[HN Gopher] Show HN: Non.io, a Reddit-like platform Ive been wor...
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Show HN: Non.io, a Reddit-like platform Ive been working on for the
last 4 years
Heya HN, I've been working on a reddit-like platform as my primary
side project for the last few years. Doing a (very) soft launch
today, mainly because I want to use it to encourage discussion of
alternatives. How non.io works: 1. Free to browse, paid to
interact. 2. Minimum subscription is $2 (though you can choose
more). I take $1 to run the servers, everything left gets split
evenly between everything you upvote that month. It's a simple
model, but I hope it's a better one than the freemium model we've
been relying on for the last few years. Fundamentally I feel like
any ad-supported network doesn't have alignment between the needs
of the users and the needs of the platform, which is what drove me
to make this. Because this is a soft launch, if you do subscribe
I'd encourage you _not_ to pay for the time being. I 'm still
testing the distribution algorithm for returning funds - you won't
get overcharged or anything, but I just want to guarantee your
funds are properly distributed at the end of the month. I've opened
up free accounts to post and interact in the meantime. If you want
to try a test account, use this login: login: hackernews pw:
helloworld Edit: Loginless browsing here: https://non.io/#all If
you want to browse the code or the api: https://api.non.io
https://github.com/jjcm/nonio
Author : jjcm
Score : 1211 points
Date : 2023-06-12 16:54 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (non.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (non.io)
| kranke155 wrote:
| As a heavy Reddit user - love it.
|
| But can't seem to register on iOS
| sanjeevverma1 wrote:
| replace the homepage with loginless site dude
| rashthedude wrote:
| Mobile version is pretty much unusable
| blhack wrote:
| Please don't take this criticism harshly:
|
| You say that you've been working on this for 4 years, but there's
| no content here. Have you not been using it yourself for 4 years?
| Where is the content that you and your friends have been posting?
| jjcm wrote:
| I've been working on the code for 4 years. Only opened up
| posting to others today. Obviously have test posts, but I
| deleted many of them prior to this post.
| sanjeevverma1 wrote:
| replace the homepage with the loginless feed dude
| bloopernova wrote:
| Hello OP, I haven't read all the comments in this thread, please
| forgive me if I duplicate someone else's ideas:
|
| First off, I really like what you've done so far, this is
| fantastic and I dig the idea despite some of the potential payout
| exploits that you'll need to guard against.
|
| My suggestion is to find the moderators who have wishlists of
| features that they want reddit to implement. Don't try and entice
| them onto your platform, just ask them for advice on what
| features the moderation tools should have. Implement those tools
| and ask for feedback. Places like AskHistorians, AskScience,
| gonewild, and other specialist subject subreddits will all have
| very specific requirements for their mod tools. If you can
| support those requirements, or at least make it so that it's easy
| for someone else to build those tools, then I think you'll have a
| headstart over others.
|
| A couple of other items:
|
| reddit has edited user's comments in the database before. Perhaps
| consider implementing public key signing of comments on the
| backend, such that once a comment is made, it can be verified.
| Hide the gory details from the users unless they're a power user
| and want to see that stuff. Being able to say "I wrote this and
| it hasn't been modified", well that's pretty powerful in my
| opinion.
|
| Allow users to set their profiles such that when someone buys
| gold for them or otherwise rewards them, the money is instead
| donated to a charity of their choice. Said charity can be
| displayed in their profile, comments, or neither.
|
| Talk to lots of people, watch how they use reddit and other sites
| that include moderation, learn from what they say. Mods are going
| to be an important customer for you, they manage the communities
| that will create content and draw people in.
|
| Decide very early on what your personal values are and what the
| values of the site are. Not in a corporate useless bullshit kind
| of way, but instead to clearly state what people should expect.
| Decide what rules mods must follow vs those that are optional.
| Same for users. Transparency and clear open communication is
| something people are really missing right now.
|
| Allow people to display the site in multiple different ways that
| suit them. For example I use ublock origin rules to display
| hackernews comments no wider than about 8 to 10 words. Some
| people like old.reddit.com, others hate it. Give people options
| and make it easy to switch between them.
|
| Allow people to not see advertising if they don't want to, as
| long as those costs are covered via a subscription (which you
| seem to be doing, nice!)
|
| If you haven't already, implement a rich text github markdown
| text entry widget.
|
| Don't bait and switch.
|
| I'm looking forward to seeing your progress, I hope you succeed
| and that I'm using your site in 5 years! Good luck!
|
| EDIT: I also wanted to add, make your site as fast as hackernews.
| Can you load the text first, then the rest of the stuff, without
| reflowing and shifting content around? Speed keeps the site
| feeling snappy and doesn't "punish" people for clicking
| discussion links etc.
| FlyingSnake wrote:
| I've spent enough time [Edit: on HN] to remember App.net1 which
| was launched with similar fanfare but was shut down after few
| painful years of trying to find a PMF. The lesson I learned from
| that saga was HN might not be the best place to validate your
| product. We're too smart to diss even good ideas like DropBox.
|
| Go and talk to your potential customers and I hope the App.net
| story gives you some inspiration.
|
| 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4372985
|
| 2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13387723
| coldpie wrote:
| "PMF"?
| [deleted]
| trufas wrote:
| product-market fit
| z3ugma wrote:
| I assume "product-market fit"
| jhatemyjob wrote:
| I also want to add: HN is an especially bad place to validate
| this type of product because HN has the exact same interface as
| reddit. This post is popular because of its novelty, there is
| an incentive to upvote this post and say whatever OP wants to
| hear in order to get him to keep working on this project.
| Because "having alternatives never hurts". But it hurts the
| person developing the alternative. He already lost 4 years of
| his life to this. Hopefully he wises up and pivots before he
| wastes another 4 years.
| collaborative wrote:
| I love it. I hope the internet one day will move to paid models.
