in the content they are _given_ in exchange for hosting & tools - both of which are have significant downward cost pressure (which _should_ trend towards free, given a large enough community).

Reddit is trying to switch their customers from users to advertisers in order to make a profit, which is difficult after years of _generally_ serving users. It is bait and switch at it's finest and most egregious.


OpenStreetMap costs a few hundred thousand dollars a year to run. Wikipedia is about $3 million. Redditors are cheap, but you can have a backend doing the heavy lifting for a community (assuming mods work for free) at a cost that can be sustained with a small pool of financial contributors.

> VCs to continue to pour hundreds of millions of dollars to run the site and never ask for an ROI

None of this needs to cost hundreds of millions of dollars.


Yeah, if they just dropped image/video hosting on the site, it's just a bunch of text and javascript (aka text), etc. Serving that is extremely cheap. They went from 400 employees in 2019 to 2000 now. I subscribed to Premium for years (not anymore due to their recent actions), and they should absolutely be able to run the site easily on the ~$600M in revenue they make now and be handily profitable.


Partly it's because Reddit is in an antagonistic relationship with its users. People want a good message board. A good message board doesn't make for very good advertisements. What do you advertise on /r/ChangeMyView ?

Partly it's because Reddit has squandered its users' goodwill. I'd be willing to pay for Reddit if it was clear Reddit was going to work in my favor. Since right now it's doing its best to run off the mobile app I'm using, why on earth would I do that?


> What do you advertise on /r/ChangeMyView ?

Drink protectors and antidepressants.


> * The ability to use a 3rd party app that does not track, advertise, or monetize you in any way

I disagree on this point - I'm pretty sure all the big 3rd party apps at least have ads. The problem is fundamentally just that the 3rd party apps are a lot better than the official app, and have been for some time. If Reddit had made the official app better (which they've had _years_ to do) then significantly less people would care about any of this.

They also could have gone the Spotify route, which I think would have gone over significantly better - Keep the API as-is, but require a paid premium account login to use it. Functionally it's not even really a difference, but it means Reddit deals with all the details rather than the 3rd party apps. However, functionally the goal was to simply price the 3rd party apps out of existence, so that's probably why they didn't do this.

It's also pretty clear from the response that they never thought this through, which is hard to believe. They had to have it pointed out to them that tons of stuff currently uses the API which has no replacement, you'd think they'd have reviewed what currently uses the API before drastically changing it. Reddit has gotten significant value for free by having people write code against their API, that's code they didn't need to write themselves.


> I'm pretty sure all the big 3rd party apps at least have ads.

I use(d) Relay for Redit, paid a small ($5?, maybe) one time fee for the "Premium" version a few years ago and have never see an ad. You are correct in the sense that if you use the free version of Relay (and possibly others), you would have ads from the app, not Reddit, but if you're willing to pay a small amount, you can get rid of them.


That's just the average internet user. They want something for nothing and often get it.

If you do ask for a few dollars a month you have to provide a ton of perceived value. That's despite the fact that they would spend it on snacks without hesitation.


Look at the vitriol that YouTube premium gets. I get it there are a lot of people that know how to have an ad free YouTube without paying. I don't like that some basic app features like background video playing are locked behind premium.

But at the end of the day the I am sure that for a large portion of people complaining they spent the majority of their video watching time watching YouTube. If it's not worth it to you to pay the equivalent of a big mac meal month to get rid of ads that's fine but don't act all morally superior to those that do.


A lot of that must come from actual children with no easy way of paying. The value prop is so obvious for any adult spending considerable time on the site that’s not in actual poverty that I doubt the vitriol is coming from them.


That is the sad truth, the minds of most people disintegrate completely from all kind of logic or soundness when "free" is in the equation. People line up for long times to get free food that would've cost them a couple of bucks, people who are highly paid spend hours and weeks of their life arguing on the internet about why they can't and won't pay $5 for some software or online service.

As patience of creators and curators begin to run more thin, today's information society will split into tiers of those who pay and get good information vs those who demand free and will splash around in the filth of the free information sewers. The filth being ads, spyware, malware, low quality content, spiritually harmful content, government propaganda and worse.


Then sell them snacks.


The 3rd party app issue, and most of the API problem consequently, wouldn't be such a big issue if they didn't take forever to release the official app, only to put out an awful one when they finally did. You don't see many people using 3rd party apps for other social media.


You think Facebook would let a large percentage of users use a 3rd party app that blocks all advertisements, tracking, and other monetization? Look at how Meta treated the whole Apple tracking ordeal

If a lone dev would have made an app like Apollo for FB, they would be under 10,000 pages of litigation the next day

People don't use the FB app because its great. They would love a non-tracking version of the same service. It's just not allowed


Without vc, cheap and ad supported is reasonable. Vc pumping in millions and expecting returns that requires building a company is the problem

Does reddit really need, hr, middle managers, sales, marketing, design teams. It wouldn't if it had a focused goal. Now it has all sorts of crap and extra features to try be profitable.


> VCs to continue to pour hundreds of millions of dollars to run the site and never ask for an ROI

Where have you seen somebody say that they wouldn’t post without venture funding for a given platform?


Reddit was launched 17 years ago. How many Redditors have lived with this state of affairs their entire lives - since before they were born? If Reddit's minimum age is 13, people who are 30 who signed up as soon as it appeared have never known life to be different.

(And, when Reddit was launched it was the era of the single core Pentium 4; storage and compute and bandwidth were expensive. Now they aren't. Store Reddit comments in a compressed file, they fit on a $50 SSD).


See: Wikipedia, Craigslist, AO3. all perfectly great websites not ruined by spam, tracking, backend, fancy graphics. Just great content, lightweight and clear UI.


> * VCs to continue to pour hundreds of millions of dollars to run the site and never ask for an ROI

Do they? I sure don't. In fact VC involvement is just about the last thing I want out of anything I consider critical infrastructure...


Could these goals could actually be achievable, via a community-sponsored model, similar to how Wikipedia works?

I'm not sure it would work, there are just so many challenges, over and beyond the initial bootstrapping.


> they want

... the product that exists.

> VCs to continue to pour hundreds of millions of dollars to run the site and never ask for an ROI

VCs are free to ask for an ROI.

They are not owed an ROI.

Only the kids think they are. Especially childish people who think people are owed money for a crap product just because they put money into a business before where the goal was growth, not necessarily profitability.


I guess they want Usenet.


absolutely. and ironically that's the one thing i would be willing to pay for - the ability to keep the site as free (as-in-beer) as possible for everyone. any gating of actual features or capabilities behind a paywall just turns me off the site, not in a "how dare they" sense but simply in a "good luck to them but the site is completely irrelevant to me now" sense.


Yeah, I suspect paid social media isn't going to work. It sucks because it's probably the only sustainable model. VC has really warped people's perception of software costs.


So people want a social media platform that has broad reach, high availability, (some) algorithmic curation, never ending content, moderation, first-class mobile support, but aren't willing to pay for it in any way (ads or subscriptions). This is precisely why I don't see anyone replacing Reddit. Niche communities will continue to exist and thrive on the internet but the mega social media aggregators like twitter, reddit, etc only seem to be viable (who knows for how long) with the same old business model: ads and VC money.


I don't mind A paid model for interaction personally, but as others have pointed out it is difficult to make the call when you can't view the content.

You already did open up your content, but personally I'd lead with that. Make lurking free and any interaction part of the subscription. This would include posting content, as it does remove the most blatant spam and gaming of the system.

Having said that, while I do think it is commendable that you want to reward the people that provide content, I am not sure if you should do so based on votes. Because that will just make it so people will try to game the system with clickbait and fluff content.

As we are on HN anyway:

"The Fluff Principle: on a user-voted news site, the links that are easiest to judge will take over unless you take specific measures to prevent it."

Source: Article by Paul Graham (the guy that started HN and funded reddit way back in the day) http://www.paulgraham.com/hackernews.html.

What this means is basically the following, say you have two submissions:

1. An article - takes a few minutes to judge. 2. An image - takes a few seconds to judge.

So in the time that it takes person A to read and judge he article person B, C, D, E en F already saw the image and made their judgement. So basically images will rise to the top not because they are more popular, but simply because it takes less time to vote on them so they gather votes faster.

Some things out the top of my head you can do to mitigate this are:

- Don't tie it to voting, make it a different action people have to explicitly give. Basically reddit gold, but then still with the monetary reward tied to it. - In addition to that, don't make it an infinite resource people but a monthly budget people can spend (this might already be the case? I didn't check too closely) - Technically a bit more challenging, but if you could tie it to engagement time in addition to votes it would mitigate the fluff content issue somewhat. Some metrics you might be able to use are time spend in comments, time between clicking on an outbound link and voting (don't count votes with no outbound interaction either), etc.

