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Raddit: An open source alternative to Reddit

302 points| funspectre | 8 years ago |raddit.me | reply

254 comments

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[+] tray5|8 years ago|reply
Eh it's not really a general purpose reddit clone, it was written by users of /r/anarchism as an alternative platform for discussion because they lost faith in the reddit administration. You can see this in the design of the site, with a larger focus on democratic decision making and an intolerance for any bigoted or racist communities. If voat was the alt-right's reddit alternative then raddit is the lefts.
[+] wallace_f|8 years ago|reply
It is worth noting that voat didnt start out as particularly alt right, it's just that's now probably the majority of what is left.

The site is totally committed to free speech, and even the Dark Web will allow paedophiles, hit men, and every type of criminal, but collaborated to push off an alt right page. In other words, it doesn't appear to be any agenda of Voat, it's just a fact that any site which allows free speech is where those people will end up.

[+] blackguardx|8 years ago|reply
Are anarchists considererd left wing? Anarchists and especially anarcho-capitalists have a lot of overlap with libertarians. If you talk to a serious anarchist, they sound like they are against big government and other authority structures. The far left is suppsed to be communist, which seems the opposite of anarchy.
[+] Aeolun|8 years ago|reply
I don't know. It looks pretty general purpose to me. A clone of Reddit is almost by definition general purpose.
[+] monokrome|8 years ago|reply
I wonder if these people are aware that they didn't need to write a Reddit clone?

Why would you write a Reddit clone in PHP when Reddit itself is a perfectly fine open source Python project? Is their license not permissive enough?

https://github.com/reddit/reddit

[+] pherq|8 years ago|reply
The authors of Raddit tried that, but found that actually running Reddit's software, especially on low-end hardware for a smaller community, was a pain in the arse and decided it'd be easier to build their own that fit their purposes.
[+] Can_Not|8 years ago|reply
If they wanted to use Python, they probably would have forked it. Not everyone thinks python is good.
[+] andypants|8 years ago|reply
That's not the complete source code. Some parts are kept secret such as the voting algorithm.
[+] creatonez|8 years ago|reply
Reddit is not released under a free software license.
[+] akras14|8 years ago|reply
I was wondering the same thing
[+] CM30|8 years ago|reply
I've said it in the last post about this site, but I'll say it again here regardless.

This site makes the same mistakes as a lot of other 'alternative' social networks or systems, in that it offers nothing for people who aren't interested in talking about politics or the problems on the original site.

It's entirely a hard left wing community laser focused on discussing American politics. There's virtually no discussion of more everyday topics there (like games, TV, movies, music, sports, etc), especially not in a way that doesn't cram politics into everything.

So people who don't care about political discussions or agree with your political views won't join this. Because there's nothing there that Reddit or independent forums on their favourite subjects don't do much better.

[+] arkh|8 years ago|reply
This.

An alternative to reddit would let you make dossiers: related news stories a little like some subreddit megathread do for huge news. So you could follow a developing story for multiple months or years. Have links to aggregate articles by authors, news site, area or protagonists.

A simple example of use: check r/science about old health breakthrough on mice and see if it fizzled or not or how advanced the human trials are.

[+] chasing|8 years ago|reply
You know why Reddit and Twitter became some toxic environments? Because they're not designed for healthy community development. And neither is this. It's a mindless clone and it already looks like it's turning toxic.
[+] jnbiche|8 years ago|reply
> Because they're not designed for healthy community development.

How so? Would you expand on this? With Twitter, I agree. But how is Reddit not designed for healthy communities? (I agree that they are not always healthy)

[+] dejawu|8 years ago|reply
Not rhetorical - how does one design a community for healthy development? I've messed with forum design before and I'm curious how the layout and format influence behavior.
[+] mercurial|8 years ago|reply
Reddit is as "toxic" as the Internet as large, considering that it's made up of very disparate communities.
[+] edgartaor|8 years ago|reply
How do you design website to be a healthy community? I can't think any website/social network with that characteristic, no without moderators.
[+] VeejayRampay|8 years ago|reply
It's not a "design" issue. Just put enough people together and anything becomes toxic eventually.
[+] eighthnate|8 years ago|reply
> You know why Reddit and Twitter became some toxic environments?

When were they toxic environments? Reddit and Twitter are what you make of it.

Are you saying it's toxic because people are able to express opinion that you disagree with?

[+] pamqzl|8 years ago|reply
If there's one neologism I'd love to get rid of, it's the use of "toxic" to describe speech that you dislike. It's all over this thread.