| The current state of affairs is untenable. Ads, privacy issues,
| the lot. One thing I have tried doing recently is using a pre-
| paid model + free tier. Perhaps I am in the minority, but I
| absolutely dislike subscriptions. They make me stay up at night
| wondering if I have some subscription still active I no longer
| need. With a pre-paid model, users can pay for usage and not have
| to worry until next time they come back. It can be very cheap,
| too
|
| ps. text box background colors look better when they are
| different than main page background colors (slightly darker or
| brighter)
| glonq wrote:
| Nice work!
|
| I love the idea of requring $ to subscribe, but expect that
| sharing $ based on upvotes will corrupt the system.
| mustacheemperor wrote:
| A couple thoughts after trying to submit a post (on firefox):
|
| - no way to post a link/URL? But I can upload an html file? Am I
| supposed to make the URL the description of the post?
|
| - "audio" does not appear to have a file upload button (probably
| a bug)
|
| - the text submission box sometimes does that glitchy thing some
| javascript'd text boxes do where everything I type comes out
| backwards until a refresh
|
| Seems like a cool platform, glad I registered. I'm trying to post
| a video, and I think this would be better if the encoder worked
| in the background so I don't need to leave the page up. Console
| is also full of CORS errors.
|
| Edit: after waiting for a while with "480" checked, got an error
| message with a frowny face file icon
|
| Another edit: Seems posting of any kind is currently broken, at
| least as an unsubscribed account. Too bad, it's a nice idea with
| about the best timing it'll ever have, but this is a very soft
| launch.
| jjcm wrote:
| Just patched the server - I opened up free account interactions
| last minute, seems post-creation was omitted in my sweep.
|
| Post creation should be working now on free accounts. Thank you
| for the detailed reports of issues you faced!
| mustacheemperor wrote:
| Working now, thank you!! Feels great to be in on the ground
| floor, haha.
| heleninboodler wrote:
| Note: I think someone changed the hackernews pw
| statsstats wrote:
| Love it. Will be big. But most VCs again won't get it
| ln_00 wrote:
| At least on iOS Safari its not responsive. Kind of a no go,
| sorry.
| MaximilianEmel wrote:
| My first thought is that there should be something like a star
| system, so I could also upvote something simple, without having
| to be afraid of lowering the value I gave to a complex,
| interesting, high-effort post I upvoted.
| prng2021 wrote:
| I applaud any attempt to compete with existing social networks.
|
| That said, user expectations are very high these days. The site
| looks awful on a phone, and I completely lost interest after
| about 5 seconds of trying to read the contents. Given how easy to
| make a site responsive these days and how relatively simple the
| main page is, that was quite disappointing.
|
| Still, I hope you keep working on improving it!
| phildenhoff wrote:
| Looks like an interesting model, I'd love to try it out. But
| signup on mobile didn't have auto suggest for my password manager
| (1pass), and I'm not going to separately create a
| username/password in 1P and then copy it over.
|
| Maybe passkeys? Or better mobile support? Sorry to add on to
| comments from a few others -- it does seem like an interesting
| model! Similar to FloatPlane, Patreon, etc. but in reverse.
| bogwog wrote:
| I really like the idea of a place where a creator can post
| anything. The upvotes = money angle makes me skeptical, but idk,
| maybe it could work.
|
| I know you just launched, so you're probably thinking about this
| already, but from what I've seen in the loginless browsing link,
| discoverability is nothing like reddit. It just feels like an
| unorganized dump of content, like I accidentally opened a link to
| a spam blog, or opened the "federated" tab on a mastodon server.
|
| If I was looking to join a community, I wouldn't know where to
| start. I see tags under random posts, but it seems like some
| posts don't have tags, and I can even add tags to other peoples'
| posts myself. It all seems too fluid and ephemeral, and I have to
| spend too much time trying to connect stuff together in my head.
| By contrast, it's obvious how a subreddit works to most people,
| and it's easy to find the content you're interested in.
| cridenour wrote:
| Looks cool and I appreciate the different model.
|
| FYI - you mentioned letting free accounts post for now but that
| doesn't seem to work.
| jjcm wrote:
| Just patched it. I very quickly reverted the free-tier
| interaction blocks, and I missed a final check on submissions.
| Should be working now.
| unshavedyak wrote:
| Looks great! Silly question, but have you considered ActivityPub
| integration? I ask because while it may not benefit you directly,
| these days i'm liking the idea more and more of joining a
| community if they're in "the fediverse". Which is to say i don't
| need to worry about the instance being small and isolated, i get
| benefits of the fediverse regardless of where i am in it.
|
| Ie, i get friction currently when looking at alternatives not in
| "the verse". Eg Tildes, i have the same concern.
| jjcm wrote:
| I have, but I think the two of these feel like different
| models. I want to encourage people to contribute back to
| creators, and doing that across the fediverse is a very
| difficult problem to solve. A few platforms are trying to do
| it, but it does come with performance/payout barriers.
|
| I wrote up about reddit alternatives here
| https://non.io/reddit-has-platform-user-misalignment , and one
| of the things I call out is that what we need is a better
| fundamental model. Federated approaches may very well be that,
| and if one "wins", I think we'll end up in a better spot. I
| personally prefer a standard hosting architecture along with
| aligning user and platform demands, as this comes with some
| benefits over a federated architecture. I may be wrong here
| though - each definitely has pros and cons.
| unshavedyak wrote:
| Yea, i get your concern about fediverse and creators. I'm
| thinking in a similar space, though it feels like it's non-
| optional these days. Ie as a user i just don't want to be
| trapped into silos anymore.
|
| I think i'd still like a "best we can do" implementation that
| supported Fedi and supported creators in this manner.
| prox wrote:
| I would look for people who are already creators and want
| more sidegig. Say lots of creators are on Twitch who might
| want to have a paid community. Then they can organically grow
| in your space without starting from scratch.
|
| As others said, make the frontpage a contentpage. See if you
| can seed some creators to post there.
| fidla wrote:
| I tried to register by clicking multiple times and nothing is
| happening. I tried to register in Brave, Firefox and Chrome
| afterburner wrote:
| Requiring a login to see anything at all is too much friction for
| this kind of thing. (Or at least I couldn't find a link that let
| to content from the main page without logging in.)