As a seperate thought, I am not sure if there are liability issues when you reward posted content with money. Not all posted content will be owned by the person posting it, but they are effectively being paid for it. So that might make you as a platform more liable for copyright claims and such. Not a lawyer though, just something I thought of.


Please don't take this criticism harshly:

You say that you've been working on this for 4 years, but there's no content here. Have you not been using it yourself for 4 years? Where is the content that you and your friends have been posting?


I've been working on the code for 4 years. Only opened up posting to others today. Obviously have test posts, but I deleted many of them prior to this post.


Hum there's one commit end of 2022, a few end of 2021, 3 early 2021 and then the initial repository creation in 2018.

You haven't been working on it for 4 years, you started it 4 years ago, have made disconnected updates here and there since, and are releasing a pre-alpha to capitalize on the Reddit story.


You should learn about git submodules before interpreting their git activity, especially if you're going to be so confidently judgmental.

You've missed over 900 commits. Oops. :)


My bad, I was on mobile and seeing the commits is always a pain there.


"A place for all content types - No matter what you make, Nonio is equipped to support it. With no advertisers, you aren’t at risk of having your content demonetized."

How far are you willing to go to defend this? There's been lots of technical talk in this thread so far, but I'm curious on this portion.

So far I'm LOVING the UI. I actually think you should drop the payment part ASAP and just push for more users in the standard social media format.

I also think a staggered release of new "tags" is a fantastic idea, but needs to scale ASAP (until the site is ready for users to create their own hashtags/subreddits)

EDIT: After using this more, it's so exciting and fun to see something so new and fresh. It really feels like I'm back in 2010.


Obviously I can’t defend “all content types” to the level that say, the darkweb can. I’ll still abide by the law. That said, I don’t have the pressure of ad networks to filter out content.

I still have pressures however. Using Stripe and credit cards for payment processing means I have to ensure the sites primary purpose isn’t adult content, as if that content dominates its very likely Stripe will choose to no longer do business with me. I can still support it, but it can’t be the primary purpose.


Are you going to Gab levels of defense? Their stance has been "if it is legal speech in the US, then it is allowed on the platform" is one that grates many people the wrong way. It allows for blatant racism, science denial, questioning of hallowed institutions, holocaust denial, and so on.


Thats a great question, one that I suspect few of us aside from seasoned moderators (such as dang) or platform runners are an authority on.

My current stance is to be a moderation centrist rather than an extremist. There are sharks in the waters of both unmoderated content and overmoderated content. What I'll optimize for is what will facilitate the health of the platform overall. In my eyes things like hate speech, science/holocaust denial, etc, aren't healthy for a platform. I'll almost certainly make errors along the way, like every platform does. While I believe my financial model is new and innovative, I don't have something similar for moderation. I'll be using similar tools as others, so I'll value any input anyone has here.


Also thank you for the kind words about the UI! Poured a lot of love into it, but I’ve got a lot of work to go for non-chrome browsers.


I like the idea and the price is fine. But I'd rather pay $2 for the servers instead of rewarding posters. The problem is that once they start making money it will become too clickbaity/commercial. I strongly dislike the mass content most "pro" YouTubers like Linus tech tips and the like generate.

Reddit never really had this because all you could give was subscription time. Paying causes this mainstream focus and clickbaiting.

Maybe you feel the need to attract content generators to your platform but it will only create more mediocre content IMO.

What was so great about Reddit was that people created amazing content that they were passionate about, regardless of whether it paid well or not.


Requiring a login to see anything at all is too much friction for this kind of thing. (Or at least I couldn't find a link that let to content from the main page without logging in.)

The UI is nice though. Minimal dead space in the comments.


Going directly to a tag view will let you browse without logging in: i.e. https://non.io/#all or https://non.io/#dog

I've still got plenty of work to do on the UX of the site!


Hmm, is there a way to switch between tags without editing the url? I can't find any list of current ones.


Logging into an account will get you the sidebar, which will let you navigate current tags. You can use the demo account hackernews pw=helloworld


Cool thanks, the account view shows a completely different picture. It would probably be a good idea to show that same sidebar to guests, aside from the subscribed tags.

The HTML upload option is... very interesting.


The html upload is my favorite part and the one I'm most scared about. This post is actually an html upload: https://non.io/reddit-has-platform-user-misalignment

One issue though is automatically resizing the iframe for the frontend. I have a protocol for iframes to request their own size, which this script leverages: https://html.non.io/nonio-embedded-page.js

I'll likely create a setting to automatically inject that script into html uploads.


Cool project! For something like this to succeed at Reddit's scale, it should stay snappy under load (which admittedly Reddit doesn't). So clicked through to Github to see what it's written in:

> Languages

> Shell 100.0%

I admired the absolute chadliness of this decision - until i realised this was just a top-level super-repo.


I also saw this and was initially both equally horrified and impressed.


Big mistake, I open non.io and I don't see content. I see you trying to sell me something. I haven't read a single word of it.

If this wants to be a "reddit like" platform, it needs to be like reddit and actually present content on its homepage.


Make the API compatible with Reddit's and you'll have a bunch of third-party clients starting on day one!


This is why I've been so curious as to exactly what Reddit is really trying to do with this api change. If the point of Reddit is to consume content then the content itself (and the amount of it consumed) is really their business model so all actions should support that vs. getting people to arbitrarily be on their site. If your business is content, it shouldn't matter if it's a third-party app or if it's on your main site. I just cannot figure out the long-term logic behind this move (ofc short-term it's about $$ and their IPO but this'll hurt their model in the long-run)


You probably lose a lot of control on ads and tracking


Do any 3P clients let you point their app to backends other than reddit.com? Or are you just saying it would be easy for app developers to quickly port their app to non.io?


The survivors are working on it. RedReader is allowed to continue using the API for free because it has accessibility features, but the creator has announced they do not plan to depend on that goodwill and will expand the app to connect to other APIs.


Saidit has a (mostly) compatible API by running a fork from when Reddit was still open source. It isn't a drop-in replacement but most of the core API endpoints are the same. Things like modmail, live threads, collections are exclusive to Reddit, for example.

Not sure the community is welcoming or even interested in the potential growth, tbh. But it exists.

https://saidit.net/dev/api


It would be easy for app developers to quickly port their app to non.io.


Some other fun tidbits: I'm trying to make this an API-first service, with the frontend being just a representation of how to use it. Because of that, I wanted to make the frontend as reusable/refactorable as possible, regardless of frontend framework. I relied on webcomponents for everything, and the full app is a SPA built purely in vanilla js.

I'd never recommend anyone take that approach, it was masochistic. Use react or something. It was a great learning experience, but writing everything in vanilla js does slow down dev time overall.


That is pretty interesting. Probably an solid blog post in and of itself.


I've spent enough time [Edit: on HN] to remember App.net¹ which was launched with similar fanfare but was shut down after few painful years of trying to find a PMF. The lesson I learned from that saga was HN might not be the best place to validate your product. We're too smart to diss even good ideas like DropBox.

Go and talk to your potential customers and I hope the App.net story gives you some inspiration.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4372985

2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13387723


I also want to add: HN is an especially bad place to validate this type of product because HN has the exact same interface as reddit. This post is popular because of its novelty, there is an incentive to upvote this post and say whatever OP wants to hear in order to get him to keep working on this project. Because "having alternatives never hurts". But it hurts the person developing the alternative. He already lost 4 years of his life to this. Hopefully he wises up and pivots before he wastes another 4 years.


> He already lost 4 years of his life to this. Hopefully he wises up and pivots before he wastes another 4 years.

I think it's up to him to decide whether that time had value or not.


"PMF"?


I assume "product-market fit"


product-market fit


Depending on how fast you can execute it may be too late, but right now you have a brief window of opportunity to get a seedbed of users.

Reproduce the Reddit API exactly such that these soon-to-be-defunct client apps can work with minimal changes (ideally, just a configurable root domain). Reach out to the client authors and see if they will enable your site. Maybe you'll capture some of those user communities.


Definitely, two killer features:

- Nearly plug-n-play with the Reddit API

- Support for subreddits with mod management


I feel like having people get paid for upvotes is going to create a massive amount of bad incentives.


It absolutely will. I had toyed with the idea of something like this before, but wasn’t sure what the behavior would look like until I found the cryptocurrency subreddit.

They have a system that rewards a monthly crypto amount based on the number of upvotes you received that surprisingly has an actual value that you can sell for. It’s largely led to a race to the bottom where comments and posts largely ignore any long form discussions or accuracy in favor of majority appeal.


This is subtley different though. 1$ gets split between all upvotes a person made. So instead of posts getting a value amount directly proportional to upvotes recieved, it will be proportional to how often those users upvote.

In theory I think this would encourage higher quality posts to attract those who upvote rarely.


I may be wrong, but I believe this is how the subreddit already works. They set a total amount of crypto to be released, and it goes in proportion to the total number of upvotes you receive in comparison to others in a given time window. I think the approaches are largely identical with the exception of the crypto vs direct fiat.


