Show HN: Discuit – A Reddit alternative with a clean UI and a sensible vision
discuit.netHi HN, this is a platform (Discuit, pronounced "diskette") I've been working on for about two years. I initially built it for a niche demographic (my native country). But now with Reddit going dark and people looking for a new place to migrate to, I'm doing a quick launch today.
A few quick things:
1. I don't believe federated platforms will ever become mainstream. They have a whole host of problems, not the least of which is that they're too complicated for most people to use. This platform is not, therefore, federated.
2. I don't know what the best way of monetizing a thing like this is. I see only two options: the Wikipedia model of running on donations, or being advertising supported (along with a paid ad-free tier). The Wikipedia model works quite well for small-scale and bandwidth light projects, but I don't think a large social media platform can ever be funded that way.
3. Whichever option of monetization I take (if this takes off, that is) what I can say with certainty is that this will not go down the path of previous platforms. I don't believe the SV grow-fast model has worked very well for the end users. I have no interest in chasing growth for its own sake, or in chasing valuations, or in capturing as much attention from the users as possible. On this platform, therefore, there never will be any dark UI patterns. Avoiding enshittification is a primary goal of mine.
4. My vision for this platform, and for social media in general, is about giving users agency; the freedom to choose their social experience to their liking. What this would mean in practice are things like: ability to customize the UI; ability to filter content as one wants; ability to tweak recommendation algorithms; ability to turn on and off things like infinite scroll and suggested posts; and so on. I hate how all the current platforms want to tightly control my experience for me.
I go into all this in a bit more detail in my introductory blog post: https://discuit.substack.com/p/introducing-discuit
I know many HN users hate the New Reddit layout, which is what I've based this site on, but don't be bothered by it too much, I will be adding a much more compact layout sometime later. A lot the post above boils down to "Trust me bro." As early users of a new website, what assurances can be put in place to help us believe the motives here? As the site grows, and costs exponentially more, your mindset and desires are sure to change. One of the big issues I see with Reddit right now, is that we the community never "owned" the data. Now that the site owner's motives changed, we're stuck in this weird state where the community made the site what it is today, and now the owner is taking it back to monetize it for his own gain. If the community is required to help moderate, grow, and maintain an organized dataset, it would be ideal if somehow the community shares ownership or has assurances it remains faithful to the statements above we are buying into. > A lot the post above boils down to "Trust me bro." As early users of a new website, what assurances can be put in place to help us believe the motives here? As the site grows, and costs exponentially more, your mindset and desires are sure to change. Looking at this from your perspective, you have a really good point here. And I don't know exactly what to say to you except that, at the end of the day, with anything with network effects, you have to trust someone. This even applies to the fediverse; you have to trust the admins. Perhaps the most that someone can do here is to proclaim their values loudly, so that they are, at the very least, putting their reputation on the line. If you have any ideas what I could do here, I'd love to hear. Seriously. I don’t think there is anything that you can do. The only reason people switch from old communities to new ones is because of a vastly better UI for your average user. See the switch from Usenet to forums to Stack Overflow / Facebook or w/e. In the case of Digg to reddit, Digg’s UI got worse. The only thing anyone can do is make a new app/website with vastly better UI and then live through your values accordingly. Most of your blog post is about moderation/monetization and that’s important, but to be honest, it doesn’t speak directly to your average user. With the classic early 2000s model of PHPBB at least you only trust each “sub” individually and they don’t have enough power or resources to fuck you up. That is why say, random example: https://www.housepricecrash.co.uk/forum/index.php has not introduced all the reddit shit despite being just as old. If it were a sub or on your alternative it would be subject to all that. What would be good is a modern enough Reddit clone, open source, that you can selfhost once per subreddit and one or more places that will host that (like you can get wordpress hosting from 1000 places). Maybe have some free ones that run ads but still run the same basic software and do it free. What you will have is some localised issues but no one has the power to change everything and pull the rug on millions. > And I don't know exactly what to say to you except that, at the end of the day, with anything with network effects, you have to trust someone I don't trust anyone running my Matrix, Kbin, Mastodon, or email servers. Well, they're me, and I guess I trust me. (My family trusts me too, I suppose) "community