|
| The UI is nice though. Minimal dead space in the comments.
| jjcm wrote:
| Going directly to a tag view will let you browse without
| logging in: i.e. https://non.io/#all or https://non.io/#dog
|
| I've still got plenty of work to do on the UX of the site!
| moffkalast wrote:
| Hmm, is there a way to switch between tags without editing
| the url? I can't find any list of current ones.
| jjcm wrote:
| Logging into an account will get you the sidebar, which
| will let you navigate current tags. You can use the demo
| account hackernews pw=helloworld
| moffkalast wrote:
| Cool thanks, the account view shows a completely
| different picture. It would probably be a good idea to
| show that same sidebar to guests, aside from the
| subscribed tags.
|
| The HTML upload option is... very interesting.
| jjcm wrote:
| The html upload is my favorite part and the one I'm most
| scared about. This post is actually an html upload:
| https://non.io/reddit-has-platform-user-misalignment
|
| One issue though is automatically resizing the iframe for
| the frontend. I have a protocol for iframes to request
| their own size, which this script leverages:
| https://html.non.io/nonio-embedded-page.js
|
| I'll likely create a setting to automatically inject that
| script into html uploads.
| blacklight wrote:
| Is it open-source? Is it based on open protocols? Does it support
| federation?
|
| If the answer to any of these questions is no, then your product
| is irrelevant.
|
| It's nothing personal. It's just that I'm sick and tired of
| centralized solutions running on somebody else's computers. At
| least this product makes its business model clear (a $2/month
| subscription fee for interacting).
|
| But hey, I'm a guy who used to run phpBB forums on a Pentium 1
| under my bed 20 years ago. Back then there were tons of those
| forums, most of us didn't ask users for any subscription money,
| there was no centralized gatekeeper, and everybody was happy. All
| of us used to curate our own small gardens and the model was
| sustainable at all levels.
|
| Can I just get that back, with some federation protocols on top
| to allow multi-instance interactions? Seriously, everything else
| is pointless, it's a waste of time, and it doesn't make the
| digital world any better. I won't jump from a centralized
| platform to another, and probably nobody should.
| Aicy wrote:
| I just created a new account using the free tier, and then
| afterwards decided I would like to play.
|
| I went to my profile, clicked on "view financials", but when I
| press "Change Subscription Amount" the page just freezes. Why
| won't you let me give you my money?
|
| Having a look in the console... Every time I press the "Change
| Subscription Amount" button there is a 500 API error from
| https://api.non.io/stripe/subscription and this is printed:
| {error: 'no customer for the user'}
| Aicy wrote:
| I also tried paying at this link https://non.io/admin/first-
| time-signup
|
| I entered my card details, and now it is stuck on a loading
| system where the "Subscribe" button used to be
| Aicy wrote:
| Ok... I managed to pay. It might not have been working
| because I was entering my post code wrong, although I got no
| feedback from the UI about this.
|
| Now I'm trying to make a post, but it similarly has gotten
| stuck as soon as I press the submit button.
|
| (I figured out that I need to actually upload a picture,
| video etc and not just write a description. This was not
| clear and I got no feedback from the UI that this was the
| problem - instead it implied it was just waiting for
| something with the loading icon)
| diegocg wrote:
| You should have written a post describing your experience and the
| platform instead of a plain landing page
| graypegg wrote:
| Using the # anchor in the url as the subreddit/tag/category etc
| is really clever!
| meltedcapacitor wrote:
| Has the cost of lawyers and moderation been modelled? At $2/month
| spammers break even if they get like 5 clicks from all their
| posting on the platform, huge magnet for them, and content
| copypasters, if the platform gets some traction.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| The idea of posters getting real money instead of fake internet
| points when their posts do well seems interesting, but maybe an
| unintentional experiment in unintended consequences. Moderation
| will be _extremely_ important to prevent low-effort memes and
| content regurgitation and the like from saturating your main
| channels. Have you considered how you will encourage moderation
| and keep it free from the corrosive influence of quid quo pro?
| (hey moderator, you overlook this spam post and maybe I cut you
| in on the profits)
|
| When real money is involved on the internet the worst kinds of
| stuff results, and it takes a lot of effort to avoid it. How's
| that going to work?
|
| None of this is to take away from your accomplishments here, by
| the way. The exact opposite in fact, you've got an interesting
| enough idea that it prompts interesting questions of the
| mechanics.
|
| P.S. do you have any long-term plans to IPO this if it becomes
| successful? If not, some kind of guarantee that this platform is
| immune to enshittification would probably be very, very popular.
| bombcar wrote:
| I would say reward "good posters" with additional free time vs
| the $2 per year or whatever it would otherwise charge.
|
| That puts an upper limit on how much of an "attention whore"
| you can reasonably be.
| stiltzkin wrote:
| Stacker News has succesfully use satoshis instead of fake
| internet points.
| lanza wrote:
| Ditto. I _hate_ this idea. We all know the type of content that
| revenue drives: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc. I
| want a site that rewards quality, not view counts.
| jjcm wrote:
| > I want a site that rewards quality, not view counts.
|
| That's what the objective of the site is. Viewing doesn't
| reward anything (whereas views do reward in the video you
| just linked). My hope as well is that for nonio, knowing
| you're contributing a share of your monthly pool will make
| people more conscientious about what they upvote, thus
| improving quality.
| that_guy_iain wrote:
| > The idea of posters getting real money instead of fake
| internet points when their posts do well seems interesting, but
| maybe an unintentional experiment in unintended consequences.
|
| I foresee some company suing because their content is being
| monetised by other people.
| bee_rider wrote:
| If everyone chips in $1, and their $1 is split between all the
| things they've upvoted, isn't the financial incentive to
| produce posts that are upvoted by people who don't typically
| upvote? That actually seems like a pretty interesting
| incentive.
| adammarples wrote:
| Yes it seems quite clever. People who upvote zero effort
| memes willy nilly will spread their share thin.