The difference is that the non.io model rewards more for upvotes from people who have a high bar for upvoting and upvote rarely.


To be clear, this is an entirely different model with a different incentive structure from the other one under discussion. It will not have the same issues. You don't want majority appeal, rather you want niche appeal. The more people like primarily your post and nothing else, the more valuable the upvotes become.


It’s weird because people seem very motivated by imaginary internet points already. I think paying out money doesn’t actually improve anything beyond just brining in people who’s only incentive is a pay out.


Anything you incentivize is going to be abused. That's the way it is. Begun the karma wars have.


So each user puts a dollar a month into upvote cash. I think i upvote ~10 things per day on Reddit. I use Reddit most days, so say 250 things a month. Given the same pattern of behaviour, each one of my upvotes is worth 0.4 cents.

A post getting 1000 upvotes earns $4. That's already quite a lot of upvotes, enough to get on the first page of a reasonably big sub. Posts on r/all (today, which may be abnormal) are at 10-50k, so would earn $40-$200.

$200 would be nice to have! But these don't seem like prizes that would motivate residents of first-world countries, considering that you have to have one of the most-upvoted posts on the whole site to win them.


I probably upvote more like 1-2 things a day (on Hackernews, I don’t have a Reddit account). I’m pretty curious what effect it would have, that my opinion would be “worth” (in this sort of system of course—in reality, my opinion is worth very little!) around 10x as much as yours.


your upvote is worth 0.4 cents but the other upvotes are worth different amounts. if i upvoted once each month that's a dollar there.


It might be feasible for a community centered on content creators as the site appears to showcase, though for much of Reddit there are all manner of posts including just OPs asking a random question which doesn't need to be monetized but which still would benefit from more eyeballs (via upvotes).


A cap could be put in place to avoid many of these bad incentives. Example: you can’t make more money than your subscription cost per month. Maybe uncashed upvotes could roll over each month, too, so long as you keep your subscription.


I'm the developer of Sync for Reddit. If you want to explore making an Android app I'm about to have a lot of time on my hands...


Extremely interested in talking. I was actually going to reach out to you/RIF/Apollo.

Do you mind sending me an email at j@jjcm.org? Would love to talk more.

I have some plans for 3rd party app revenue sharing I'd love your thoughts on. What I'm thinking is that with the $1/mo server fee I charge users, I'd carve out 30c of that as the "frontend fee", which I would distribute evenly between the frontends that user was using that month. If they were only using an app, I'd pay that app $0.30 for the month for that user. If they were using the app and the website, each would get $0.15 for the month.


I haven't been on Android for a few years now, but the years I was, your client was my favorite. Thanks for making it!


Listen to this guy. Sync is a fantastically well-designed app.


As others have said, congratulations on what is clearly a lot of solid work and a very interesting bet about how to dodge some of the traps e.g. Reddit is in all this grief over.

And this is the kind of moment that projects like this get a chance: struggling incumbent, #1 on HN, this is a great moment!

My 2c is that I’d stay flexible on the revenue model, even if you’re pretty sure you don’t want to do adds there are a variety of interesting variations on the paid model, there’s kinda left field stuff like Brave’s BAT thing (probably worth emailing their people for a fun chat either way) and lots of Patreon-style stuff.

I’d really nail the simple-sounding but critical stuff (and you’re well on your way!) before I got too attached to a revenue strategy.


Pretty cool! I would consider changing your URL patterns though. It's not ideal to change them after launch, but it will be harder to change them a year from now if/when you run into issues.

1. Using '#' in URLs is not great.

  - When requesting a page, the browser doesn't include anything after the hash, which means:
  - Tag pages rely solely on client-side routing — they'll never work with JS disabled. You might not support no-JS right now, but if you ever want to allow for it in the future, it's incompatible with hash-based routing.
  - SEO will probably be impacted; not sure how well crawlers deal with hash-based routing.
  - If someone links to non.io/#dog on social media, I think the opengraph preview will also ignore the hash.
If you want client-side routing, you should use a library or the JS history API[0]. That way you can use normal URLs and potentially support server-side rendering to allow for no-JS clients.

2. Putting user-generated URLs at the root of your site could be bad.

  - Keep that namespace for yourself: what if you want to make a page at non.io/support but someone already named their post 'support'?
  - Some stuff needs to be at the root (currently non.io/robots.txt 404s and seems to be trying to render a post).
  - There are other standards that look for specific URLs, or non-standards: e.g. BlueSky was authenticating domain names in a dumb way [1]
To be fair, Twitter does put usernames at the root (not sure if they regret that), but they have some careful exceptions (/home, /i/, etc). If you don't want to switch your post URLs away from the root, you should at least set aside some of the useful URL real-estate.

If you do decide to make these changes, you should try and set up redirects for any existing URLs, at least for a while.

[0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/History

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35820368


I like the monetisation model, it'll hopefully incentivise and reward creators, while being cheap enough that a lot of people won't mind paying. Best of luck!


> hope it's a better [model] than the freemium model we've been relying on for the last few years.

It may be a better model for something, but it's impossible for this to be used on a "reddit-like" site.

Reddit is a large community where many users are anonymous. A paid model means it will never be a large community and posters will never be anonymous.

And while reddit has tried to make freemium work, I'm pretty sure it has never worked and their real business model is ad based. Advertisements are a centuries old model that has proven to work well, I encourage you to switch to that (and on your API, make it a requirement to show ads).

Also don't allow people to remove the ads by paying - you need to show ads to people with enough money to buy the stuff you're advertising. Exclusively showings ads to poor people does not work. Just make sure your ads aren't annoying.

It's your site, you can do what you want with it, but it won't be like reddit with your proposed business model.


> Also don't allow people to remove the ads by paying - you need to show ads to people with enough money to buy the stuff you're advertising. Exclusively showings ads to poor people does not work. Just make sure your ads aren't annoying.

I would definitely not pay money to a site that wanted to show me ads, regardless of my preferences, as a subscription member. Full stop.


> Reddit is a large community where many users are anonymous

...to you. Not to reddit themselves in virtually all cases. Maybe 1% browses through seven proxies but if the 99% is okay with "public anonymity", it'll work for the masses so long as you don't show everyone's payment details on their profile pages.

(Whether excluding this particular 1% desirable, is a different question.)


A couple thoughts after trying to submit a post (on firefox):

- no way to post a link/URL? But I can upload an html file? Am I supposed to make the URL the description of the post?

- "audio" does not appear to have a file upload button (probably a bug)

- the text submission box sometimes does that glitchy thing some javascript'd text boxes do where everything I type comes out backwards until a refresh

Seems like a cool platform, glad I registered. I'm trying to post a video, and I think this would be better if the encoder worked in the background so I don't need to leave the page up. Console is also full of CORS errors.

Edit: after waiting for a while with "480" checked, got an error message with a frowny face file icon

Another edit: Seems posting of any kind is currently broken, at least as an unsubscribed account. Too bad, it's a nice idea with about the best timing it'll ever have, but this is a very soft launch.


Just patched the server - I opened up free account interactions last minute, seems post-creation was omitted in my sweep.

Post creation should be working now on free accounts. Thank you for the detailed reports of issues you faced!


Working now, thank you!! Feels great to be in on the ground floor, haha.


I wasn't able to register initially due to some password strength requirements that aren't written anywhere, and got errors without an explanation of why. Generally I would have bailed at this point but wanted to give your project a look.

Good luck, I think it's a cool idea.


Same. Seems to need "special characters" in the password, even though I got a green check mark when putting in a long/strong password with no special chars.

No information in the error feedback, just a red X.

As a side note, I'm tired of websites deciding that a password is not strong enough simply because it does not contain enough random subsclasses of basic ACSII characters.


> I'm tired of websites deciding that a password is not strong enough simply because it does not contain enough random subsclasses of basic ACSII characters

me too. and i'd guess at least half of people put 1! at the end to fulfil the requirements anyway.


Of course, because such requirements are adversarial and make no sense. So they need an adversarial and nonsensical solution :)


I just had this issue with lemmy today. caused me to bounce. maybe will try again later.


I just created a new account using the free tier, and then afterwards decided I would like to play.

I went to my profile, clicked on "view financials", but when I press "Change Subscription Amount" the page just freezes. Why won't you let me give you my money?

Having a look in the console... Every time I press the "Change Subscription Amount" button there is a 500 API error from https://api.non.io/stripe/subscription and this is printed: {error: 'no customer for the user'}


I also tried paying at this link https://non.io/admin/first-time-signup

I entered my card details, and now it is stuck on a loading system where the "Subscribe" button used to be


Ok... I managed to pay. It might not have been working because I was entering my post code wrong, although I got no feedback from the UI about this.

Now I'm trying to make a post, but it similarly has gotten stuck as soon as I press the submit button.