shares ownership " How can this work practically or legally ? Any real world concrete ideas ? I am open to learning more. Yea but the tech for a truly decentralized site of this nature just isn't there yet, so what's the alternative? The world needs something like a web3 reddit. You know what's an interesting problem? Decentralizing moderation. HN does it sort of but the masses are really stupid and biased. Maybe an ML based personal moderator. Based off of comments you vote down or up. The problem isn't Clean UI. The problem isn't Sensible vision. The problem is getting enough users to make your community interesting. My humble two cents: I won't say that a clean ui is not part of the problem. Just in this very thread there's people despising Reddit's redesign. The HN hivemind and others like UIs with information crammed on every pixel (for some reason) so I guess if there were an alternative that offered some "information density" setting, that very thing can do much to attract users. About how to get said users. The 4 years I've been using Reddit and have seen the popular page, you're left with the sensation that much of it is just a giant aggregator of curated content from TikTok/Twitter/Instagram, in that order (and how almost everything is centered about the USA, but that's another story). I think people would engage to that new platform if there were a way to improve that process of bringing new and trending stuff from those other platforms (and Reddit itself) to a new alternative. Can you turn which moderators affect your feed on and off? if there's a moderator going on a senseless censorship spree, i'd like to just be able to unsubscribe to them so their changes don't affect me. Additionally if the moderators i am subscribed to aren't moderating enough of what i would like to avoid seeing, i'd like to be able to subscribe to more moderators to cover any gaps, without affecting the website for other people who might want to see the content i want to avoid. These would ensure that i can actually control my personal experience and have unparalleled agency on your website, without infringing on anyone else's experience. > Can you turn which moderators affect your feed on and off? Right now the site is very basic. But this is an interesting idea to explore, for sure. I'm also thinking of similar ideas. Examples: moderator logs for transparency; ability for members to vote moderators out, etc. > No porn. What is porn? > No politics. What is political? > No racism or any form of bigotry. What is bigoted? > A soft rule of: Don't be an asshole. What is an asshole? HN is more or less moderated on similar guidelines, and the discussions here are better than on most online spaces I've been a part of. I understand that one cannot draw a line to clearly separate categories from categories, but that doesn't mean that categories don't exist. As to the definition of these terms, I was only thinking of their "common sense" meaning. What is the common sense meaning of something being "political"? Do conversations around minimum wage count? What about current LGBT issues? What is the common sense meaning of bigotry? "No politics" is not a useful or viable rule. Any time that two humans interact with one another, even indirectly, there are politics involved. > HN is more or less moderated on similar guidelines There’s plenty of political discussion on this site (the top 5 includes about ongoing EU legislation). There’s obviously some pretty heavy-handed moderation of it (not that it is inappropriate for this particular community), but no general forum will get very far with such a rule. HN works partly because it is a single forum about technical topics. It excludes subjects that produce contentious discussion. Reddit is a general forum. There are subreddits that are moderated heavily and need to be, and those that are barely moderated. There are subreddits for porn and politics because people want those. Reddit replacement needs to support multiple communities and varying moderation. HN once tried a "no politics week". It was one of the bigger clusterfucks in the history of the site, and the experiment was quickly abandoned. What is common sense? Grey lines are hard (impossible?) to enforce. Not OP but this can be explained. Porn = Nude Pictures/audio/videos of human beings. People having sex of any type in the form of video/audio/images. Politics = Discussion of any political ideology. Libeal/Conservative/Country etc etc. I personally disagree with OP here but wanted to define it for you anyway. Bigoted = judging/not liking people purely based on where they come from, color of their skin, sexual orientation or religion. Asshole = someone who engages in bad faith with someone and/or calls them names. disagreeing != asshole. But if you add name calling, verbal abuse, direct threats to someone, I would call them as asshole. Thanks. This is what I mean, perhaps I should have explained better. I've now just dropped the "no politics" rule, because people seem to get the wrong idea. This is the crux of the issue. The owner/moderator/single person/relatively small group of people become the arbiters of truth on those questions and that is wrong. If these are the rules I'm pretty sure the site already lost the battle against reddit Yep. Just look at Tumblr. This just sounds like Reddit without solving any of the big problems of reddit. I know you said you don't believe in federation, but why not solve the problems with federation.. or if you think that's entirely the wrong approach, then figure out some other way of solving the issues that federation attempts to address. Those issues don't disappear just because it's your project. Wikipedia, although a non-profit, is not federated; it's a centralized platform. It doesn't seem to me that it's centralization that's necessarily the problem, although, I agree with you, it often is. So are you planning to register Discuit as a non-profit, and turn over control to a board of trustees with half of the members elected by the community? That's the example Wikimedia has set. "No adult content"