Think about what the metaphor of "toxicity" does for speech. By all means, you can find speech to be disagreeable, or annoying, or factually or morally wrong. I read all sorts of things that I disagree with, and some that I find actively annoying. But the metaphor of "toxicity" implies something more -- that these ideas are actually dangerous, and some kind of public health hazard. If something is "toxic" then you don't just dislike it, you need to actively protect yourself from being contaminated with it, and it activates your disgust reflexes. After all, better to be safe than sorry when it comes to toxins, right?

Basically, the idea that ideas can be "toxic" seems to be a roundabout way of inviting censors to come in and save us all from the danger of having to read things that we don't like.

Let's ditch the word "toxic" for things that aren't actually harmful chemicals, and learn to deal with the fact that things we don't like on the internet are best dealt with by not reading them.

[+] WalterBright|8 years ago|reply
With that name so close to Reddit, I expect you'll get a trademark infringement notice shortly.
[+] vincentriemer|8 years ago|reply
Could probably fall under trade dress infringement too.
[+] camel_Snake|8 years ago|reply
Maybe, but I think that would be a bad move at this point. Why give them the free PR?
[+] shitlord|8 years ago|reply
It didn't take long before your site was taken over by political extremists
[+] tray5|8 years ago|reply
It was built by anarchists to be an explicitly anti-capitalist community
[+] _red|8 years ago|reply
Raddit is a terrible name....

Lets name our product confusingly similar to the original, even though we claim the original is terribly flawed: "Don't eat at Joeys, most of the food contains poisons, eat at Joeez!"

[+] r3vo|8 years ago|reply
Why is it so difficult for a forum to accommodate different political views? Is this a problem of human nature?

The idea of a uncensored reddit it a good one, but the first thing I see going to the page is an administrator complaining that they apparently cannot effectively ban "nazis".

https://raddit.me/f/lobby/6159/we-re-being-brigaded-by-nazis...

From the comments I've read here, it definitely seems as though the site has the typical heavy handed administration banning opinions it disagrees with.

Why can't any of these sites just allow people of all political ideologies to post? 4Chan is the only site I can think of which has never had censorship of this sort. Why is this such a difficult thing to accomplish?

[+] blairanderson|8 years ago|reply
Hey mods can we rename this to "an alternative to reddit" Given the link has nothing to do with hacking or how the site was created or a link to the source
[+] King-Aaron|8 years ago|reply
> Given the link has nothing to do with hacking or how the site was created

Let me draw your attention to:

- Wind Energy Is One of the Cheapest, and It's Getting Cheaper (scientificamerican.com)

- Fish are eating lots of plastic (washingtonpost.com)

- A ten-day camel trek through the Australian outback (themonthly.com.au)

- A Japanese Pen Maker Anticipated the Fountain-Pen Renaissance (bloomberg.com)

And thus discard your issue as not relevant

[+] chungy|8 years ago|reply
There is a link to the source on GitLab in the footer, but indeed that is not the focus of the homepage.
[+] smortaz|8 years ago|reply
Uhhh... there's already a radd.it which is a nice viewer for reddit videos. people might get confused (or are these related?)

update: radd.it just shutdown. hmmm...

[+] PrimHelios|8 years ago|reply
I like the idea, but the admins are... troubling.

I appreciate that they're banning nazis, brigaders, and people spamming bigotry and gore, but they're straight up wishing violence on these people. It's one thing to think "Wow, you're a dick and I hope you die" and another to openly admit it and let it influence your decisions.

Thanks, but no thanks.

[+] JosephLark|8 years ago|reply
Personally, I would love to see something like Lobsters [0] made general purpose. It's very HN like, but I love the ability to tags posts with multiple tags so that a single topic of conversation can belong to multiple subreddit-like communities. I've always wished that HN would co-opt that tagging. It seems like the best of both worlds (general front page and targeted communities) and naturally aides discoverability of interesting communities.

[0] https://lobste.rs/

[+] seany|8 years ago|reply
Was hoping this was going to be a better performing clone of voat, not an even more restrictive platform.
[+] akras14|8 years ago|reply
> bigotry - intolerance toward those who hold different opinions from oneself.
[+] fourstar|8 years ago|reply
I really think the future is a decentralized model that rewards its users for content creation.

https://steemit.com is what I believe will replace reddit.

[+] staticelf|8 years ago|reply
There is already an open source reddit clone created from the same reasons https://voat.co and it's far superior.
[+] jhasse|8 years ago|reply
I like Raddit's design more, also Symfony over .NET.