(I figured out that I need to actually upload a picture, video etc and not just write a description. This was not clear and I got no feedback from the UI that this was the problem - instead it implied it was just waiting for something with the loading icon)


Seems like this is a great way to monetize content theft, since almost every single post in high traffic subs is currently a repost of a recycled meme or Tiktok.


I have to recommend that this platform doesn't give users a profit motive. It encourages quantity over quality and only "front-page" worthy content. Niche communities won't get traction this way. A few Gallowboob-level posters will be making most of the profit.

That's not to say that a financial incentive is a bad idea, though. If you capped the amount that a user made per month to the cost of their subscription - $1, then there's no profit for users to make. They're just saving money on the subscription cost.


Nothing against paying to take part in something but having money paid out to people you upvote seems to set up a very perverse incentive structure. There's now a direct monetary incentive for clickbait. I would much rather 50% to the running of the site, 50% to a charity chosen by the sub that I'm posting in. Anything but rewarding people for drama creation.


I signed up, but immediately lost my password because the password manager didn't save it. Your signup password field doesn't seem to play nice with password managers. Just thought you should know!


Well there's a name I wasn't expecting to see sign up for my side project.

And yea, password managers right now aren't working great with the webcomponent inputs. Thank you for the report!


I love trying new sites! I'll reserve judgement until it has more content, but it looks pretty so far. :)


Apparently me too. Hopefully the cookie expiration isn't short :)


Is it open-source? Is it based on open protocols? Does it support federation?

If the answer to any of these questions is no, then your product is irrelevant.

It's nothing personal. It's just that I'm sick and tired of centralized solutions running on somebody else's computers. At least this product makes its business model clear (a $2/month subscription fee for interacting).

But hey, I'm a guy who used to run phpBB forums on a Pentium 1 under my bed 20 years ago. Back then there were tons of those forums, most of us didn't ask users for any subscription money, there was no centralized gatekeeper, and everybody was happy. All of us used to curate our own small gardens and the model was sustainable at all levels.

Can I just get that back, with some federation protocols on top to allow multi-instance interactions? Seriously, everything else is pointless, it's a waste of time, and it doesn't make the digital world any better. I won't jump from a centralized platform to another, and probably nobody should.


The github link is in the post.


So, I signed up, paid and I am already concerned by the financial information page.

1: Within the financial page, I have a wallet of $844.33 -- Can you elaborate on what this is?

2: https://non.io/admin/financials appears accessible by all.

a: I selected $7 for my monthly subscription, however the financial page displays as $9.

b: I can't amend the amount nor can I cancel my subscription. The UI buttons are not working on Chromium & Firefox on FreeBSD.

c: What are all these other contributions?

3: Your support page leads me to GitHub, I don't own a GitHub account.

4: Text editor is so very broken: https://non.io/itsverybroken

Maybe maintenance mode is required? Good for the first stress test and I've learnt a lesson of maybe not paying for something that's not a final product ;) Although hope to see these improvements.


I really like the idea of a micro-subscription. I want to contribute to online content but nearly always people are asking north of $5/month, and I have massive subscription fatigue at that level.

I wish the UI was more basic. All the work to create fancy UIs just makes them worse. Just clone old Reddit and stop there, it was nearly perfect.


The fundamental problem with Reddit isn't ads, or freemium, or venture capital, or who is CEO, or even the API changes.

The fundamental problem is lock-in.

Once a site becomes big enough, its "users" effectively become owned by the site, because everything they care about is there, and the site controls access to it. Preventing another Reddit/Tumblr/Digg disaster entails solving this problem.

And with all due respect for the work you did on Non.io, I fail to see how it represents even the tiniest amount of progress in that regard. Notably, the payment model does not solve the problem, because if the site ever takes off, the temptation to milk the userbase for all they can give will become irresistible. And that means ads, dark patterns, blocking of third-party clients, censorship to appease advertisers and the mainstream press, etc. And then we're back to zero.


totally agree, what makes me hesitant to contribute is whether the site is going to defunct next year.


Four years of work and I instantly nope out when you can't keep my scroll position when I click Back. Don't mess up the basics.


My first 5 minutes have been positive. I've worked for years on a similar platform but never expected to have the time to ship, so I appreciate that you've implemented a few patterns/features that I was hoping for, namely tag-based subscriptions.

Bug report: on latest Firefox with uBlock Origin, I have a strange UI bug on the root/home page: without any activity from cursor or otherwise, there is a dropdown that appears to show emails saved in my browser for form auto-fill. This is visible in the top left which seems to be in the same place where your registration sidebar is.

I have quite a number of thoughts and questions which I'll move to the platform. Great job.


It is a nice start, but I cannot image that tags are sufficient organization of the content to scale this idea. And while the UI looks nice, it is incomplete. I saw no tag options when posting, and before logging in I didn't even see sufficient navigation to understand how to find and filter content.

The monetization idea also feels like it won't scale - the more someone is active, the less their vote is going to mean. Seems like an odd incentive, as creators then will be targeting those users who pay for the site, but don't use it much.

Overall, this looks like a well-coded but half-baked idea of a site.


The back button doesn't remember scroll position, it always takes me to the top. Can't really use this as is.


Please gzip-encode javascripts and css.

They are transmitted raw (also: not minified, but that'd be more acceptable if you gzipped them) and also they are returning Accept-Ranges header. That's IMO not a sensible default; they are not big resources supposed to be downloaded with retries - they are needed as a whole, in a fastest way possible. Gzipping them will shorten the page load - which is actually quite good already - congrats for that!


Please work on the area for setting up bio and picture. I've paid $2 - I believe in you and want this to work! :) Thank you for all that you're doing!!


This seems like a great idea, I'd consider popping in and registering but I would have to wonder how you would handle things like NSFW content?

I don't know what payment processor you're using but I have to assume it'd fall prey to the same issues that onlyfans and others had.

What about keeping objectively terrible content off the platform? I won't name it but we all know what I'm talking about.

I think spelling out API usage from the get-go would be a good idea.


>objectively terrible content off the platform? I won't name it but we all know what I'm talking about.

When the politicians arrive you will have a runaway success. Unfortunately politicians tend to be followed by more 'objectively terrible content'. Funny how that works.


Really hope it succeeds!

Maybe there could be an low-effort area where you don't get paid.

I get the site is targeting creators, but I also get the impression that it is about general discussions etc? As a user it feels weird to give equal money to a discussion as someones awesome multi-month project, especially since there will probably be more discussions than awesome multi-month projects.

I really like the lurk for free but pay to participate approach. Getting paid however feels like a possible distraction that might just overcomplicate things, both technical and moderation+incentives. I don't think most people would be doing it for the money (and for most people it would at best be pocket change anyway). Getting rid of ads is the killer-feature that hopefully builds a good community, I guess/hope.

Getting people to enter their credit cards is probably harder than the actual amount, so the appeal of getting the money back is still red in the balance-sheet for pocket-change amounts.

My biggest gripe is that payments kills anonymity (which some might see as a big thing).


It could be interesting to be able to mark a bits of content as dependents, and have them pay a portion of their reward to the parent. This could be recursive.


I really like the idea of a place where a creator can post anything. The upvotes = money angle makes me skeptical, but idk, maybe it could work.

I know you just launched, so you're probably thinking about this already, but from what I've seen in the loginless browsing link, discoverability is nothing like reddit. It just feels like an unorganized dump of content, like I accidentally opened a link to a spam blog, or opened the "federated" tab on a mastodon server.

If I was looking to join a community, I wouldn't know where to start. I see tags under random posts, but it seems like some posts don't have tags, and I can even add tags to other peoples' posts myself. It all seems too fluid and ephemeral, and I have to spend too much time trying to connect stuff together in my head. By contrast, it's obvious how a subreddit works to most people, and it's easy to find the content you're interested in.


There's no way to get from https://non.io/#all back to https://non.io without manually editing the browser URL?

Is this a real project or another collect-HN-users-IP-addresses scheme?


So posts need to have a unique/custom path directly under the main domain?

https://non.io/avo-jump

Sounds like a recipe for disaster. At least it should be in a sub-path (/post/?), and probably include some sort of unique id.


I don’t think users should get any input on the URL. I’m failing to see the upside in allowing this.


I suggest decluttering main view. Hide all tags or make them visually hidden (e.g. grey on white, no outlines etc.), also make a headline at the top, and all the service metadata like date, comment counter, author name at the bottom and to the side. Also as a nice to have next improvements make actual fixed categories/subreddits/subforums thing. Because used based tags doesn't work at all at scale. At best they are a secondary thing helping in search and used by 0.1% of all users. Categories should be more fixed, maybe initially user created but not changing (existing ones).

Otherwise you will get an endless scroll of doom/memes page with everything dumped there, and we already have tons of networks in such format - facebook, twitter etc.