"No politics" No thanks! As a practical matter, is sex ed material adult content? Would discussion of LGBT rights (or people), or election results, or the site guidelines, or the Reddit protests be political? What about arranging IRL protests, union strikes, war zone evacuations? OP's statement of "Politics rots people's brains" is a very head-in-the-sand statement and ignores one of the truly good and powerful aspects of social media. Agreed! I would also argue that it's a deeply political statement. How come most of these new reddit clones choose a style that aligns more with "new reddit" than "old reddit"? Which I thought we disliked? Please use the full-width of the screen. I came here to ask if there's an "old.discuit.net" style. I never adopted new reddit and when I see it, I know I've been signed out. Old reddit is the only "clean" UI in my book. Is that why people like old Reddit? I never got what the allure was. Two Words. Data Density. Same with this website. Most people use new Reddit. But not most people looking for an alternative maybe. Good god that's nice. I don't even completely hate the layout. Very fast, would love to see the ability to add new categories. Meh, I disagree with point 1. Any platform that is not federated or at the minimum open source will go the same way as Twitter, Reddit, or Myspace. The idea of reddit is bigger than one site, it's a replacement for the internet forums. We don't need another platform lock in. I applaud the dev work, but this isn't going attract the tech crowd. Hard disagree on point 1. I mean, yeh, you'll maybe win a hardcore niche of nerds with federated services, but the usability / understandability of federation is absolutely awful, per my AskHN recently [0]. That's not to say it couldn't be improved with some good UI and maybe some thoughts about how to communicate it, but right now your average Reddit / Insta / Facebook user is gunna be running a mile. It's absolutely baffling. The thing is that federation is a non-user facing feature if you do it right. The whole point is that you don't need to care where a specific service is. Email, arguably the most successful federated app, exposes the servers as a disambiguation mechanism (which hakfoo do you want to message?) but that's not really that important when you're consuming content. I could see a "polished" Fediverse app that abstracted away the server concept-- you'd say "I want to read the $subject Lemmy community / $person Mastodon account" and it would aggregate and deduplicate data on multiple servers automagically for a rich feed. Maybe track the emergence or discontinuation of servers and refine the lists. Then, if you want to be particularly precise about which providers you're working with, you can go in and micro-manage the automatic selections. 100% on this. Maybe we're just too early - I'm still waiting for this kind of UI so I don't have to think too hard about providers or the weirdness of the whole thing. 1. Matrix is growing so fast that I can't take seriously people that dismiss federation. 2. Name me something that has outlived reddit and not gone through enshitification (it's a term, I'm not being crass). Name one single product or platform. 1. Yeh - but what sets Matrix aside is that you're abstracted away from the conceptual side of federation. As I said, this is about UI as much as anything else. Non nerds are used to "going to InstaFaceTubeDdit and seeing the stuff they want to read" - not having to wrangle with the conceptual stuff about instances, weird looking addresses and usernames, etc. 2. I mean, Wikipedia, but it's not the point. Yes, us tech people are maybe concerned about things being shit, lock-in, etc - but literally no-one else cares. So our best approach isn't to make something perfect from the tech point of view, but perfect enough that there is mass migration to it - because, as we all know, it ain't about the tech, it's about the momentum, content and growth. And in order to get these into a serious shape, we need migration. And to get migration we need slick, beautiful, easy to use UIs. Email is one of the most successful Internet applications of all time. HTTP is too. People forget that HTTP is the original fediverse. Yeah. I think it's funny that people talk about individual sites like hackernews as 'centralized' whereas I tend to think of the ecosystem of forum like sites as a decentralised mass. Now it would be nice if all the things associated with my identity followed me around between the various decentralised forums, if reputation were more easily assessed and transparently generated, and if all my discussions across the web were accessible to me from a single dashboard. Still, it surprises me when people say 'decentralised? it'll never take off' since I think it's a big part of why the internet was