Show HN: Non.io, a Reddit-like platform Ive been working on for the last 4 years (non.io)

This is something you should absolutely be prepared for and guard against if you are opening a public demo account.

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.

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

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.

Ah, gotcha! I'll keep noodling around :)

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

> 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?

You probably lose a lot of control on ads and tracking

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

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 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.

Same for Firefox on Android

> 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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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).

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

> 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.

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.

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.

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

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)

> 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.

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.

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

How did you reach that conclusion?

> 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.

>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

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

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

The marketing page is not readable on mobile either.

Aaanndd it's instantly overrun with spam

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

> “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”.

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

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?

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Funneling money toward karma farmers is a dark pattern.

Very happy to hear that, I looked more into your service and I’m really hoping you can succeed!