Spezless – A Reddit clone without u/Spez

[jrflowers]

I love the idea that recreating Reddit is a job that anybody could do with $10-20 mil to throw at engineering, as if the reason for its success is that it’s some sort of software marvel and not the fact that it’s the website with the people on it.

There are so many people speedrunning Field of Dreams right now.

[switz]

I'm blown away that this is being upvoted. The lack of effort and critical thought here is appalling.

[predictabl3]

Beyond obvious criticisms that others have pointed out, I'm not signing up for any platform that's not federated, idc if I'm on a site with 3 other users. I am done with rugpulls.

[number6]

As you are mentioning rugpulls, all this clones are missing a key ingredient: Blockchain!

Upvotes should be bound to a token. Companies or you can buy upvotes for promotion, or use your own stash that you earned in creating good comments.

I am bit sad that no one is doing this. Would be the perfect storm if the Blockchain days weren't over...

[printvoid]

You need more than 15000 signups just for building a counter. By that logic you are not going to get reddit with all the functionalities for 1M signups. lol

[kjeksfjes]

I'd say your logic is a bit flawed if you think that the logic for what to do when reaching 15K signups needs to be identical to the logic for what to do when reaching 1M signups. The reasoning for each goal can be totally different.

That said, personally I'm not going to use a site branded around the name spez.

[memefrog]

I agree. This is absurd. A reddit clone is a few hours work. The technology is not the difficult part, and they haven't even done it?

Anyway the idea as a whole is stupid, because the problem with reddit is not its CEO but its entire design. It was an interesting idea, but it has failed. People are upset because third party mobile apps will be gone, but the site as a whole was far better before the influx of phoneposters anyway! Phoneposting is fundamentally incompatible with text beyond a couple of sentences. Phoneposters want - and get - short, easily consumed memes, photos, and videos.e They post short, easily consumed, low-value comments. Phoneposters have turned reddit from "the front page of the internet" into a site dominated by screenshots of tweets.

[carrolldunham]

Paying "power users" is a heinous idea. The reddit karma farmers posting fake stories and known-approved thoughts are bad as it is. Imagine if you had the pull of actual money for crafting on-message bullshit you know a community will eat up. All genuine contributions that are purely from passion go out the window

[TobyTheDog123]

Yeah that 48 hour limit really was a misstep.

There were a handful of times today I wanted to research something and hit the private wall, surprising me each time.

It showed me that if this protest was indefinite, it could have a real impact on the platform. Yet, on Wednesday all will be back to normal.

I'm also very skeptical of something like this - it's the Twitter effect: people will complain all they like, but at the end of the day - Twitter and Reddit are where people are and will remain. As for the Digg comparison, tolerance for corporate greed in the services we use has skyrocketed in the past 13 years, so I dont think it's an apt comparison.

[memefrog]

How many people left Digg for Reddit all those years ago? If the same number left Reddit today, nobody would even notice. Digg was a very niche website. So was Reddit. The migration was large only relative to their then-tiny populations.

You could build a platform the size of early Reddit from people unhappy with these changes. You could probably build a platform 10x the size of early Reddit. Very likely larger than HN, certainly bigger than Lobste.rs or Tildes. But you aren't going to do to Reddit what Reddit did to Digg.

[laserbeam]

So, not only this promotes itself to be a copy of Reddit, but also trashes the CEO in the name of the clone. Now don't get me wrong, I support the protest and an alternative to reddit. However, the way this is framed sounds like a one way street to a losing lawsuit. At least a very expensive one.

[alpaca128]

You're making this sound a lot more heinous than it is. The name of the site just implies it doesn't involve Spez, and it's just a nickname. There's a large difference between "spezless" and something like "huffmansucks".

[prox]

Love to see this work. In good reddit fashion I will use a throwaway to sign up.

[Mengkudulangsat]

90% of revenues go to moderators and power users.... and where exactly are these revenues coming from?

So far, all these alternatives I'm reading about can't convincingly explain how they plan to pay for themselves.

[0x0203]

Honest question: roughly how much would running a link-aggregator website like (early) reddit actually cost, assuming text only user-submissions (links/comments), 50 million daily users, and an uptime similar to reddit? If one magically had the users and wasn't interested in personal profit, how cheaply could it be done effectively?

[Hasu]

> So far, all these alternatives I'm reading about can't convincingly explain how they plan to pay for themselves.

For most of its existence, Reddit hasn't been able to convincingly explain how it can pay for itself, and it still can't. The company currently isn't and I don't think has ever been profitable.

[throwawaylala1]

looks like they're crypto guys

so there's that

[taesu]

Not a fan of these - prove my idea will sell - type of websites.. theres a dozen websites ahead of this ten minute spent clever domained website.

[joot82]

Isn't the base version of reddit, without the crappy UI and image hosting, already open sourced? Just go from there. Probably easier to install than building a counter for your email signups.

https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit

[alpaca128]

> 90% of revenue will go to moderators & power users

Congrats, you now have a community of GPT-driven karma farming bots.

[eternalyxiii]

Idea sparked by Shaan Puri (https://twitter.com/ShaanVP/status/1668323286936338432?s=20)

[gravypod]

I think this is a pretty interesting idea. It would be great if the creator (seems to be "benmlevy"?) was in the comment thread here. There's a lot of interesting questions that come to mind. I think that nonprofit software companies could do a lot of good.

[voramok]

Somebody is way ahead of you with the idea of a non-profit Reddit

https://flingup.com/

[prox]

Doesn’t allow pornography. Whatever you think, that’s a lot of Reddit it’s not covering in such a case.

[CodinM]

You've been swimming in the VC world too much when you're under the impression that building a Reddit clone is a "$10M-$20M" sized task.

[senectus1]

Lost me at u/Spez is a good dude.

his behavior's and words say otherwise.

also the comment earlier : >There are so many people speedrunning Field of Dreams right now.

So true.

[8note]

Why not use the fediverse code? If you don't have to build stuff, why build stuff?

[goykasi]

Why use the fediverse code? If you don't need the complexity, why include it?