successful in the first place, and we still have the legacy of that in so much of what we do on the internet. People have been using postal services for centuries. With your phone you can call people in different countries, on different networks, using handsets made by different manufacturers. If anything, I would say that we started decentralised for good reason, the first generation of attempts to enclose the commons failed because they couldn't generate content as fast as the world. The second attempt was very successful, based on a large influx of money, and network effects but we're starting to see those start to fail for predictable reasons. The lifecycle of centralised services are tied to the lifecycle of corporations and the vagaries of shareholder interest. That will never result in services that can stand the test of time in a meaningful way. You can tell we're in the pendulum swing back now, because companies are fighting against volunteer labour (anyone who tries to make their systems work with other systems) to make things worse for their own customers. That sort of approach is absurd and not long term sustainable. "No politics" inevitably means "No politics the moderator/owner disagrees with." No federation, not interested. For those that don't think federation can take off, go look at Matrix stats and at how many governments are adopting Matrix at large scale. Points 1 & 2, together, are basically a dead-on-arrival style announcement. Would be fitting if it were intentionally ironic. The lede is buried anyway, no politics/porn/etc. Again, see #1. We have no reason to trust, the folks that say "no politics" are always political in favor of the status quo and don't understand the full implications of social networks. At all Edit: does OP's 8 month old comment talking about wealth redistribution from tech billionaires being tantamount to "Soviet Russia" count as political? Etc etc etc. > The Wikipedia model works quite well for small-scale and bandwidth light projects, but I don't think a large social media platform can ever be funded that way. I wouldn't call Wikipedia a "small-scale and bandwidth light project". It's a rather great looking + feeling platform and the blog post is nice too, but I find the arguments against federation quite weak and have diminished hope for Discuit's popularity based on it not supporting it. It may still be a bit away from a tipping point and the UX may not be 100% finished, but to me Lemmy looks like the clear favorite for a platform one can use today. If you're compatible with it you automatically get its content, which is a valuable commodity for kick-starting right now. I think it looks really clean and it's awesome that you're actually building something instead of just complaining. Growing a community is going to be a huge challenge. I'm working on something similar, but based on Nostr. Good luck man. Thanks. I checked out your site. Cool, unique design. And the back button works! I'm confused. You basically used/aped Facebook's feed layout (which is super outdated and not optimal for this) while replicating Reddit without solving any of Reddit's inherent problems. > I don't believe federated platforms will ever become mainstream. They have a whole host of problems, not the least of which is that they're too complicated for most people to use. This platform is not, therefore, federated. These problems will go away. There is no usability problem or bug in the fediverse software that is inherit to its federated nature. On the other hand, your centralized software will always be centralized. To me this is already a "bug" that can not be fixed. Are you planning to register a designated agent at dmca.copyright.gov or are you comfortable with assuming personal liability for DMCA notices? I'm not following follow you? They're referring to DMCA compliance. Basically, if you're hosting a site where people can post videos, images, text, etc. You have to accept the possibility that someone will try and post every Disney movie in full on there. And you need to have a plan to deal with it, as you'll be receiving a lot of DMCA take down notices from companies that don't want their copyrighted shit on your site. I suspect you're a little too early in the process to have to consider that, but it's worth thinking about if things start going well. One thought and certainly just my opinion: you should allow users to block scripts from googletagmanager.com. I allowed scripts from your domain, but was still unable to use the page. When you embark on the more compact website, do you intend to support static HTML? The hot button issues with people having to use Reddit's official app also include the trackers it uses. I'd certainly suggest getting rid of Google Analytics here and replacing it with something more privacy concious. Looks neat! What’s the tech stack? Golang on the back-end (with mysql and redis) and React on the front-end. Really cool, congratulations! Is it possible to see the website without any image from the posts ? Everyone gangsta...until the VC bucks show up.... No more private platforms. Can it have some kind of legal
charter and non-profit (and not the openai farcical one) status so we can trust you wont be spoiled by capitalism? Not against capitalism but for some things - especially free as in beer for everyone things — it doesn’t work well for users. >(Discuit, pronounced "diskette") Sorry, no it's not. More like Biscuit (in English anyway)