Make it costly for creators to actually post something. They can recoup in upvotes. That's the proper incentive structure ... by posting you're imposing on other people actually, and their attention. If what you posted recoups and goes on to get you a lot of points, great! But if you posted crap, make that be costly.

In fact, make "upvotes" be zero-sum transfers from the user to another. They have a limited amount and their upvotes will mean something. If you have downvotes then I guess the person is willing to lose that amount, just so the other guy does also.

Here is the full tokenomics: https://community.qbix.com/t/preventing-spam-and-sybil-attac...


I love this. And I would like to say that I think many of the highest-voted comments have it wrong: I WANT TO PAY for using the app in exchange for good privacy/ethical practices of the app/company making it. I don't even comment here on HN much but I was moved to speak out about your post. (And its the right day to post this, given the protest of so many subreddtits due to their API pricing and terms)

That said, yes you may still get a "network effect" from not enough people registering/using the app. But hey, I applaud the attempt and hopefully it will get some users/traction.

Last question I would have is: how does it compare/contrast/integrate with other, possibly federated, social services such as Mastodon?


I searched for a random tag and it showed me all of the front page content.

Seems it's not allowed to simply return "Nothing found" anymore. I don't want blackbox algorithms serving me stuff it thinks I want.

I like the design. I like the domain. I don't understand grouping of content at all. People want siloed communities. If this is just tags, I'm not interested. Twitter had that and it was a nightmare.

EDIT: also, yeah. Parroting other answers. non.io should take me directly to content. I went there to take a look as I got home and it's... a marketing page, with no information (at least, from a cursory glance) as to how to get to the content.


I think this is a great idea! I'm surprised by the vaguely shrouded negativity in the comments. It's so easy to poke holes. This is great work and whatever problems arise can be dealt with at that time.

Here are some of the lazy thinker comments:

- If there's money involved, things go askew!!

Yes, well look: Google, FB, "open"AI etc. etc. What's new? The difference is this is a new approach and could potentially work.

- You make me sign up without showing me the stuff?! The gall..

Sigh...

- It's not pixel perfect on my special unique Moto-galaxy-iphone!

Really? You realize it's in the process of being made right? Soft launch it says. Recall how shit ChatGPT UI was, and it's not significantly improved since.


I think the subscription and redistribution idea is the future of a sustainable internet. You will need some way to make sure this money given to the original content creators, or the website will be completely overrun by spammers re-posting other people's material that they know will net them the most money. Or am I tripping?

It's a bad choice to have all images in Google file format if you want your website to be accessible to as many people as possible. Not everybody is on Chrome browsers.

Why haven't you seeded your platform with high quality content before launching? Now it is a desert.

I assume self promotion for people and businesses is allowed and encouraged, since it costs money to post?


Moderation is a big concern for me, as well as the rules should be better clarified, but I can understand the lack of content as it just launched - I agree, however, with the proposals in not having the google file format.


I gotta point out a UI issue on account registration. Firefox generated a random password for me, and filled in the password fields. When I clicked the Create Account button, the button changed to red, and shook as if to say, "NO." There was no message indicating the problem.

I had to retry with my dev tools open to see that the response code from the request triggered by clicking Create Account contained a message about username, e-mail, and password being required.

This error was presented even though I had all fields with valid data, and I was unable to create an account until I manually edited both password fields, which I had not dirtied myself previously.


First of all thanks for sharing this!

Secondly, not sure if anyone has mentioned this before but in Safari on macOS there's something odd happening. On the page I see a small '1Password' popup and when I click it, it asks me to to unlock 1Password.

However I don't see any login form on the page and I don't see any other text input fields so I'm not sure why this would be.

I'm sure it's a perfectly innocent bug but it's probably something you want to address otherwise maybe it might put some people off.

See screenshots: https://imgur.com/a/3CcDFcg

Best of luck with the app!


I saw the same thing, it seems to be because the login form is hidden off screen or something but still gets focused.


Your site doesn't think "$&m22KPBeB$!7&^l" is a strong enough password.

Uhm… okay?


Obviously it isn't, when you've just posted it here!


Interesting, I was able to sign up with it.

Can I ask if you're using a password manager / what browser you're using?

Also for context, instead of testing password length/number of characters, I look for overall entropy in the formula of [alphabet length for char set used]^(number of letters in password). The one you described is well above the limit.


> instead of testing password length/number of characters, I look for overall entropy in the formula of [alphabet length for char set used]^(number of letters in password).

You should do none of this. It shouldn't be the websites concern if my account gets hacked - basic password requirements are fine, but anything that goes past a character count is just making the UX worse. The requirements increase friction, which you've already put at a high level due to requiring payment.


LastPass. I think maybe you're not detecting when LastPass fills it in, only when typed?


Well done for launching! Kudos for using Web Components.

RE: Landing Page. Keep the marketing side, after all you've a paid Model. I'd split the Landing Page on non-mobile devices:

----33% Marketing ----|----66% Endless FEDD----|

Could hide Marketing pane after some time / or button.

RE: Paid Subscription. Re-think the model you've got, won't scale (direct wealth-distribution by vote) as it's presented (e.g tipping creators by vote: could be done/seeded by Agents/Affiliates etc), unless I'm missing a twist to this.

You've done the right thing to not accept money atm (while you iron out platform/user issues)


The site is surprisingly fast. It's unlikely I'll use it since I'm not an early adopter of social media, but I do like that it's fast. The animations are slow, which could be changed, but each page loads fast.


Thanks for building this and I hope you don't get discouraged by HN's tendency to shoot stuff down. It's best to pretend like it's the hottest new thing, for the highest chance of that actually being true.


I just tried it and it could do with improvement.

* How do I post a link. I just want to post a damn link. Images, audio, blogs not no link option... The page I'm trying to post already has meta tags with a the description and thumbnail so I want you to suck that content down.

* So whatever I posted an 'image' with a link in the content. The link didn't actually turn into an <a href>

* I clicked on some post and a video started playing WITH SOUND!

* The financials page says I have over $800 in my wallet. Lol OKAY let's go!

* I connect my stripe only to find that it won't work for non-US people.

* I guess I'll just cancel now but the cancel sub button is broken.


Do you mind emailing me at j@jjcm.org? Can confirm the cancel button is indeed broken. I’ll refund you and cancel your sub asap.


No worries. I'll let it be for now. I'm sure you'll have it fixed soon anyway.


This is cool, but I actually feel right now it leans more towards being twitter-like in a reddit UI than a reddit-like. The analogy to tagging on Reddit is posting to a subreddit, but it differs on Reddit in that posting isn't inclusive but exclusive to the discretion of the moderators(owners) of the subreddit(tag). The creates distinguishably different cultures in the comment sections between subs sharing the same content. How you go about approaching how moderation and classifying works will have a major effect on how the commenting and reaction experience will feel.


Back when I don't even know what PHP is, i was dreaming of creating this Facebook like social media. Now 7 years later, I have the knowledge of creating. I was not even interested in creating another social media, just because I know I am nobody, I am not an MIT graduate, I don't have a network, my social/communication is terrible. Now I am settled on a working day job, those big ambitions are buried when I fully grasp the reality that I am not gonna be that one lucky enough to launch a successful billion dollar social networking app.


I love this idea but I cannot figure how to sign up.

On mobile the site does not really work at all. Everything’s scrolled off the page and then way to small. When I zoom out.

I click sign up, nothing happens…

I guess I’ll have to go see if my laptop is charged up


How will you combat plagiarism?

I wouldn’t want to see someone else profiting off my content.

I’m guessing you’d place a hold on any payout, until you’ve reviewed their content? But I’m thinking about the claims / reporting process.


Others may have covered this but I think you should have the landing page be the site itself, that will be an good advertisement rather than a product sell page. Also, the tags are interesting, but I find them distracting and would rather a single 'upvote' count with specific tags. The navigation needs some improvements, the submit button is somewhat hidden near the top and should be made more prominent (grey on darker grey is hard to see). Other than that, I have been interested in a similar payment model for sometime.


I've always liked the idea of this monetization model. But have you thought about how to disincentivize content stealing? Feels like these models end up needing a very thorough verification system.


It's a hard problem for sure. My hope is that paid users are easier to moderate than unpaid users, especially when Stripe Connect (what I use for payouts) verifies identity quite a bit.


Awesome! I added a post about accessibility. Since the accessibility community is getting hit hard by the reddit API cost. Let's see a more accessible platform than reddit. https://non.io/a11y

For anyone not aware, read about r/blind here: https://twitter.com/rumster/status/1668004686610178048


I recently found that more sites has Stripe code on pages that actually don't require payment. First it was a calendar site to schedule meetings, now this.

As many of you, I have a bunch of blockers installed in my web browser and I strip off the Strip code when I am opening non.io 'register' page. Unfortunately, it prevents me from registering.

I believe the code there is to build my profile and start using metrics/features about who I am. I am not sure if it is really necessary at that point.