| haroldp wrote:
| > maybe an unintentional experiment in unintended consequences
|
| Just charging $2 might be a _huge_ improvement over reddit
| because it makes sock puppets cost too much to scale.
|
| Paying out for upvotes, I fear will incentivize lowest-common-
| denominator content. If you go to a quality tech subreddit and
| sort by "Top" comments, they will mostly be memes. They won't
| be from an expert solving your very specific problem. And more
| generally, I worry it will reward that twitter-style, shrill
| political dunking, binary thinking, maximalism and in-group
| point scoring. This may be a recipe for an even more toxic
| r/politics.
|
| Very interesting trying to puzzle out how a given incentive
| structure will play out in practice.
| Zedseayou wrote:
| Do you actually think sock puppets will be too expensive? The
| value of the bot only has to be more than $2 to justify
| paying it for the bot operator, and if there is monetary
| incentive to get upvotes/attention seems like it could pencil
| out (if N bots can generate some multiplier of attention)
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Actually, yes. many trolls do it simply because it's easy
| to do. adding even a $1 barrier to entry would cull a lot.
|
| Ofc there are determined and financuially comfortable
| trolls out there that would still make a few dozen, but
| those few are easier to stamp out without the noise of low
| effort trolls.
|
| >if there is monetary incentive to get upvotes/attention
| seems like it could pencil out
|
| worst case, it helps pay for the server. But yes, this is
| the equivalent of a KS campaign being partially self-funded
| to make it seem like others are interested. There are
| likely dozens of other tricks that such a community would
| reveal.
| wraptile wrote:
| Sounds like I prime example of Moral Hazard where people
| would justify shitty behavior because they pay for it. It's
| also more difficult to ban people in one way or another
| because they are paying customers now.
| hansworst wrote:
| I wonder though whether people will upvote differently
| knowing that there's real money involved.
| DirkH wrote:
| I keep thinking there should be two upvotes. One that is
| just internet points and one that is a paying-upvote.
|
| That way you can interact with the site and upvote shitty
| memes as you normally would, but when it is time to be
| serious you'll using the paying-upvote instead.
|
| Reddit kinda landes on a similar formula with Reddit gold.
| beowulfey wrote:
| Maybe for the better. I think personally I'd be more
| inclined to upvote posts/content that I enjoy if I knew it
| directly supported them.
|
| Same reason I buy albums that I love despite me already
| having Spotify--to give back to the creators.
| Nition wrote:
| I was thinking this too. I'd be even _less_ inclined to
| upvote low-effort posts, knowing that I 'd also be paying
| them for that low effort. And more inclined to upvote
| high effort, less visible posts - both because I think
| they deserve my money more, and because being more
| upvoted = being more seen = getting paid more by others
| as well.
|
| I'd also give out upvotes more sparingly overall, since
| upvoting a post reduces the amount my previously upvoted
| posts will get paid.
| wlesieutre wrote:
| Another moderation risk is that whoever is moderating has an
| incentive to delete people's potentially successful posts and
| repost under their own or a friend's alt account
| yieldcrv wrote:
| when you dont rely on advertiser support you arent beholden
| to their desires of moderation
|
| when a sub-forum crosses a threshold of insensitivity, just
| remove it from search and let those fans direct link
|
| sub forums can remain popularity contests where community
| decides if anything there is a good fit. theyre already echo
| chambers and nobody is aiming to solve that so just run it
| that way
| twic wrote:
| People attach a lot of value to fake internet points, so
| these bad behaviours are already incentivised.
|
| What will be interesting is how they are incentivised
| _differently_. Different people attach different relative
| value to fake internet points and less-fake currency points,
| so you 'll get different behaviour from different sets of
| people.
| afterburner wrote:
| Well, if there's money attached, it will be _guaranteed_ to
| be constantly gamed and abused.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Whereas if there are fake internet points attached, it is
| only _almost certain_ to be gamed and abused.
| ithinkso wrote:
| But it will be gamed and abused by people that care about
| fake internet points. Those are _very_ different people
| from those who want to extract as much money by any means
| available
| bee_rider wrote:
| If it gets successful enough that people really want to
| game it, the creator will have proven their concept and
| can try to tweak it as necessary. I think that would be a
| fine problem to have.
|
| The basic incentive of money drives all sorts of things.
| Maybe the best "exploit" will be to find interesting and
| novel links.
| inamorty wrote:
| Perhaps meta-moderation would work in this scenario? Randomly
| assign previous moderation choices (anonymizing the
| moderator) for users to rank. This could to identify
| moderators that are out of line. It could also lead to echo
| chambers though.
| AH4oFVbPT4f8 wrote:
| I do like /. meta-moderation, but I also feel that the ones
| contributing the most, interacting the most (via
| votes/comments) should have a vote to who they want their
| moderators to be on a regular basis.
| ryandrake wrote:
| If meta-moderation powers were assigned randomly and
| uniformly, this could be gamed by just spam-creating tons
| of accounts. Any system that accepts user input needs to
| have a robust answer to the question "What if a significant
| percentage of my users are actually bots under control of a
| single person?"
| qmarchi wrote:
| You could disincentivize them by having access to the
| metamoderation queue behind the subscription. Thus it's
| $2/mo/user account.
| ryandrake wrote:
| I wonder how much would a government intelligence or
| defense department who controls millions of bot accounts
| be willing to pay per month in order to have even a small
| percentage of power over who gets to mod (for example)
| r/ukraine?
| penneallagricia wrote:
| Considering 1 patriot missile costs several millions, it
| would be pocket change.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| * * *
| mrtranscendence wrote:
| A moderator who does this consistently will be crucified, and
| no one will want to post in the community while they remain.
| Zetice wrote:
| Completely disagree re: moderation. The goal for sites like
| this is _never_ "high quality content", it's "maximum traffic".
|
| If he can get 50k paying users, he's a millionaire. If that
| means low effort meme posts, who are you to slap those dollars
| out of his hand?
|
| The "intelligentsia" of the Internet need to get a grip on what
| people want; these sites are for _entertainment_ not
| elucidation and discovery.
