Ask HN: Are you working on a Reddit replacement? What is it?
Interested to see what the HN community is doing in response to the recent reddit events.
Post the name, URL, description, and what you'll copy from reddit, and what you will not.
Post the name, URL, description, and what you'll copy from reddit, and what you will not.
93 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 164 ms ] threadApparently yes: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/3bxrxj/lets...
> Another great example of how much reddit cares about their assets is reddit companion. Which at the time of writing has around 154,302 installations, is utterly broken and hasn't been updated since February 21, 2013, the most ridiculous thing? It isn't hard to fix people tried to do the work for reddit since it is open source but they simply have been ignoring those pull requests since 2013. Which is silly since those pull request effectively do fix companion, resulting in a perfectly working version.
This is about poor communication, and how Reddit treats the ones that actually make it all go around.
While I can understand the interest in "disrupting the space"; I'm not entirely sure that the current management conditions at reddit are indicative of an opportunity here.
I was thinking about having a gimmick of graph based commenting to prevent the "top post guides discussion" effect. Not sure at how feasible or user friendly that could be.
Some options:
1. Register with a phone number (do some basic checks to avoid Google Voice, Twilio, etc.)
2. Accounts cost $1, payable either through Payal or credit card. Accounts are tied to the payment credentials.
3. Participation is restricted to desktop and mobile apps employing strong anti-cracking measures and linking accounts to the current device only by way of unique hardware IDs.
is that a good idea? If accounts are paid, then "richer" opinions have bigger impact on the site
I'm sure people will come up with some scenario where that's not 100% true, but I think it generally is. And you could probably devise alternate solutions for those exceptions. Some ideas off the top of my head:
1) The sign-up fee could be waived for anybody signing up with a .edu address.
2) Integrate with major library systems, and say the sign-up fee can be waived if you authenticate with a local library, enter your library card number, etc.
3) Offer a refund of the sign-up fee after 6 months of non-troll behavior.
I don't know. But I do think the benefits of having some money on the line and some basic identity verification outweigh the risk of drowning out some voices.
I don't entirely follow points #1 and #3.
Re #1: There are myriad ways to get a temporary phone number, beyond Google Voice, Twilio, etc. For example, I can just use an anonymous pay-as-you-go phone. What would this accomplish beyond creating some slight inconvenience?
Re #3: I get the need for strong security. You could require multi-factor auth. But what does disallowing participation through a web browser get you that 2FA doesn't?
These are sincere questions. I'm not trying to be snarky, just understand what you're saying, because I agree there's room for improvement in this area.
#3. The idea is to tie the account a specific device (such as an iPhone), by generating a unique signature in the app. For this to be enforceable, logins outside the app cannot be permitted -- otherwise signatures can be forged.
#1. I still think #2 is a more important barrier, but I don't see a huge downside with this either. You didn't explicitly say this, but I think you're making the point that troll accounts can never be completely eradicated. But you can make it significantly less convenient for them, while minimally inconveniencing most legitimate users.
#3. I get the general idea, but I don't see how it's substantially more secure than requiring 2FA. I mean, GMail, Dropbox, AWS, etc., seem to think 2FA is sufficiently secure for very sensitive data, and they allow interacting through the web browser. Plus, at the end of the day, you'll need some mechanism for adding new devices, which will effectively work like 2FA – I presume.
It should be assumed that when the professional executive class gets their hands on the company they will try to arbitrarily censor and ban things. The system has to be decentralized so the parent company is technically unable to do this even if north korea were to purchase it.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collaborative_filtering
The idea was that each person would select some number of people to state that they trust/respect (fakeedit: this should say respect most of the times I say trust, but I don't feel like replacing all of them atm. mentally substitute the word 'trust' with 'respect') them to some degree (between 0 and 1, or between -1 and 1, but the negative ones were counted as zero until the last step). These would together form a (square) matrix of how much each person has granted 'initial' trust to who. Also each person's statement of who they trust is a vector, and it is normalized to have magnitude 1 (before being used as part of the matrix. This is to defend against attacks from people making extra identities that all trust each other, or things like that)
The idea would then be that people tend to trust people that people they trust, trust, so it would be useful to determine what trust levels there are when including 'indirect' trust. To do this, one adds the matrix to the matrix raised to the second power, plus the matrix raised to the third power, for some number of levels (I think they recommended 3 levels). For each of these, on the last level, one can include the negative values in order to include /distrust/. (But one does not want to include it in earlier levels, otherwise one would end up trusting people that people you distrust, distrust, which probably isn't what you want).
Then to find someone's indirect trust vector you look at the appropriate, uh, I think row, of the resulting matrix.
In addition, there is a measure of how much your 'initial' trust vector aligns with your 'indirect' trust vector, by taking the dot product of the two, (and I think also dividing by the magnitudes of the two vectors). This is sort of a measure of how similar your trust is to that of the people you trust.
....
oh, I think I originally saw it as a blog post, but it looks like it was by neyer and is at https://github.com/neyer/respect
...
So, a roughly analogue thing for using upvotes as the input would I guess be, uh...