Would you consider removing Stripe snippets on registering page?


Just for clarification, the site is a SPA. There’s no difference in the frontend package between the registration page or viewing a post.


what payment method would you prefer? I find Stripe to be one of the least invasive payment SDKs. Am I wrong?


It's not about which payment method is used, it's about Stripe's payment SDK being embedded on every page (or at least, more pages than it needs to be on).


I misunderstood. Yes, that's not ok


This reminds me of Coil subscriptions that was built on a similar micropayments concept for paying out creators. Sadly they shut down. Worth looking into their efforts, what went wrong...


I love the business model. Have you checked in with credit card processors yet regarding "no content type demonitization"? Cool in principal but many sites like onlyfans have gone through hell with credit card issuers playing the moral police.

Also, have you considered making it a foundation or non-profit as a business model? IMO the for-profit nature of Reddit is behind its troubles right now. You could pay yourself a handsome salary as the foundation's CEO while still keeping things pro-user.


Hm, I don't really see how this is Reddit-like. It doesn't seem to have anything like subreddits.

If I wanted to recreate a subreddit on non.io, how would I do that? How would I enforce rules?


You are charging the people who volunteer content for your site. You’ve got this completely backwards. PAY money for the privilege of giving you value? No thanks.


%98 lurk, %1.9 comment and %0.1 make content that make the rest of the group come in and lurk / comment in the first place. You probably want to invert the payment model in a way and still give money to content creators, or make it a platform which content creators can get paid and take a cut, like substack.

But you have a chicken/egg issue there too, which is why coke when it was first getting started gave coke to various soda fountain places to bootstrap demand in the first place.


Oh, that kind of Coke!

#samebusinessmodel


You should scrape the popular posts off of Reddit's /r/all and post them on here as well.

And, IMO, you should ignore (and possibly even actively flaunt) any of Reddit's TOS.


Looks like the website has been overwhelmed with spam, and, possibly hacked/exploited [1]. It looks like someone has been able to create directories & upload scripts [2]?

I do bug bounty in my spare time so this was an interesting live find.

[1] https://non.io/expoity

[2] https://html.non.io/upload-demo.html


Scripts are permitted in html uploads (all content is iframed and served from a separate domain), though I will go through and remove blank directories for now.

I’ll likely add checks for an index.html for any upload and turn off indexing in the future to prevent these.


I find the concept interesting, but I see no reason to spend money when platforms with larger communities only want easily-obfuscated personal data or easily-blocked advertising impressions. If anything, the number of sites which are advertising themselves as "like Reddit, except..." today is proof that Advance Media (and Spez) are right in exerting their influence over Reddit's users and their channels of engagement.


On the landing page: "$2/mo min." is confusing, is it talking about minutes? consider "just $2/mo" or "from just $2/mo"


Good call. Updated.


I like the idea, but it's almost like your sales model and distribution model is conflicting with itself. You realize how important the content creators/submitters are to the platform so you agree to split money with them, but you also are charging them to use the platform.

If anything the most valuable members are the contributors. Stats on this very, but something like 1% of users ever make a submission, and only 10% or so comment.


I like the idea of paid to comment / interact.

I mostly lurk reddit / read.

But understanding its balance between sustainability and popularity, is there a lower bound to free that can ensure the content is posted to seo the space popular?

1-3 free submissions per month would be enough for me.but if I started a sub (which I’ve considered a few times) I’d see enough value to pay.

Love the idea. Good luck. The timing is great. The audience is ready for a new model.


The poor mobile experience, and the seeming inability to even find the content without manually adding #all to the URL, makes this a non-starter.

When looking at #all, there doesn't appear to be any way to register or login without removing that from the URL and going to the splash screen.

It's not clear what posts are videos, and when I clicked one that happened to be, having it auto-play with sound is terrible.


Everybody's been working on a Reddit-like platform, including Paul Graham, who called his Hackernews.

I think it's fine if you realize that the value lies in the community, not the platform itself. Online communities used to cluster around the 31 flavors of forum/web BBS, so if you have interesting topics to build a small community around your software may flourish based on those.


Looks like an interesting model, I’d love to try it out. But signup on mobile didn’t have auto suggest for my password manager (1pass), and I’m not going to separately create a username/password in 1P and then copy it over.

Maybe passkeys? Or better mobile support? Sorry to add on to comments from a few others — it does seem like an interesting model! Similar to FloatPlane, Patreon, etc. but in reverse.


> 1. Free to browse, paid to interact.

This is exactly what I have been pondering recently about maintaining a website with useful content not prone to some of the problems we are seeing from all of the "free to interact" websites. Only serious contributors would pay for the ability to aggregate and interact with a community.

Thank you for your work on this, will be looking into this further.


I’ve noticed people are entering a lot of test content on the app which ruins the experience for new users. Why don’t you force people to enter a title and either a picture or a description? And block posts with the word “test” that are under 20 characters or something? Just to make the front page better and not ruin the conversion rate for new people.. just a thought!


I tried to register, but my 30 character random letter password with numbers letter and characters "wasn't complex enough".


Are you using a password manager? If so which? If you add the letter "a" at the end, and then delete it, does it work then?

I'm using webcomponent form elements, the spec for which is relatively new. I suspect it isn't working well with auto-filled passwords from them.


There is a platform that has some similar ideas, it's called Stacker News. I especially like the idea of splitting income between the builers/hosters and posters and voters of posts.

Furthermore, each comment under a post can earn by being upvoted.

See: https://stacker.news/faq


I think non.io is significantly more accessible and less fringe than stacker.news, which is very heavy on the "love crypto" thing and appears to be a bastion for fairly fringe right-wing thinking. It's so coloured by cultural dogma I would at least not join it out of hand, until it becomes a little more palatable. The people there are not inviting.


The homepage needs to be the content. Without doing that you are gonna be dead in the water because only a small fraction of people are going to bother registering just to test the water.

Also look at how the current and past generations of forums grew up. Lots of time it was their site owner linking to the content on whatever site they are on...


I command clicked (on a Mac, equivalent to Ctrl click on Win) on a link. It did not open in a new tab, but the same tab. That alone makes me not want to test it further, because 1) that should be default and 2) whenever I see a list of links, I would like to be able to open more than one of them in the background before actually checking them out.


I like the idea and am curious to see how well / if this gains traction. Nice UI, although I'm having trouble actually subscribing on the financials page, and it seems to show demo data?

Great job launching something!

https://pasteboard.co/eRp2eCMwkExq.png


Yep, still working through the financial aspects. The financials page is definitely demo data!

This link should let you subscribe: https://non.io/admin/first-time-signup if you're really keen. That said, I've allowed all functionality on the free tier for the time being until I get things like that financials page complete.


Ah, gotcha! I'll keep noodling around :)


Ha, I had almost the exact same idea but just today. In my version though the subscription fee minus the dollar would be split evenly between all the subcommunities you follow, and within them by votes (by anyone).

This would incentivize creating communities that people would like to follow, not only for the content but also for the moderation.


It's a strange concept, but interesting. You might need to ensure that the system is difficult to game, though.


‪I logged in using the loginless browsing link. I could not see where to create a new post, nor where the "subs" are, if they exist. I tried to reply to a post, but instead of a functional HTML textarea I got some javascipt box that seemed to add two newlines after every character that I typed in.


Can https://non.io/#all just become a part of https://non.io homepage? So that the marketing goes first, and #all goes after it.


Looks great! Silly question, but have you considered ActivityPub integration? I ask because while it may not benefit you directly, these days i'm liking the idea more and more of joining a community if they're in "the fediverse". Which is to say i don't need to worry about the instance being small and isolated, i get benefits of the fediverse regardless of where i am in it.

Ie, i get friction currently when looking at alternatives not in "the verse". Eg Tildes, i have the same concern.


I have, but I think the two of these feel like different models. I want to encourage people to contribute back to creators, and doing that across the fediverse is a very difficult problem to solve. A few platforms are trying to do it, but it does come with performance/payout barriers.

I wrote up about reddit alternatives here https://non.io/reddit-has-platform-user-misalignment , and one of the things I call out is that what we need is a better fundamental model. Federated approaches may very well be that, and if one "wins", I think we'll end up in a better spot. I personally prefer a standard hosting architecture along with aligning user and platform demands, as this comes with some benefits over a federated architecture. I may be wrong here though - each definitely has pros and cons.


Yea, i get your concern about fediverse and creators. I'm thinking in a similar space, though it feels like it's non-optional these days. Ie as a user i just don't want to be trapped into silos anymore.

I think i'd still like a "best we can do" implementation that supported Fedi and supported creators in this manner.


I would look for people who are already creators and want more sidegig. Say lots of creators are on Twitch who might want to have a paid community. Then they can organically grow in your space without starting from scratch.

As others said, make the frontpage a contentpage. See if you can seed some creators to post there.