| digging wrote:
| > If he can get 50k paying users, he's a millionaire.
|
| How did you reach that conclusion?
| Zetice wrote:
| Estimation skills and general understanding that the exact
| value is less important than the larger point.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Multi-millionaire as the typical valuations of start-ups
| go. Getting 50K paying users would be absolutely amazing
| out of the gate. Many web properties with a fraction of
| that are worth in the millions.
| mrtranscendence wrote:
| Given the popularity of searching for things like product
| reviews or good restaurants in a new town by appending
| "Reddit.com" to the search query, I think elucidation and
| discovery are at least part of what drives people to such
| platforms.
| Zetice wrote:
| Not really a given, that's just how _you_ use the platform.
|
| You'd have to show thats a substantial part of Reddit's
| traffic and therefore revenue, for it to actually be given.
| mrtranscendence wrote:
| To be clear, that's not how I use the platform (I'm not
| sure I've ever searched that way). But it's a common
| enough pattern that there have been widely read articles
| referencing it:
|
| > This means you'll no longer have to add "Reddit" to
| your searches when you're looking for thoughts from
| actual humans, not empty answers from websites just
| trying to get clicks.
|
| https://www.theverge.com/2022/4/20/23034024/brave-search-
| fea...
|
| > It turns out that almost 70% of polled readers add
| 'Reddit' to their search results at least sometimes.
|
| https://www.androidauthority.com/reddit-web-search-
| queries-p...
|
| I can't say that it's a _substantial_ portion of Reddit's
| traffic, of course. But clearly it's not just a
| mrtranscendence idiosyncrasy.
| Zetice wrote:
| Then I don't think what you've said is a given. Maybe
| many people do it, but does that matter to Reddit? That's
| not certain, and it is even less clear that such a thing
| would be relevant to Non.io.
|
| Besides, there are _many_ routes to profitability here
| that have absolutely nothing to do with replicating all
| of Reddit 's value for a user. Presuming this needs to be
| a 1:1 clone of Reddit seems needlessly reductive.
| CM30 wrote:
| Yeah, earning money for posting on a service like this sounds
| good at first, but it's often a magnet for folks that don't
| really care about contributing to the platform beyond that.
| These usually fall into 2 categories:
|
| 1. Hustlers and schemers, who want to get rich quick (usually
| the folks that like spam, blackhat SEO and 'hustle culture').
|
| 2. Folks in 3rd world countries who see this as a ticket out of
| poverty.
|
| The former are a disaster for any good community site or
| service, and the latter have the potential to become the
| former, since 'spam the crap out of a service for the chance to
| make more money' becomes an enticing proposition. A big digital
| marketing forum shut down its revenue sharing because these
| folks flooded it with low quality crap, the likes of Medium and
| Quora have become hellholes due to the same incentives, and
| crypto based 'pay to earn' games have literally led to people
| starting up sweatshops to make money in them.
|
| Having it also cost money to use the site will help a bit, but
| it'll also filter out many good users due to not wanting to
| spend money on a subscription, and create a mental calculus of
| "can I make more from my content than it'll cost me to sign
| up", which isn't ideal in itself.
| [deleted]
| axus wrote:
| I liked someone's idea in non.io #feedback of subscribing to
| multiple moderators, whose filters are applied to your view.
| Makes the moderator's job easier too, if its more distributed.
|
| I could subscribe to a couple moderator's idea of "low effort",
| a few more for "spam" moderation, etc . Could even have
| "#racist" and "#woke" mods, whatever bubble you choose to
| subscribe to.
| jjcm wrote:
| > do you have any long-term plans to IPO this if it becomes
| successful? If not, some kind of guarantee that this platform
| is immune to enshittification would probably be very, very
| popular.
|
| This is a solid call out. Part of me wants to keep things
| private in order to maintain the "user is the customer"
| alignment. One issue with going public is it then means
| shareholders become your primary customer, with your users
| becoming second tier. I'm not quite sure what the answer is.
|
| This also brings me to the question of funding - on one hand,
| proper funding here would help drastically with launching, on
| the other hand it comes with expectations and requirements.
|
| Part of the reason why I want paid users though is it means the
| site can be self-sustaining without that funding, if it can get
| past the network effect threshold.
|
| Lots to think about.
| jacquesm wrote:
| The thing to keep in mind that alignment is often good
| initially but deviates over time. Funds have horizons that
| they want to respect lest they get in trouble with the LPs or
| end up with piles of money allocated but not turning a profit
| for them (because of the sunset clauses on management fees).
| Shareholders may see eye to eye - for a while - and then
| split up due to unforeseen development (that's when you'll
| find out how good that shareholder agreement really is). All
| in all this is a tricky thing and you will want to get
| yourself very well informed before pulling the trigger on any
| investment.
| brightball wrote:
| I can already see people justifying gaming the system with
| multiple paid accounts if they know that farming those upvotes
| back to themselves will recoup costs. Especially if the farmed
| votes get more attention from other paid votes.
| dbcurtis wrote:
| I really do love the idea. But in addition to the moderation
| risks others have mentioned, are you prepared to issue tax
| documents to every jurisdiction where you might be rendering
| payments?
| jjcm wrote:
| Yes ish, as currently I'm doing payouts via Stripe Connect
| (and likewise only paying out in countries that Stripe
| Connect supports, as it takes care of that aspect).
| Everything is theoretical until battle-tested however.
| twic wrote:
| Personally, if i signed up, i would not be interested in
| getting payouts. I'd have to declare them on my tax return,
| and it's just not worth it for such small amounts. So a
| checkbox to donate any payouts to a charity (the EFF,
| perhaps?) would be great.
| uvesten wrote:
| How about doing this _instead_ of paying out to the
| creators? When you sign up, you choose which charity
| should get the payouts for your created content? Maybe
| start with a searchable list of well-known charities, let
| users propose new as the site grows.
|
| I think that might stem a lot of the potential abuse of
| the system to earn money, and it gives users a good
| feeling.
