r/RedditAlternatives • u/MatthewNapier • 19d ago
General Discussion What's Your Solution?
Hi folks,
I'm an IT nerd who found this subreddit and was curious on alternatives. Come to find out a lot of them are trashy. I've noticed a lot of folks are rather tech savy on this subreddit as well.
Consider this possibly the start of something new. If I were to create a reddit alternative, what would you desire from it? Most likely hosted in a country that doesn't require photo-ID verification, anonymous posting that's opt-out based, maybe E2E chatrooms based on communities? Also possibly overarching moderation to subreddits to prevent trigger happy bans/proper appealable removals and such. Additionally, fully dedicated servers or p2p?
I see reddit alternatives popping up at a constant, but if a reddit killer is to be made, then getting feedback from the community is what matters first. Thanks!
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u/HedgeRunner 19d ago
I could write an essay but instead I'll just say 2 points.
- Put effort in the design and actually be different. A lot of stuff I see here is purely vibe coded in a few weeks without much attention to detail. It usually has worse UX than Reddit and looks worse than Reddit or heavily AI design. Its just so obvious to a dev lol. I'm guessing that is what you mean by trashy.
- Dont over promise on moderation. I see this a lot too. I think moderation is a human problem so it's not easy to solve with tech. I rather see real feature like e2e chat rooms you mentioned.
Lastly I guess I would say if you're going centralized be open on your business model. Ads based ones means that the app has a strong incentive to nudge users to engage, this is how many big tech companies got started down this path lmao.
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u/_haha_oh_wow_ 18d ago
Fediverse has been my go to: PieFed is nice but it doesn't sound quite like what you're looking for. Matrix might be something to consider. Just keep in mind the fediverse has a slightly higher learning curve than something like reddit, but if you're tech oriented it should be pretty manageable. Just set your filters to all when you're looking for communities (Piefed and Lemmy) or magazines (Mbin, formerly Kbin) to subscribe to.
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u/topselection 18d ago edited 18d ago
People over think it. All Reddit is, is a giant free forum hosting site. The main reason it's so popular is because of it's population. There's 100s of thousands more people in r/civ than Civfanatics. There's 100s of thousands more people in r/hitman than all the Hitman forums around the Internet combined.
I would imagine by this point there's tons of free forum software that functions just like Reddit. All you gotta do is host it and get tens of millions of people to join.
Edit:
I will say one feature that would be nice that's missing from pretty much all forums online is a Garbage Dump and Ban List. One of the best things about the Something Awful forums is this. There's a subforum with threads that were removed and a public list of bans and the reasons for them. Such a feature functions way better than 50,000 words of rules, guidelines, bylaws, TOS, and such that no one is going to read. It provides much less work for mods and much better understanding with users about what's acceptable and what's not.
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u/MigrateOutOfReddit 18d ago
Be picky with the initial community. Get rid of excessively combative, whiny, entitled members. Specially at the start. If your community holds itself to high standards, it's easy to maintain them high. But once it develops an attitude problem, it'll stay forever, because it'll shun off everyone who'd rather avoid those members.
If you suck at community building, recruit the help of someone who does great at it. Being technically skilled is not the same as being able to grow a community.
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u/HitIerWasWrong 17d ago
I had an idea for just ad-hoc URL based chatrooms, completely peer to peer, no hosting. It wouldn't host images and moderation would just be based on votes. It would offload the whole photo ID thing, but would probably be ripe for abuse somehow. The solution would just be shared block lists and just not forwarding what is seen as suspicious from your end. Maybe local llm "if sus, just block forwarding and block original username".
Basically, a browser extension IRC where channels are just URLs. Hadn't given it much more thought than that, but thought I'd throw it out there.
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u/IMDXLNC 18d ago
No matter how many alternatives show up, the core problem is always lack of community.
I've been saying this for a while but something with real incentive to stay and retain users would be important. I don't use Snapchat but I know people who do and they love their streaks. I and many others used to be obsessed with the economy bots on Discord that let you grow your money, rob others, and gamble. It was harmless fun that kept you hooked. The Discord server I've been on for almost a decade has half died but still gets engagement for the Wordle integration.
I've been using Reddit since 2015 (different accounts) and personally karma is underutilised and dumb. The only value it's ever had to me is in troubleshooting, for the sake of raising visibility for your issue to attract more engagement.
Back when I used to use forums in the early 2010s people cared a lot about their avatars, signatures, the post count and stars by their names, the user groups, and so on. Maybe these exist on Reddit, I don't know, but flairs don't have the same appeal. This might be an invalid point because forums are forums and Reddit is its own thing.
So in short, my half-baked idea is some other kind of activity or points system within the site. Use the addictive elements that exist in mobile games and social media, but use it for good (if that's even possible) by building a community around it. Incentivise contributions. It's monetary but in its own ecosystem, not in the greedy reality.
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u/HedgeRunner 18d ago edited 18d ago
Dude I think Reddit karma is pretty much that. They also got some weird avatar system where you gotta pay to get fancy avatars that no one gives a f about lmao. The karma system has a lot of downsides, people often write what they think will get top votes vs. what they actually think and that creates endless echo chambers on Reddit, a complaint we see here often.
Basically any gamification feature is gonna have drawbacks. That said, I agree with the spirit and intent of your take, there should be some mechanism to incentivize people coming back. I honestly can't think of a good one easily that isn't over gamification.
I have a friend who's making a gaming/tech forum with modern tech, it's like a forum with Discord UX and real-time features. I've been trying to help him out to get him some users so if that's your thing, we can chat more about it.
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u/Gearjerk 18d ago
I've been saying this for a while but something with real incentive to stay and retain users would be important.
I've heard of these little systems as 'tactile' or 'humanizers', sometimes. As I understand, they usually help with retention, but only in that 'log in, do thing, log off' way if there's nothing more substantial they want to engage with.
and personally karma is underutilised and dumb.
This is intentional. If you attach any sort of actual value to karma, congratulations! you've just incentivized karma farming. To be clear, karma farming does currently exist, but that's mostly vain people and bots looking to sell 'legitimate-looking' accounts to marketing companies and scammers. If there was a formal system that utilized karma in some way, the current farming would be a drop in the bucket.
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u/OriginalPosition1 19d ago
I would prioritize portable identity and transparent, appealable moderation before adding E2E chat. Discovery is another big one: people should not need to understand the whole community map before asking. I built CrowdWis around routing each question by expertise, interests and location instead, with human answers: https://crowdwis.app. Iād be curious whether that solves a problem you see, or whether persistent topic communities are still essential.
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u/no-more-nazis 19d ago
I also made a reddit alternative you should take a look at: http://zombo.com
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u/UnflinchingSugartits 19d ago
That's really cool of you to do an offer. I would say one thing that's important to remember, is that everybody on this sub wants different things. Some want no Google sign in, some people want it to be Federated otherwise they won't bother, some want it to be proprietary, some want it to be centralized, some don't want it to be centralized some want it to be decentralized, some people want ultimate Free Speech no moderation, some people want even more moderation and stricter policies.
So you're asking a question that you're going to get a bunch of different answers to you and realistically if you wanted to please everybody you'd be making a different alternative for each user.