Nice work!

I love the idea of requring $ to subscribe, but expect that sharing $ based on upvotes will corrupt the system.


Reminds me of retroshare, which is fully peer to peer and anonymizing. Anyone here try it before? Meant for closed communities and not open/global so a different niche I suppose

https://retroshare.cc/


You know I often daydream of creating a social media site that has a small monthly subscription, a way to show users they are not the product, a way to maintain integrity and not have to appease any VCs.

But when faced with it here I couldn't help but recoil a bit, and I'm not sure why.


Because you're not the party with whom the trust lies.


Would be great if one could have at look at the site without being forced to register.


I don't think this can be successful as an alternative to reddit. I'm a broke unemployed person from a third world country who's not gonna pay to ask a question on /r/work to find a job. Just the thought that I have to pay for talking is alien to me.


I'm blaming it on a lack of originality that everyone's been working on a Reddit-like system for the last 2-4 years. But the real kicker is everyone announcing theirs today, with how many years they've been working on it in the subject.


Is there any written guarantee that all of the user created content is public domain in perpetuity and can be exported by anyone? Because if not than this is just another Reddit wannabe clone that will flip on a dime once it gets a sniff of user traction a potential exit.


- test login doesn't work

- loginless browsing drops user into New which is full of garbage

- when I click popular, I still don't see any interesting content.

:-| - i think you have a chicken and egg problem. Why pay to post somewhere without readers? why read when there isn't any interesting content?


Dude you need to figure out your landing page ASAP. The marketing splash thingie isn't doing you any favors. Route the root to /all and allow a simple registration. This is the moment when you can get the users, the current splash page is horrible for it.


It's quite an interesting business model. Qudos...

Happy to see it at github: go server, javascript frontside.


> everything left gets split evenly between everything you upvote that month

Does that include comments that are upvoted? I mean, in some cases the submission itself is just a question and all the value is in the contribution from the users in the comments.


No, comments are outside the contribution model.

I have some early designs that show a user setting that lets you allocate a % split between comments and posts, but for now I wanted to preserve the simplicity of the model.


Fair enough, but for some submissions (like questions), all of the value is in the comments.

Also, I think a lot of long time users contribute a lot of value in the way of: helpful comments, upvotes, downvotes, spam reports, tech support, etc and they're not recognized for the value that they add. I'm happy to see that your product has the opportunity to recognize that and hopefully that will be enabled in the future.


Using the # anchor in the url as the subreddit/tag/category etc is really clever!


Why can posts not be links/URLs? Isn't that a pretty huge part of reddit posts?

When submitting a post, why do I need to come up with a URL like non.io/example-i-made-up? If I leave that blank I would expect it to just assign a random or UUID URL.


I think with some very basic UI/UX tweaks this can very quickly look, feel and perform 10X better. I applaud your efforts and if you need help. Just ask (details in bio). Happy to lend a helping hand or give you a few quick wins.

Congrats on the launch.


Has the cost of lawyers and moderation been modelled? At $2/month spammers break even if they get like 5 clicks from all their posting on the platform, huge magnet for them, and content copypasters, if the platform gets some traction.


I’m willing to give this a try if you can clean it up a bit. UX is rough on mobile. I also prefer subs to hashtags but whatever, I’m easy. I bailed on Reddit like 2yrs ago and there’s really no alternative that I can find except HN.


Title seems oddly similar to another “Reddit-like” post from today!

Show HN: FlingUp, a Reddit-like platform Ive been building for the last 2 years (https://flingup.com)


I like the monetization model and wish you the best of luck.

IIRC, the get paid to post model can make users feel like they are working which can have negative consequences. Deal with that later... hopefully you can get traction/network effect.


My first thought is that there should be something like a star system, so I could also upvote something simple, without having to be afraid of lowering the value I gave to a complex, interesting, high-effort post I upvoted.


For what it's worth, you should add openid/google/apple/etc auth. Registration friction is going to be one of the hardest things you face, especially on mobile, which is where a lot of people are these days.


Awesome. I've had a very similar idea for about as long, the main difference is you did something about it and I navel gazed. Awesome to see this idea of paying into this instead of users being the product.


The model of users paying money for the site means that there probably can’t be any discussion about file sharing or piracy at all. I remember this becoming an issue for the Something Awful forums a point time ago.


https://html.non.io/.well-known/Motherfucking%20Website.html


Definitely make it browseable without signing in.

When reddit launched they used fake accounts to create posts and engagement and avoid empty-site syndrome, not saying you should/could do that with an AI.


You should probably visually distinguish posts from the test account(s), and delete them after a short time, or content from actual users will be drowned out.

Or maybe move test accounts to a separate instance?


If there is money to make then anti-fraud and anti-spam is a topic besides gpt-bots / ai-agents that will be coming up. I like the idea of course but i see dark clouds coming up.


I applaud upur efforts, and hope it catches on!

However, the current top post is NSFW and the preview is rendering in the timeline, that would be something to change so folks can safely browse on the job.


I don't want to belittle your work, but there is zero chance for me to register just to check the place. If someone sent me that link I would open and close the tab immediately.


Hey, that looks nice but I can’t look at it on a older, small iPhone. The page resize in loop.

But from what I can see it’s a landing page; I would need to see conversation and links right away.


I dont mean to sound harsh but I believe this project is a waste of your time. If you want to make money, I would abandon this immediately. Cut your losses and start something new.


I'd like to be able to view content when not logged in. Also, the site is not mobile friendly, which is my primary method of access for these types of sites.


The UID/PW demo combo doesn't work for me. Tried to actually sign up and couldn't figure it out (maybe you can't yet?)

It sounds interesting, but I can't figure it out.


Looks like someone's first action logging in was setting the password to something else. I've reset it back to "helloworld".


This is something you should absolutely be prepared for and guard against if you are opening a public demo account.


First launch learnings. It's something I'd definitely have done a bit more if I were more prepared, but I mainly launched today because of the current situation, not because I had thought through all aspects of launch and felt ready.


Congrats on the soft launch Jake! Did not realise this was yours, I share some similar feedback on the front page as per others here.

Wish you all the best from Australia!


I gotta say I’m impressed, this thread has over 300 comments and everything still feels smooth, for a dynamic site that’s quite the feat to escape the hn hug of death.


You should probably have a responsive homepage. Being greeted by a static page that gives me sideways scroll on mobile doesn't exactly fill me with confidence.


What would be really powerful is an API compatible alternative to Reddit. There's a ton of already developed apps just itching for a new platform to use them with.


60% of web users are phone users. Probably more for a site like this. Would be better if it supported mobile screens. Not just supported but that should be the default.


Are signups working? I tried to sign up, but the login form shook at me and said "X", which is not among the most informative error messages I've seen.


Sorry for the trivial nitpic but in the interest of reducing ambiguity the login asks for email and "hackernews" is literally not an email address.


You need to put some content in here even if you have to add it all yourself under a few different accounts. All I can see are blank messages and testing123


Wow, we almost had a name collision with the service nonan.io I'm currently launching :) (not really related. It's a data cleaning app)


Congrats on the launch!

How do you handle reposts and low effort content with this business model?

I.e. what prevents me from repackaging popular content from elsewhere and farming votes?


votes aren't free. why would i upvote the low effort?


I don’t know. But I saw a post with a seagull standing on another seagull and the submission had votes, so I assume this is still going to happen.


A few quick suggestions about the landing page: - less text - more spacing in your text - try not to let your text span the entire width of the window


bro there is a crazy high amount of bugs on your site.


I click the link and get to a landing page with ZERO way I can see in 5 seconds to browse the content... Nothing to see here, moving on


You need to hire people to "create" content, and do it soon, if you want capture the feedback loop that could make it a success.


The homepage had no content on it so I closed the tab.


Give me a preview of whats inisde without logging in


In concept very similar to https://steemit.com/


I hope this is the Reddit killer! Good luck <3


I tried to register by clicking multiple times and nothing is happening. I tried to register in Brave, Firefox and Chrome


Looks cool and I appreciate the different model.

FYI - you mentioned letting free accounts post for now but that doesn't seem to work.


Just patched it. I very quickly reverted the free-tier interaction blocks, and I missed a final check on submissions. Should be working now.


The rendering of the main page in my iphone 8 is pretty bad… Is bot designed for mobile? Maybe I’m doing something wrong?


Sorry I don't have a mobile css yet. Working on some designs here however: https://www.figma.com/file/DStwulDd9Vd3TLjrMuxZ9y/nonio-desi...


IOS registration window is broken - it pops up for a split second and then disappears. On the latest iOS 16 (not 17)


You're asking me to sign up before I can even see what I'm signing up for. Let me look at the content first.


so, people would have to pay in order to do the thankless "job" of sorting through content. "pay for the ability to rank and moderate!". great sales pitch. very enticing. seems like a failure to understand why 'upvotes/downvotes/points' exist and what do they accomplish.


