zlacker

>>robbie+(OP)
I have a story to tell, about the demise of one of the largest internet forums in my language.

About ten years ago, when smartphones just started appearing, the forum did not have a mobile version, and there are various 3rd party clients on the App Store or Android Market.

Later on, one of the largest 3rd party client was blocked, because of they hammering the forum's servers too hard,. Or something about caching and stealing ad revenue.

Then a couple years later, in 2017, the 3rd party client's devs launched its own forum reusing the client's name. It exploded in popularity and quickly took over as the most popular message board among the youth.

The old forum now has a sort of boomer or mentally ill stigma to it.

I hope to see Apollo go down this route.

Oh, and I think both forums in the story did not monetize as hard as reddit going to paid awards and memberships.

One more thought: Keep the Apollo UI or whatever thing the users are most familiar with. Most of them do not care if it is fediverse or open source or backed by web-scale k8s, they only want it to just work (tm) good enough to post things on it. Eat the lunch you prepared yourself.

>>gaudat+XX
This is such a good idea even without Reddit's monetization and potentially blocking NSFW content. To me it seems obvious. It's also something that's actually likely to succeed and within the community's control, unlike getting Reddit to change their stance. Like, there's nothing stopping this from developing right now.

- "There won't be as many people." That's ok, probably even a good thing. 1.5-2.5 million users are more than enough, especially considering most of them are power users. I believe HN has around 1.5-2.5 million and the content here is way better than Reddit.

- "Making a social network is hard." Yes, but it's not too hard. Scaling is hard, but we're not scaling to Reddit's size (100+ million); and Mastodon has issues with scaling, but that's because their protocol is super-redundant in an effort to be decentralized (and apparently also kind of sucks). HN runs on 2 servers and uses a LISP dialect (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28478379); even though HN is text-only and Apollo would have images or videos, I'm 100% certain there are enough dedicated Reddit users who can make this a reality.

- Also be aware that Reddit's community is different than Facebook, Twitter, YouTube; they're a lot more tech-savvy, a lot more anonymous, favor NSFW a lot more, and a lot more anti-corporate. Especially the moderators, who honestly control most of the community (though it's usually a bad thing). We're going to need those moderators to prevent the Apollo social network from becoming the next 4chan (because, hopefully you understand, that's a bad thing)

There's absolutely going to be an exodus if Reddit does anything non-negligible, the only reason Reddit is even considering moving ahead with these changes is because they don't care.

>>armcha+i91
I don’t do 4chan, but I know people IRL who do. They seem to think it’s pretty good.

Is there a chance it’s getting better?

>>pyuser+Hy1
4chan will never "get better" because if that happens it'll cease to be 4chan as we know it. /b/ has always been an open pit sewer that the occasional nugget of gold flows through. /trv/ is where I like to hang out, but /pol/ can't help itself and likes to crap-post in there on the regular. /gif/ and it's blue board, "safe for work," version /wsg/ are fun to browse, but the 4chanX extension and some filters are needed to hide a lot of the trolling and truly awful stuff while browsing.

>>yosham+VI1
Are these things like subreddits?

>>pyuser+x83
Yes. On 4chan they're called boards. Some boards are focused on particular content. Other boards are focused on the type of media posted.

/b/ = random /trv/ = travel /pol/ = politically incorrect /gif/ = .gif and .webm files /wsg/ = the work safe version of /gif/ (its toned down but still not actually safe for work)