Show HN: Sociables: The community platform for content creators and niches
sociables.substack.comHey HN. We've been working on a community platform/Reddit alternative with a focus on building a place for people to create communities instead of just buckets of posts. We want communities to feel like a place where you want to hang out instead of just scroll.
At a high level, our platform is like a Reddit/Discord/Patreon hybrid. We took all of the best features from each of those platforms and combined them under one umbrella.
Here's a list of the core features of each community:
1. Customizable discussion boards: Community owners can set up threaded discussion boards for different topics related to their niche. For example, if a user creates a community for a niche like "Sports", they can create different discussion boards for subcategories like "Soccer", "Football", “Hockey”, and "Golf". This is different from Reddit, where you only have a singular discussion board per community. All the posts within these discussion boards are crawlable by search engines, meaning they will appear in search results.
2. Voice rooms: Community owners can set up Discord-style voice chat rooms where users can seamlessly jump between different rooms to communicate verbally.
3. Real-time text chatroom: We modelled the chat after Twitch so communities can have a form of instant messaging-style communication.
4. Synchronized YouTube/Vimeo player: Community owners can create a playlist of YouTube/Vimeo video embeds. Each community has a media player that cycles through the playlist and synchronizes the playback, so people within the community can watch the same video at the same time.
5. Baked-in monetization: Community owners can offer customizable tiered monthly membership plans that allow members to financially support them. Owners can also link their PayPal accounts to receive donations. Users can purchase post bumps within the boards and comment awards, and the revenue is shared with the community owner. (Note: Tiered memberships and paying to bump posts/comment awards are in development. Communities can currently only offer a singular membership tier).
6. Link-in-bio page: Each community has a link-in-bio style page where community owners can display a list of links related to their community. Posts from the community also appear on this page along with buttons to monetarily support the owner. This page is meant to act as the “cover” page of the community.
7. Moderation tooling: Communities can set up custom user roles and assign different permissions within the community to these roles. You can assign permissions such as being able to move posts between boards, remove posts/comments and more. (Note: Our moderation tooling is currently in development. We are exploring integrating AI to automatically scan and flag posts that the moderators should review). Hey man. I don't mean to rain on your parade. But nothing you've written above actually matters. The tech for a social network is a solved problem The HARD unsolved problem is how to keep the social network running and monitized without going down the VC Funded death spiral. You are literally making this post on a social network (hackernews) that is as old as reddit. They both roughly do the same thing. Yet reddit is self desctructing. But hackernews is still running just fine, and still has a great community and high quality content and comments. Have you stopped and asked yourself why this is so? The first is a VC funded company that is expected to generate 100x return or die trying The latter is subsidized by YCombinator to generate a funnel for their accelerator. If you can't answer the question of how your social network is gonna stick around like hackerenws, and not self destruct like reddit in 10 years, then your social network is irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. Hey, thanks for checking out the platform. As I mentioned in the attached article, we actually do have a monetization strategy in place outside of relying on advertisements and VC funding. We take a cut of each transaction that occurs on the platform to help fund the development. Some examples of such transactions include: 1. Giving communities the ability to offer tiered monthly membership plans. Users will also be able to purchase memberships for other users similar to the system on Twitch. Communities can also chose to gate entire communities behind a membership. 2. We are also adding the ability for users to pay to bump posts and buy comment awards which the revenue is all shared with the community owner. 3. Adding a platform wide subscription fee that would give users some additional benefits however we haven't fully fleshed this out yet. See this section of the attached article for more on that: https://sociables.substack.com/i/134540416/monetization-mode... I think stating explicitly that you will NOT take VC funding at any point in the future is important. Otherwise there is no confidence that your product will stick around It's certainly our intention to make the platform work with relying on outside funding as little as possible. Ideally we will be able to get the platform to being profitable without needing much. The economics of our platform start to play out at scale, so it does take some money for us to get there. Ideally if we can land a few larger content creators with communities active in supporting them we will be able to fund a lot of that early development through that I wish you luck. But I don't think this strategy is predictable. Appreciate the discussion!