To determine the ranking that a given person would see, consider the list of all of a person's upvotes/downvotes (or all in the last 6 months or w/e?) as a vector, and for each person who upvoted or downvoted anything in the thread one is looking at, take the dot product of their voting record vector with one's own voting record, and weigh their votes in the given thread based on that dot product (perhaps adjusted for the magnitude of the voting record vectors in question).
So, if someone is someone who you vote similarly to, their upvotes increase the score you see of posts, and if you tend to vote the opposite way from them, their upvotes would decrease the score you see on posts (the opposite would be the case with downvotes).
However, this seems like it might be computationally expensive? For each thread one looks at, getting each person who voted a single time in that thread, and then get every time they voted in the last <x> time ( or at least all the times that they voted, where you also voted), and compare all of your (recent) votes with theirs.
Another concern that I think people would have would be that it might produce some echo-chamber-ish effects, but I don't know if that would really be a problem.
It might be that if one votes for what makes good arguments for their position, and not just the opinions that one agrees with, then one will vote similarly to other people who do that, and that one will as a result...
Hey, that's my thought! And I thought I was being original. Also probably not the first to think that either.
The whole "shapes the ordering for you" idea isn't bad; I think maybe even is a good one, largely. But, the one thing I take issue with is customization, or being more mosaic. Movies and TV shows it totally makes sense for; but I think it's a little more nuanced with news sites given the broader scope of topics and such.
When your userbase is your main asset and you treat them as a given, bad things happen.
Digg had some mildly bad policy before their exodus. Reddit policy is failing in a much more dramatic way.
If someone comes out with a viable alternative with, perhaps, one or two notable improvements there is enough froth to push people to a new home.
I personally hope it fragments. The slacktivists and amateur political wonks to one corner with the news, the popular entertainment to the other, and the learners/hobbyists/special interest associations to yet another.
Reddit is the Craigslist of 2015. It is doing too much and it is ready to be picked apart.
The default communities are cesspools (consensus seems to be Reddit is better when they're unsubscribed)
The staff has no idea how to communicate with the userbase, a problem which has obviously gotten worse in the past few months.
The site hasn't seen a major upgrade in years and still regularly falls over under its own weight
The moderators of the defaults are all friends with each other and run each other's communities (++corruption)
Their current CEO has a questionable at best ethical history
It's licensed under CPAL, which I am unfamiliar with and do not know if it would allow for commercial use.
PG and current sys-admins of HN, open the flood gates, put in this ticket for HN development project: "Create sub-HackNewsies".
Also, I think Reddit source code is open source; so people can use that too! A great business idea I think is doing a bannedsubreddits.com/r/{banned}; crawl webarchive.org for the previous archives for all the banned subreddits for continuity...
That said, here is the software that Hacker News is based on: http://arclanguage.org/ so maybe someone can fork a version with those features themselves.
It would certainly be more complicated than something centralized, but considering Reddit's attitude towards user-generated communities and moderation, I could see it being a good fit. There could be a lot of opportunities for black/whitelisting, paid/ad-supported servers, etc.
I'd be very keen to hear more discussion on the topic!
We could call it, "Usenet."
All jokes aside, what you're describing has existed for over 30 years.
You beat me to it by less than one minute. Dang!
Regardless, perhaps Usenet is lacking certain bits of accessibility and convenience that Reddit has? Or, part of me feels that Reddit has a large draw because it's not very difficult to create an account and start engaging. Features such as up/downvoting, badges, and the whole default web interface would make a lot of sense too.
I wonder if a federated Reddit would work. Different subreddits could be hosted on different servers but the accounts could all be connected.
* Reddit-like engine that supports only one subreddit
* data importing tool that can fetch all the previous posts from Reddit sub and feed them to the engine
* mods of subreddits setup the engine on their own servers and migrate their subs' data there
* another useful addition - profile importing tool that can verify user, so you can preserve your username (via PM from bot on Reddit)
This way we're getting hundreds of small Reddit-like sites. If one fails for some reason - you can always fork it and try to attract audience to your version.
Combining ideas from Ello and Reddit could be pretty interesting.
Personally, I don't think profits are bad. But I think being profit driven is. I also think a company can serve a public role and not have to be a non-profit to do it.
If you're interested, you can check it out: http://discoverboard.com/code/HN
Facebook didn't replace Myspace because they tried to do what Myspace did, but better; they won because they took an entirely different concept, built it, and eventually evolved into the behemoth we have today. Reddit didn't surpass Digg in content aggregation intentionally; they had a different community, with a different focus, and an entirely different strategy that eventually succeeded.
Over the years, I've gone from getting my web content through AOL portals --> blogs/geocities --> news sites --> StumbleUpon --> Digg --> reddit, and I've been on there for 5 years now. I'm definitely ready for something new.
I guess what I'm trying to say here is... if you want to make "the next reddit", you won't do it by trying to be BETTER than reddit. It's time for the next wave of content delivery, in whatever form that may be.
I'd like an anonymous Usenet/distributed-server style system that runs on port 80 - like a BitTorrent for discussions where anybody that can put up a web server can run a node.
https://github.com/nehbit/aether-public/
Found Digg the same day, wasn't impressed.
