Voten seems like it's trying to implement a more democratic system, but who will be pushed into switching over to that?
Probably no one. But you also need to keep in mind that most HN readers probably have a very skewed perception of what Reddit is. E.g. basically my entire 11+ year experience with Reddit is reading and commenting on subreddits that aggregate articles about various topics. But the vast majority of subreddits either allow only self-posts, or else only allow links to one or two whitelisted domains like imgur or youtube. Sometimes this is the stated policy, but many times that's just the de facto state of the subreddit.
I only point this out because it's easy to think that Reddit is mostly about finding and discussing content, which it used to be, when today it's much more about community building.
edit: Registered. Is this a joke? 262px from the start of one submission to the next. Reddit: 98px. So I guess it actually is a social bookmarking site where people can post memes. But certainly no Reddit competitor. Maybe a pinterest competitor.
Over the years I've been surprised at the "stickiness" of user habits. They can have every reason to switch to another site and still refuse to do so, preferring the old habit. Communities do occasionally move, but it's hard to make it happen.
The other issue is that reddit is an inlet, a way for communities to get traffic and find each other. This is partially because of the inadequacy of search engines like Google, which have been thoroughly gamed for the last decade or so, such that they almost always prefer crappy, highly-commercialized results that have been "SEO-optimized" v. organic, real-person-generated content.
A reddit competitor would need to address a) user stickiness, and unwillingness to give up old habits; and b) supply a stable quantity of new users to keep the community active and alive.
Do bear in mind that reddit itself generally has a reputation as a "dark corner of the internet" in the public mind. There is probably room for something more widely accessible if it can somehow control the user intake and avoid an "anything goes" atmosphere.
Absurd hyperbole. I mean, all someone has to do is just look at the front-page to see that this is false.
> it seems like they shadow ban everyone except for bots
Also absurd hyperbole.
You claim to have been banned because an admin or an algorithm incorrectly identified you as vote spamming, but I honestly don't believe it based on the rest of the content in your post.
As for shadowbanning, reddit is taking steps to get rid of that altogether [0], or at least they recognize that it's a bad system for actual users.
[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/3sbrro/accou...
Undermoderated websites gradually radicalize as the heat and rage drives away moderates. 4chan is the extreme example of this, but Reddit's culture slowly lumbers in the same direction.
No, but most people who seek a reddit alternative don't list its design as a grievance. The site will be made by its community, and it's a safe bet to make that Voten's community will not be very different from Voat's.
Scott Alexander put it very well, in describing the right-leaning Reddit clone voat.co, and its influx of new users after Reddit purged some subs:
"The moral of the story is: if you’re against witch-hunts, and you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches. It will be a terrible place to live even if witch-hunts are genuinely wrong."
(from http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/04/getting-high-on-your-ow...)
I wonder if the removal of CSS from the subreddits will give other message boards a chance to splinter off some of the community.
Still, something like CSS removal, spezgiving, or Pao happening again could easily trigger a migration. Voat didn't take off simply because it couldn't handle the load when those events occurred.
* Nothing fancy, nothing new, nothing impressive. I wouldn't spend time on this site.
* The graphical design wasters most of my screen estate.
* The side panel overlaps with the content when the window is not in full-screen.
* If you register without an email, it is impossible to add one.
* Did I mention that 60% of my screen estate is wasted ?
* Reddit is open source, this is not.
Which community? There are thousands of subreddits. Are you talking about the people who use the default front-page subreddits?
EDIT: The article implies a connection, but as cracell pointed out, there is in fact no association, even historical or in personnel.
the site should really show its content at first page instead of hiding it behind login or signup.
And not being able to browse news without account means it'll never pick up.
Still better than Google+.
Also I imagine any general forum like Reddit wouldn't retain its power users for more than a few years at most. At a given time, most users are either at the point where they don't get any of the inside jokes, or where all of them are getting old. So it might make sense to have a new one of these every once in a while.
A tiny handful of people feel that Reddit is over moderated, and those people went to voat or 8chan.
Everyone else thinks there's not enough moderation on Reddit.
When you ask people what the good bits of Reddit are they almost always talk about the most heavily moderated sub-Reddits, which is telling.
Is there another Laravel other than the php one? Seems odd to roll out with both php and node.js. I don't know why you would need both.
Edit: Yes, I see each has it's strengths. But that has to drive a lot of doing the same thing twice, in two languages...they both interact with the same data. I would guess time-to-market is important at launch to react to things you missed. I would have settled on one or the other. Feels like premature optimization.
