Comment by trcollinson | Hacker News Reader

Comment by trcollinson | Hacker News Reader

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I have heard a lot of people here and in reddit say, "well we should just make something better and leave!" Maybe a lot of that talk is just anger or discontent coming out right now. The community is up in arms. The moderators are frustrated at both corporate reddit and the website/tools available to them. Users are mortified. But in all seriousness, I want to explore the question, why don't we? What is stopping us from replacing it?

-- Technical challenges? No that doesn't seem right. Many of us build and scale applications far larger than this. The tools and technology are there.

-- Building a community is hard? This seems more in line with reality. Building another community like this is high risk and low reward maybe?

-- Sites like this aren't the solution any more? This could be it. But if this isn't the solution, what is?

I haven't thought of all possibilities. But really, why not just replace it?

*edit: fixed typos, typing on phones is hard.

I think the biggest issue is that any general discussion site which simply clones reddit's conversation model (e.g., voat) might do better at transparency and free speech and community relations and so on, but is still probably doomed to end up with the same middlebrow discourse and groupthink that exists on reddit.

Does there exist good, empirical research on how different discussion models (linear vs. trees of comments, up/down-voting systems, etc.) affect quality of discourse, for some definition of quality?

>Many of us build and scale applications far larger than this.

In general you do so with a huge corporate budget.

>Building another community like this is high risk and low reward maybe?

That's the answer.

You only have a few ways to monetize the product. Direct advertising; banner ads. The ad market is going to crap though, everyone has them, large numbers of users block them, and payments are very low. Direct payments for features. Reddit has 'Gold' as a means to get premium features and help pay for the site. The other way that has been bandied about, but with no direct evidence that it occurs is indirect advertising. For example a movie star paying for an AMA to advertize for their new film.

Even then those things only work if you can get the people to come to your site in the first place. It's highly likely a large number of social sites have a good deal of vice in their founding. People come to the site looking for porn or other somewhat socially unacceptable topics, but end up staying for the other parts of the community. As the site grows you run in to the inevitable 'great purge' which can cause serious issues.

> But really, why not just replace it?

It costs money to run. Serious money if you're going to have employees. And, as voat have discovered, if you're going to become the favoured destination of the assorted gators, racists, pedo^h^h^h^hebeophiles, woman-haters, frozen peachers, and assorted bottom-of-the-barrel types that have been looking for reddit alternatives in the last few months, you may find it quite difficult to keep your hosting arrangements even if you can pay for them.

Hey, modern Australia was founded from a colony of convicts, too.

Right, anyone who disagrees with Reddit's management decisions is deserving of hyperbolic abuse.

It's refreshing to see someone agree that calling a person part of voat's core constituency would constitute hyperbolic abuse.

People want/need x, where x : forum threads :: IRC : chat.

That was Usenet. How many people even remember when there was real discussion and community on Usenet?

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