I'll move on to the next site that supplants it. I have no loyalty to reddit and this Pao chick is a fucking joke.
In my mind the perfect reddit replacement is run by the users, probably with the assistance of a non-profit foundation setup to support it. Instead of subscriptions providing superficial perks it buys you into voting power within the governing body.
Effectively a decentralized network run and owned by the users, in a similar fashion to IRC or Usenet but more modern and without the centralised entities that operated them in the past. (ISPs were usually in charge of "free" Usenet servers or commercial Usenet services were run by corporate entities, IRC is often setup and operated by small cliques of people).
You could accomplish this without a fully decentralized technical architecture too though that wouldn't be a bad goal long term. The main goal would be to distance the control of the platform that keeps the community together away from commercial and political interests.
It's worth mentioning that reddit gold = $5 which is about the price of a small VPS. If every reddit gold user instead provided a small VPS worth of compute it suddenly becomes pretty simple to replace reddit from a money/infrastructure perspective.
http://www.tribe.net/welcome
edit: tribe.net history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tribe.net
It's the exact same problem that Digg had. And if Reddit experiences the same outcome, I don't know why anyone would rush to replicate that model a 3rd time.
Look at the history of 4chan: you can grow a large audience by allowing people to say whatever they want, anonymously. But no one has effectively monetized that yet, because it turns out that such a site collects a lot of objectionable content.
http://www.redditblog.com/2014/02/decimating-our-ads-revenue...
The source code is at https://github.com/rdwallis/TheAleTree
The idea behind it was that the passionate minority on sites like reddit, hn etc tend to drive the discussion on issues because the less passionate majority isn't as inclined to upvote / downvote.
So say you've got a website where a small minority of the users are racists but the racists are very passionate and always upvote racist content. You'll tend to see a lot of racist posts on the site even if the site as a whole isn't racist. And over time the passionate racists will drive out the rest.
Wanted to see if I could solve the above without moderation, while keeping posts completely anonymous.
Probably doesn't work but the idea is that before users vote you divide them randomly into teams. And then when a user submits a post or a comment the team votes on it and only if certain percent of the team like it does it get an upvote. And the passionate racists would most likely end up on different teams so they'd be less likely to be able to get submissions into the public parts of the site.
The database is on at the moment so you can try it out. I'll only turn it off if the spam comes back.
What problem are you trying to solve? I don't see any problem with people voting as long as it is one person, one vote.
The popularity of a post will depend more on how it appeals to the majority than how it appeals to the experts. So the most popular mathematical posts may be posts that the actual mathematicians find mundane but that the writers / lawyers are able to understand. And this is true for all topics in which the non experts out number the experts.
So even though all the people on your site are experts the actual content on your site will be at non expert level, which will attract non-experts to your site who will then tend to vote on content that is at an even lower level.
Eventually the experts find all the content on the site mundane and are driven out.
Abandoned the Ale Tree because I don't think it is a solution to the problem. But there are definite problems with a pure majority vote system. The underlying concept that led me down this path was the difference between a republic and democracy. The Ale Tree was meant to act more like a republic where you elect representatives who vote on issues for you instead of voting on them directly.
The idea is that it's a news aggregator that learns what you like, so it forms a probabilistic model of what it thinks your interests are and applies that model to the network of submitted content to decide what you see. Instead of subreddits the system forms subcommunities by showing users with similar interests similar lists of content.
The main thing I'm having a lot of trouble with is figuring out how to do efficient keyword extraction on pictures and video. Otherwise it only supports links that have a lot of text. The other problem is it doesn't have enough of a community feel so that's something else I'm working on.
One of the ideas I am about to experiment with is removing user accounts and using browser fingerprints instead. I think if users dont have to sign up it will encourage users to more actively participate in the community.
> Otherwise it only supports links that have a lot of text Sounds good to me!
> using browser fingerprints instead
By all means experiment; but this has a few problems with it. Some people like (or need) multiple accounts, which would mean separate browsers at the least. Equally, it's trivial to spin up a VM with a browser. So, the users who need multiple usernames can't (or lack the technical understanding), and the ones you don't want having multiple can easily create hundreds.
The browser fingerprinting idea is a bit more involved. The idea is that everyone is anonymous and the types of people who you seem to like, based on factors like leaving your cursor over their comment for a while, are slowly deanonymized to you. The way browser fingerprinting would work in this scenario is that instead of storing usernames attached to models, we store a few different indicators (like browser fingerprints) and create probabilistic models relating these indicators to the aforementioned models. That way even if we have a completely new user we can create a new initial model for them based on what they might like. I have only just started working on this idea though, so I'm not sure how well this would work in practice and I'm not sure what other indicators I might use.
With this in mind I don't think there would be a reason to spin up VMs and create new 'accounts' because it would just limit your personal experience.
The way it would work is that you'd install our plugin onto your site and make all of the images hoverable and linkable. Then, when people purchase through those links, you make an affiliate commission. The way we'd envision it working is that users would get a percent of the commission of whatever purchases they drove, and your site would also get a percent of the commission.