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:
As a disclaimer, this is truly me just launching today, there's only 4 posts currently.
Great job launching something!
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.
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).
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...
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
I've still got plenty of work to do on the UX of the site!
Backend is in go.
Source is here: https://github.com/jjcm/nonio
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'}
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.
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.
Sounds like a recipe for disaster. At least it should be in a sub-path (/post/?), and probably include some sort of unique id.
# 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...
Aiming to have mobile css in a couple weeks time. Apologies for the poor experience!
Not sure the community is welcoming or even interested in the potential growth, tbh. But it exists.
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.
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!
Is this a real project or another collect-HN-users-IP-addresses scheme?
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.
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...
> 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.
Show HN: FlingUp, a Reddit-like platform Ive been building for the last 2 years (https://flingup.com)
I do bug bounty in my spare time so this was an interesting live find.
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
For anyone not aware, read about r/blind here: https://twitter.com/rumster/status/1668004686610178048
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.
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.
Furthermore, each comment under a post can earn by being upvoted.
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