| jjcm wrote:
| A really great idea. Love that as well. I've also
| considered adding a threshold for payouts (i.e. $50
| withdrawal minimum) to help with the reporting aspects.
| skupig wrote:
| Are you dead set on paying out directly? Internet
| communities _always_ get worse when there 's money
| involved. It will be a constant fight between moderation
| and clickbait. People will make it their job to game the
| system. You could, instead, have votes go toward paying a
| user's subscription fee instead of cash.
| jstarfish wrote:
| > I've also considered adding a threshold for payouts
| (i.e. $50 withdrawal minimum) to help with the reporting
| aspects.
|
| Do this anyway. You don't want to be paying out every
| cent immediately to people reposting things that
| otherwise warrant moderation.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Another option is to have a "play it forward" option,
| where your earnings are passed on to things that you
| voted for during the month.
| searine wrote:
| I tried to register, but my 30 character random letter password
| with numbers letter and characters "wasn't complex enough".
| jjcm wrote:
| Are you using a password manager? If so which? If you add the
| letter "a" at the end, and then delete it, does it work then?
|
| I'm using webcomponent form elements, the spec for which is
| relatively new. I suspect it isn't working well with auto-
| filled passwords from them.
| ln_00 wrote:
| Loving the ui.
|
| A bit more rich text features for the comments might be nice.
| yett wrote:
| Mobile experience is pretty bad right now.
| shermix011 wrote:
| This reminds me of Coil subscriptions that was built on a similar
| micropayments concept for paying out creators. Sadly they shut
| down. Worth looking into their efforts, what went wrong...
| dehugger wrote:
| To be blunt, this had enough bugs out of the gate that I nearly
| didn't even finish registering! It feels like you rushed this out
| to capitalize on the reddit collapse, which I understand, but it
| may flop entirely because of these problems.
|
| The registration kept failing with no indication as to why, just
| a red X on the button. I finally figured out that it simply
| didn't like my email address, trying a different one worked.
|
| Then I tried to change my profile picture. That was failing
| completely silently; I guess .PNG files aren't excepted? I tried
| the same avatars that I use on every other site without issue. I
| did try a random .JPG, and that worked.
|
| Opening the videos tab, none of the posts show the video,
| clicking on them doesn't expand anything, and the text isn't
| aligning, some of them randomly have the title in the center of
| the bar. I can't even figure out how to view the video.
|
| This is on Firefox, latest version, no extensions.
|
| EDIT: On further exploration, the submission description box has
| a bug. The first letter I wanted to type somehow got stuck as the
| last letter, and there was no way to delete/move it. "y
| description looked like this.M"
| sudobash1 wrote:
| The fact that I had to register at all to see the content
| (unless I am missing something obvious) was nearly a turn-away
| point for me. But I ran into the same thing. But it seems to be
| an issue with the site on Firefox. I was able to register with
| Chrome just fine.
| pythko wrote:
| I really like this idea, and would love to subscribe when you're
| ready!
|
| I think many commenters have pointed out reasons why this model
| is not suited to widespread user adoption, but I just want to say
| that may not be a bad thing. Meme content moderation is not a big
| problem if your users are not the type to submit or upvote a lot
| of low effort memes in the first place. A paywall will inherently
| limit your user growth, but if the users you get end up being
| people who are happy to create and support high quality content,
| that seems pretty ideal to me (unless you are looking for maximal
| growth, VC level returns, and/or an IPO).
|
| If there's a mailing list or other way to get notified when
| you're ready to do a full launch, I'd love to sign up for that!
| ZacnyLos wrote:
| Is it part of fediverse?
| bdcp wrote:
| I like the name. Non.io
| thih9 wrote:
| Congrats on the launch!
|
| How do you handle reposts and low effort content with this
| business model?
|
| I.e. what prevents me from repackaging popular content from
| elsewhere and farming votes?
| stOneskull wrote:
| votes aren't free. why would i upvote the low effort?
| jjcm wrote:
| Some other fun tidbits: I'm trying to make this an API-first
| service, with the frontend being just a representation of how to
| use it. Because of that, I wanted to make the frontend as
| reusable/refactorable as possible, regardless of frontend
| framework. I relied on webcomponents for everything, and the full
| app is a SPA built purely in vanilla js.
|
| I'd never recommend anyone take that approach, it was
| masochistic. Use react or something. It was a great learning
| experience, but writing everything in vanilla js does slow down
| dev time overall.
| ehaughee wrote:
| That is pretty interesting. Probably an solid blog post in and
| of itself.
| root_axis wrote:
| Congrats on the hard work, and the idea is fine, but the problem
| is that tech like this is a cheap commodity in a massively
| oversaturated space, and without a hook that makes the platform
| exceptional (innovative/clever/beautiful design, unique
| aggregation features, inherently interesting content, reimagined
| user/content/moderation dynamics etc etc), this kind of thing is
| dead in the water because it lacks a network effect. Add in the
| upfront subscription model and failure to launch is basically
| assured.
|
| When I visit the root domain I shouldn't be greeted with a
| marketing splash page, you need interesting content in the user's
| face right away, entice their curiosity and drive the user to
| explore the site... even as a fellow developer, my first instinct
| is to abandon the page as soon as I'm greeted with the cliche
| startup marketing page. Consider the user experience when I visit
| reddit.com or news.ycombinator.com or any other link aggregation
| competitor. What you have now is a tech demo, not a platform.
| Sorry if that's a little harsh, but I mean well! Good luck!
| bradgessler wrote:
| What is it about insanely great user experience design that's
| hard to "open source" in the same sense that engineers are able
| collaborate on software, like Linux, and achieve massive
| distribution?
| Eisenstein wrote:
| Design is artistic and artists don't collaborate well due to
| art being a personal endeavor? Unless it has a 'decision
| maker' at the helm like a film or it is intensely personal
| like a band.
|
| Just a idea to get some ideas from others -- this does not
| necessarily represent how art or artists feel or operate
| since I am not one and don't actually know.