Hey how did you do the tilted / perspective effect on the browser window screenshots on the landing homepage?


I just transformed screenshots in Figma.


Cool. Can you shed some light on how you handle the logistics of charging for it? Which payment processor etc. ?


Stripe subscriptions for subscriptions, stripe connect for payouts


How do you prevent users from posting artwork by other people and stealing money from the real content creators?


How do you prevent users from posting other peoples artwork and stealing money from the actual content creators?


On the provided link I’m unable to register on safari, the pop up shows up for a second then goes away.


Neat idea.

Can it just open to the front page of articles in view mode instead of first signing up?

That would be a little more like Reddit.


I really like the subtle animations in the UI. What do you use for the front-end/back-end tech stack?


Thank you! A lot of sweat went into those. The frontend is pure vanilla js, and all of those animations are hand coded.

Backend is in go.

Source is here: https://github.com/jjcm/nonio


You should have written a post describing your experience and the platform instead of a plain landing page


I applaud any attempt to compete with existing social networks.

That said, user expectations are very high these days. The site looks awful on a phone, and I completely lost interest after about 5 seconds of trying to read the contents. Given how easy to make a site responsive these days and how relatively simple the main page is, that was quite disappointing.

Still, I hope you keep working on improving it!


on a desktop display i would expect some kind of limit on content width, plus centering. right now the content is left-aligned to about 15% of the full page width: https://non.io/#all


Do you plan to support Activity Pub?


man i want to like it, but had I not scrolled to the comments, i wouldn't have seen the link to view all without registering.

also, when I watched a video, no video controls appeared until the video ended and then they didn't work anyways.


I clicked your link but you didn't sell me. I closed it and didn't register.


Mobile web needs to be addressed…


100%. I'm still working on it. I announced today without it purely because of what's happening with Reddit. Mobile designs are here: https://www.figma.com/file/DStwulDd9Vd3TLjrMuxZ9y/nonio-desi...

Probs will be another month before I get the branch merged however.


Very happy to hear that, I looked more into your service and I’m really hoping you can succeed!


Lets see if this will eventually take in VC cash. Bitwarden did the same thing.


Great Work!! I'd say to give yourself room and charge atleast 99$ per year.


I wonder if this could be used to launder money for a cost of $1 per month. :)


I am now imagining endless rows of North Korean inmates posting cat pictures.


This is why you build a MVP and test it before working on it for 4 years


There are window.alert() popping up, the website is vulnerable to XSS.


What are you serving it using?

It's surviving what I imagine to be a huge hug of death.


Served off a small $10/mo vultr VPS. Today it's transferred about 200GB of content across 6m requests. I'm quite happy with how it's handling it!


Please allow password generator to be used when creating my account.


i love how you divy up all the funds for upvotes. thats so creative


At least on iOS Safari its not responsive. Kind of a no go, sorry.


what is gonna prevent someone from upvoting their own (or alt accounts', or friends') hundreds of post, inflating away the value of a single upvote?


I like the subscription model. Wish Spotify worked like this


It's funny, I originally pitched this about 8 years ago to some VCs, and Spotify was the example I used as a platform that could do things much better.

Turned down the funding offers I got, and kicked things off in more of a slow-burn sideproject style after that.


I think it basically does? I think they pay out a big chunk of the subscription fees to songs based on plays.


From what I remember last time I checked on this. % of money goes to a pot. Money is then globally distributed based on time listened globally (nothing is specific to you for the distribution).

So barely any of the money you put in goes to the artists you actually listen to.


Love it. Will be big. But most VCs again won't get it


Loving the ui.

A bit more rich text features for the comments might be nice.


I really like this idea, and would love to subscribe when you’re ready!

I think many commenters have pointed out reasons why this model is not suited to widespread user adoption, but I just want to say that may not be a bad thing. Meme content moderation is not a big problem if your users are not the type to submit or upvote a lot of low effort memes in the first place. A paywall will inherently limit your user growth, but if the users you get end up being people who are happy to create and support high quality content, that seems pretty ideal to me (unless you are looking for maximal growth, VC level returns, and/or an IPO).

If there’s a mailing list or other way to get notified when you’re ready to do a full launch, I’d love to sign up for that!


I had to login to upvote and hopefully get it to 1337.


Karma farming, but now for money.. cant end well.


Wow, it looks like this has a Vanilla JS frontend


Confirmed! Vanilla js SPA because I’m a masochist.


As a heavy Reddit user - love it.

But can’t seem to register on iOS


replace the homepage with the loginless feed dude


I don't see a scroll bar in the feed window?


great effort!

Do you think can you remove the css animations when loading any page? It's a bit annoying to see the fading in at each load.


I love it. I hope the internet one day will move to paid models. The current state of affairs is untenable. Ads, privacy issues, the lot. One thing I have tried doing recently is using a pre-paid model + free tier. Perhaps I am in the minority, but I absolutely dislike subscriptions. They make me stay up at night wondering if I have some subscription still active I no longer need. With a pre-paid model, users can pay for usage and not have to worry until next time they come back. It can be very cheap, too

ps. text box background colors look better when they are different than main page background colors (slightly darker or brighter)


Note: I think someone changed the hackernews pw


nice, https://ibb.co/w72r31d


Mobile experience is pretty bad right now.


Can't open links in new tabs :/


Mobile version is pretty much unusable


What is your content policy? Will this be another leftist echochamber like reddit, lemmy.ml, lobste.rs and so on, or do you plan to allow more diverse opinions to be posted?

Is it possible to create opt-in communities that do not appear on the frontpage by default? This is required for minority communities to thrive.

The $2/month fee sounds quite reasonable to me, but I don't plan to pay for a service where I have to kowtow to leftist political activists like the ones that rule reddit.


Congratulations on your work, but I think society needs to wake up to platforms.

Given the repeated destruction of public squares by corporations, there is zero reason to trust centralized social media. It's still a business, it exists in this psychopathic market system, and will still succumb to financialization. No matter who started it.

If a for-profit platform is providing value, it's because it's at the beginning of the enshittification cycle.

Ignore the shiny, people. Use your brain.


Is there a way to actually pay yet?


Fantastic idea and great work!


> went to non.io

> no mobile view

Instand turn off. I don't get why these kind of platforms aren't "mobile first".


Hello OP, I haven't read all the comments in this thread, please forgive me if I duplicate someone else's ideas:

First off, I really like what you've done so far, this is fantastic and I dig the idea despite some of the potential payout exploits that you'll need to guard against.

My suggestion is to find the moderators who have wishlists of features that they want reddit to implement. Don't try and entice them onto your platform, just ask them for advice on what features the moderation tools should have. Implement those tools and ask for feedback. Places like AskHistorians, AskScience, gonewild, and other specialist subject subreddits will all have very specific requirements for their mod tools. If you can support those requirements, or at least make it so that it's easy for someone else to build those tools, then I think you'll have a headstart over others.

A couple of other items:

reddit has edited user's comments in the database before. Perhaps consider implementing public key signing of comments on the backend, such that once a comment is made, it can be verified. Hide the gory details from the users unless they're a power user and want to see that stuff. Being able to say "I wrote this and it hasn't been modified", well that's pretty powerful in my opinion.

Allow users to set their profiles such that when someone buys gold for them or otherwise rewards them, the money is instead donated to a charity of their choice. Said charity can be displayed in their profile, comments, or neither.

Talk to lots of people, watch how they use reddit and other sites that include moderation, learn from what they say. Mods are going to be an important customer for you, they manage the communities that will create content and draw people in.

Decide very early on what your personal values are and what the values of the site are. Not in a corporate useless bullshit kind of way, but instead to clearly state what people should expect. Decide what rules mods must follow vs those that are optional. Same for users. Transparency and clear open communication is something people are really missing right now.

Allow people to display the site in multiple different ways that suit them. For example I use ublock origin rules to display hackernews comments no wider than about 8 to 10 words. Some people like old.reddit.com, others hate it. Give people options and make it easy to switch between them.

Allow people to not see advertising if they don't want to, as long as those costs are covered via a subscription (which you seem to be doing, nice!)

If you haven't already, implement a rich text github markdown text entry widget.

Don't bait and switch.

I'm looking forward to seeing your progress, I hope you succeed and that I'm using your site in 5 years! Good luck!

EDIT: I also wanted to add, make your site as fast as hackernews. Can you load the text first, then the rest of the stuff, without reflowing and shifting content around? Speed keeps the site feeling snappy and doesn't "punish" people for clicking discussion links etc.


Awesome idea, great work


this is a much better experience then Lemmy for sure. Congrats!


Is it pronounced nonio?


I like the name. Non.io


replace the homepage with loginless site dude


it looks more like slack to me than reddit


pay to post? Naaa bruh... naaa


Keylogger?


mmmr no DOCTYPE? :)


Is it part of fediverse?




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