Laravel can act as the API backend to the frontend (basically a set of REST endpoints that the frontend can talk to), or alternatively the Vue components are used only where heavy client-side interactions are required, while the rest of the pages are still served up by Laravel normally.
For websockets, as an example, HHVM+proxygen should be as performant as node. Or, node should be roughly as good as php for developer speed on the normal, not-websockets side of the house.
I assume that both would need to understand the concepts around: users, admins, moderators, topic areas, topics, threads, banning, moderating, vote counts, sessions, and so forth. And interacting with all of that both server<->browser and server<->database. Feels like a lot of duplicated classes, marshalling, etc.
Why? PHP works fine as a daemon, there are many servers written in pure PHP, as well as frameworks for "async" programming.
On a sidenote, given that Reddit "growth-hacked" its early days by creating fake accounts and the appearance of activity [0], it'd be funny to see Voten use bots to simulate activity based on Reddit's years of activity. A slightly less obvious version of www.reddit.com/r/SubredditSimulator, if you will.
[0] https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/how-reddit-got-hu...
edit: One missing feature: I skipped out of the recommended channels feature after signing up. OK, now I want to sign up for more channels. I've been clicking random buttons and hamburger icons for a minute now and still couldn't tell you how to find the channels I've subscribed to, nevermind all the other existing channels. The "Search" menu appears to be the only place where I can find new channels to add. But there's not a list of channels. I'm just supposed to guess which channels already exist as I type into the autocomplete?
Regarding being a Reddit competitor, if they can get the content well seeded and manage to allow unpopular opinions that are substantial then I would gladly switch. HN has done a fairly good job of not allowing downvotes into oblivion because someone disagrees with a popular opinion on the forum. It is not perfect, but better than Reddit. Unfortunately HN is more or less a single topic forum. I can't come here reliably for fishing discussions for example. Likewise, it would be great if Voten can figure out a way to disincentivize comments that are unconstructive or personal attacks but go along with the narrative (another problem I see on Reddit).
So in short, my hope for the founders is that they can attract good users, properly seed content until it takes off, and promote substantial and quality comments regardless of viewpoint. I think they could be a good alternative at a time when Reddit is becoming a victim of its own success.
Really? Their UI is bloated and ridiculous. On my laptop screen I can see a whopping two stories per page, compared to 10 on reddit. It's confusing, crammed and poorly designed. There's a big useless sidebar on the left where your eye automatically goes to, instead of the content.
It looks exactly like the project of young webdevs straight out of school who are using all the fancy hip new tech and just learned about material design.
EDIT: One quick example of "not putting content first". Take a given story. At the very top, in big, we have the username and their avatar. So to kick off, it seems more like Twitter/Facebook than reddit. The user posting is given more importance than the content itself...
Anyways, I was commenting on the UX on mobile was. The UI wasn't what I was particularly focused on, but on mobile I found it much better as well.
It's like reddit but each topic/page has a realtime chat.
Unfortunately it's rather infested by spammers currently :)
Getting traction for these social media sites is very tricky!
To expand on that a little - if I forget and link an interesting comment thread to a friend and they have to register to view it I look like a dork. It's not happening.
If so, completely agreed. That was one of Tzu's massive fails, though they supplied same in quantity.
I am aware my complaining has taken longer than just signing up but I'm already registered and logged in here :P
The same people said that about Digg before Reddit took all their users.
1. Digg started sucking
2. Reddit offered a truly innovative feature that most people found useful, subreddits
Reddit is still great, and this doesn't offer any significant features that I'd consider important enough for most people to switch.
It'd certainly fix a lot of Reddit's issues with censorship (by making it so the subreddit owners act like independent forum owners). Or if it's truly decentralised rather than federated, by not having a single person or team doing the moderation in general. And there'd certainly be no possibility of the system losing CSS support...
It's very interesting what the first topics are. There is a #conservatism with 8 members already, but you can't make #liberalism, #communism or #leftists. "The_Donald" is "coming soon".
(Edit: I must have hit a bug because I tried with a few names and my attempts just didn't do anything, but someone else did it immediately).
I wonder if this is like Gab, an attempt to make a more single-issue-politics-friendly variant of a popular site.
Reddit has an issue with lightweight throwaway comments already. Broad mostly-right comments killing actual discussion.
Wouldn't adding real-time on top of that add up to the hell of teamspeak in games with a bunch of kids?
It could go like IRC... But if you're saying you're like Reddit, I don't see how it wouldn't devolve into pettyness.