| Greed wrote:
| The difference is that you can see it. If you have two highly
| skilled contributors with very different programming styles,
| they can still collaborate within the same codebase given a
| goal and the end-result is the same for your users. When a
| code contribution is marginally better or worse in its
| approach than another the difference is negligible to the
| project as a whole. By contrast, users notice when a single
| color is different for design elements. And they complain
| extremely loudly about it.
|
| On the contributor side:
|
| - Visual style guides require much more time and skill to
| create (relative to style guides for code) and still
| generally fail to achieve anywhere near the aesthetic unity
| of a single great designer with total control.
|
| - If you commoditize your design elements to the point where
| it is easy to contribute them, then it is no more difficult
| to do it yourself to begin with.
|
| - Delegation of design work still requires that you funnel it
| somewhere to be judged on qualitative measures, rather than
| the pass/fail nature of code
|
| Generally the best you can do is collaborate very, very
| tightly and then funnel it through a single person in the end
| anyway a la Python's BDFL in a very trial and error fashion.
| Greed wrote:
| The difference is that you can see it. If you have two
| highly skilled contributors with very different programming
| styles, they can still collaborate within the same codebase
| given a goal and the end-result is the same for your users.
| When a code contribution is marginally better or worse in
| its approach than another the difference is negligible to
| the project as a whole. By contrast, users notice when a
| single color is different for design elements. And they
| complain extremely loudly about it.
|
| On the contributor side:
|
| - Visual style guides require much more time and skill to
| create (relative to style guides for code) and still
| generally fail to achieve anywhere near the aesthetic unity
| of a single great designer with total control.
|
| - If you commoditize your design elements to the point
| where it is easy to contribute them, then it is no more
| difficult to do it yourself to begin with.
|
| - Delegation of design work still requires that you funnel
| it somewhere to be judged on qualitative measures, rather
| than the pass/fail nature of code
|
| Generally the best you can do is collaborate very, very
| tightly and then funnel it through a single person in the
| end anyway a la Python's BDFL in a very trial and error
| fashion.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| I dont think UX is "harder". But the kinds of people that can
| realize a launch like this need to be technically minded,
| tend to work alone, and lean a lot more on the "Linux" side
| of this than the UX side. It's like trying to find the
| perfect Programmer/Artist hybrid to make a game with; it's
| simply two different mindsets that rarely get taught
| together.
|
| As an example, look at most of Linux Distro's UX since you
| brought it up. They aren't meant for the layman the way
| Mac/Windows was. the deeply technical audience, for better or
| worse, puts up with a lot of UX issues for their tools. That
| doesn't work the same way for a general audience website or
| app.
|
| ----
|
| But that's from the "why can't programmers art" side of the
| argument. Of course, that begs the question "why can't
| programmers find artists to work with them?"... well, there's
| a dozen different reasons. Culturally, historically,
| socially, and so on.
|
| But to list the one big reason; there aren't stereotypes
| about programmers being short on cash and needing to
| commissions out programs after their full time job just to
| get by. (a few) programmers do all that just for their own
| self-fulfillment or for their own goals, with no expectations
| of a big payment most of the time. Because many are already
| financially comfortable.
| kZardo wrote:
| Indeed. At this point, you need a reason to not put that $2 in
| the ChatGPT subscription bin.
| temptemptemp111 wrote:
| [dead]
| FireInsight wrote:
| Not to mention the marketing page is not responsive for mobile.
| Doesn't really feel like a modern design, either. Doesn't tell
| good about the site's mobile UX.
| Zetice wrote:
| The hook is that it's not run by spez, IMO.
|
| And I'm not trying to pile on, I'm just saying there's value to
| people in that fact.
| DerekBickerton wrote:
| > this kind of thing is dead in the water because it lacks a
| network effect
|
| Which is why launching any social network is a dice roll. You
| need that initial momentum to propel it further, or some 'lucky
| break' to get it popular. Many social networks got popular
| accidentally, typically because some VIP joined the platform
| and everyone went to follow the VIP, increasing DAUs / MAUs
| which is the only metric social media networks care about.
| yywwbbn wrote:
| Also back in the day tech was moving fast (i.e. UX and
| frontend would become outdated in a year if not months) and
| you didn't to compete with multi-billion dollar companies.
| pbreit wrote:
| Charging to post is also pretty much a non-starter.
| yamazakiwi wrote:
| Twitter is edging on charging to post if we consider exposing
| content related to blue checkmarks.
| pbreit wrote:
| Twitter has a massive existing user base and still isn't
| there yet.
| [deleted]
| afterburner wrote:
| > without a hook that makes the platform exceptional
| (innovative/clever/beautiful design, unique aggregation
| features, inherently interesting content, reimagined
| user/content/moderation dynamics etc etc), this kind of thing
| is dead in the water because it lacks a network effect
|
| I think the ONLY value any of these these have is network
| effect. All those other things you listed are either irrelevant
| or come after the network effects kick in. The only other
| important thing is the visual/practical UX.
| root_axis wrote:
| I hear your point, but I think in some ways the network
| effect is intrinsically linked to the capabilities of the
| platform, they are kind of like two sides of the same coin.
| Consider a platform like discord where the quality and
| capabilities of the software product have allowed many
| massive communities to be built because of the beautiful
| design (for its niche) and the empowering community features.
| Platforms like teamspeak and ventrillo had the network effect
| but were eventually crushed by discord because of the
| product's capabilities.
| mnky9800n wrote:
| It doesn't even work on mobile.
| pojzon wrote:
| The hook is called ,,Reddit becoming more ans more aggressive
| with monetisation"
|
| Its really enough for ppl to start looking for alternatives.
| janalsncm wrote:
| On the flip side, the fact that this is a crowded space means
| that there's a demand for it. And this isn't a Reddit clone, it
| has a business model which is pretty close to the best anyone
| could hope for in my opinion. In any case, I applaud any
| efforts that could unseat Reddit or make them reconsider their
| greedy hard line.