Also, why choose a domain so close to voat.co for a reddit alternative? Whether you're a fan/user of voat.co or not, i can see them being easily confused or mistaken as related projects. They could have at least gone with another tld.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7861985
[1]: http://drum.jupo.org
Edit: created #agile was thinking of trying to create a agile focused HN and 1 minute later this came along :-). Anyway if this doesn't work out; DM me if you are interested in starting something like a agile focused HN. Looking a bit more fore the business / change management side of things instead of the SE side of things.
Or if this already exists please point me to it :-)
I feel like more of these websites may be able to succeed (not sure Reddit has a network effect that could prevent another site from coming up), but I'm not sure how necessary it is.
The combined this category based UX with recommendation algorithms and social indicators. Worked well. But I believe they had trouble monetizing it or potentially growing it to scale.
Anyway this is a site by actual guys that used to work at Reddit so you'd expect them to be pretty smart business orientated chaps right? Well they launch, pull a few strings and get to the the first page on HN ... then they immediately blunder by making you login to browse! Thankfully I was bored enough to do so and as expected it's just a barren 'seed user' populated scaled down version of reddit.
The biggest USP is real time and there's actually only me on there right now. Last story was posted 35 mins ago. I logged in not expecting my favorite reddits to be there, but for an exciting proof of concept. If I was in charge of this company, me and my entire team including the tea lady would be logged into at least 5 different accounts and we'd be creating a frenzy of real time activity so that AT LEAST we give people an glimpse of what we're trying to create.
Poorly executed - you'd really expect more from people with the resources to self finance a start up like this, the connections to drive users to the app and the experience of working for a top notch start up like Reddit for a number of years.
These aren't ex-reddit employees. The linked article calling them "former Redditors" is pretty misleading, I think it was just trying to say that they used to be users of the site.
But so far the reddit tile would never go away from the speed dial.
<citation needed>
I have no real horse in the race and am generally sceptical about reddit alternatives as the refuge of whoever gets banned on reddit, but hey, feel free to shit over other people's efforts!
* They have a well funded + experienced team
* They are currently featured on the front page of HN
* The number #1 USP of their site is "Real Time".
So after forcing me to login to check out what it actually is, I find that there's actually no real time content. It's dead.
My insight is clear even if it is drenched in negativity. These guys should be doing better, even if they had no resources whatsoever, for the next 24h, the CEO, his girlfriend, their dog, the grandmother and every other person they know should be logged in creating the illusion of users.
I think even Paul Graham/YC advocates this method, it's how Reddit got started - so beggars belief that these chaps don't think they need to go to those lengths :/
Edit: To add my own - Doesn't work without Javascript, information density of both content and comments is far too low, and, flatly, Why? What benefit does it offer over Reddit? What role does it fill that Reddit isn't presently filling? Because for me, things that Reddit does terribly includes iffy moderation, witty snark being upvoted more than sensible comments, and their abysmal search. HN, for instance, is great with all of these things, so I'm on here a lot.
Or are they going to take on a complete hands-off approach?
Make it useful for people in Venezuela.
It is the only reason I would use it over Reddit.
Requests to the API are returned with a 403 code.
Reddit management prefers for their website to only showcase non-controversial content in order to attract advertisers. Which is their right, but I'm rooting for the disruptive upcomer that will kill that website like Reddit originally did to Digg back when Reddit was cool and stood for something.
- Look at this cute dog (drinking a bottle of Coca-Cola)
- I broke my leg this morning (while holding this can of Pepsi)
- Thread that shouldn't be on the frontpage (and the top comment is: "I bet he bought it at Walmart")
- Cool drone video (literally filming an ad)
- Photo of CharmingGuyMcAbs and/or CharmingGirlMcBoobs (Positive Reinforcement)
> I'm rooting for the disruptive upcomer
Doesn't look anything like Digg/MySpace days unless they somehow find a way to kill the "smaller" communities. Even the outbound click thing (or the new frontpage) didn't made any real impact from what I can tell.
But who knows, maybe you're right and someone comes up with a killer feature. Or an UI that doesn't suck so bad that you need a mandatory browser extension (that fries your CPU).
If you have to have a cancer, better to know where it is and keep tabs on it that risk spreading it out.
It's almost like there's a bunch of gaslighting that makes it okay, regardless of opinion, to modify voting algorithms to promote certain political opinions.
FYI this is the behavior the brown shirts exhibited. We're not so far from those times again.