|
| I encourage the creator of Non.io to identify the key
| shortcomings of Reddit and improve upon them. Don't just try to
| clone Reddit beyond the basic image/link board, otherwise
| you'll just be playing their game. Change the game. There is a
| Folding Ideas video on this topic which has some great insights
| with respect to YouTube: https://youtu.be/r3snVCRo_bI
| tester457 wrote:
| That folding ideas video is excellent. I implore anyone who
| wishes to unseat Reddit or any monopolistic website to watch
| it, so they don't fall into the trap of creating a clone with
| the same architectural flaws.
| jodrellblank wrote:
| > " _it has a business model_ "
|
| What's that story about the economist who was trying to
| concentrate but there were kids playing soccer below his
| window and being noisy, so he went out and offered them $1
| each if they come back and played tomorrow. The next day he
| offered them 50c, then 25c, and after that 5c, and the kids
| got annoyed "we wouldn't come here to play for a measly five
| cents!" and stormed off, and didn't come back.
|
| I've put many hours into Reddit and Stackoverflow for free,
| but if you take $24 from me for a year and then offer me
| $0.0193 for my efforts based on upvotes I might feel a bit
| cheesed off about it.
|
| Being forced to face how insignificant I am feels likely to
| drive me away, free upvotes at least let me feel important
| and they cost nothing.
|
| Or the people who knit clothes saying things along the lines
| of "I'll do it for a genuine thank you, but $10 is an insult;
| if this is a transaction, that doesn't begin to cover my
| costs let alone my time".
| 6510 wrote:
| haha right, the cultural problem is that when one has to
| pay $24 one should loudly cry how expensive it is
| tirelessly, again and again, all day, every day, until the
| server is shut down but when one is paid $24 one should be
| offended by what little money it is and as elaborately and
| tirelessly explain that your posts are worth so much more.
| You took whole minutes worth of valuable time out of your
| day to write them.
|
| What if you pump it up with VC money?
| Endy wrote:
| When you pump it up with VC money, you get Reddit all
| over again.
| tester457 wrote:
| Overjustification effect in action.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >but if you take $24 from me for a year and then offer me
| $0.0193 for my efforts based on upvotes I might feel a bit
| cheesed off about it.
|
| is that how it works? I thought it was offering payments
| based on who creates posts or other community tools, not
| based on participation.
|
| you are correct that 2 cents would be a pittance to me who
| doesn't even want to be paid to browse content. But if I
| and 1000 others gave that 2 cents to what we thought was
| quality content, that could make someone's day (not career
| per se. But $20 from random strangers feels good). At scale
| that's basically how YT/Twitch work, except they don't take
| money directly from us so much as time (for ads).
| jodrellblank wrote:
| It reads to me like:
|
| > " _[your subscription fee over my $1 take] gets split
| evenly between everything you upvote that month._ "
|
| So if I subscribe and pay $2/month, there's $1/month from
| me for that, so if I upvote ten things they each get
| $0.03 from me and if I upvote a ten things a day that's
| three hundred in a month, they each get $0.0033 from me.
|
| I'm not clear if that covers comments or only top level
| submissions / posts, but if I comment and get upvoted ten
| times in a month, presumably I get some money from the
| upvoters, like $0.03. There are times I've spent well
| over an hour writing programming comments on Reddit,
| testing code or trying to explain a concept, things that
| could have been a blog post. Getting nothing for it is
| fine, that was the deal. Getting $0.03 for it is more
| like tipping a waitress a penny, I think. Getting $10
| would need into the thousands of votes (which rarely
| happens on Reddit comments by comparison) and still
| wouldn't pay for my time wtiting it by minimum wage.
| didgetmaster wrote:
| There needs to be a limit on things you can upvote each
| month based on how much you give as a subscription. Each
| upvote should be worth at least 1 penny. If you agree to
| subscribe for $2 a month, that gives you a max of 100
| upvotes (1 for each penny over the dollar server costs).
|
| The more you donate, the more upvotes you get ($5 per
| month would give you 400 votes).
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Yeah, I see what you mean, and it's definitely not clear
| enough to say whether or not this is just for posters or
| also commenters.
|
| I think this only works if you throttle votes (and
| assumedly, this only applies to voted on posts, not
| necessarily every comment), but that was one of the worst
| parts of Voat (from a technical standpoint, at least).
| There probably needs to be normal old infinite "I like
| this" votes and then treat your subscription votes as a
| form of gilding (except it actually does help pay
| someone, unlike reddit's gilding).
|
| You can also propose that you do let non-subscribers
| vote, but a subscriber vote weighs more. Be it explicit*
| or not.
|
| *(e.g. hover over votes and you see a split of which are
| "subsciber votes. Which say, counts as 5 votes or
| something. so A 30 point post with 2 subs votes = 20
| normal voters + 2 subs)
| janalsncm wrote:
| I'm not sure. I think it's an interesting experiment at
| least. My prediction is that it will encourage clickbaity
| behavior similar to YouTube, which also has a profit
| sharing mechanism. Long form content has little chance to
| compete against drive-by laughs and memes. Maybe donations
| would help.
| nephanth wrote:
| Medium is a prime example of monetization leading to poor
| content
| jjcm wrote:
| 100% agree with everything said here.
|
| My original plan was to pay for ~100 users accounts and seed
| the site with content for a proper launch. Given what's
| happening today though, it felt at least pertinent to show off
| the current state and get some feedback.
|
| The balance between splash page on landing / landing on content
| is a hard one, but I think you're right. I am worried though
| that without conveying the initial business model, it'll be
| harder for users to understand that this isn't a direct reddit
| clone.
| kokanee wrote:
| An idea I mull over occasionally: what if you could spend
| your karma points to boost any given post? This would
| ultimately be another form of paid advertising, except that
| the currency used would be earned by contributing to the
| community. Then, allow people to sell their karma points for
| fiat currency. Companies would buy karma points directly from
| users in order to promote their self-promotional posts, but
| those posts would be subject to the same rules and moderation
| as any other post. That way you're actually paying your best
| users rather than charging them.
| PMunch wrote:
| To be honest I don't completely agree. The business model
| itself is what makes thin interesting, not to users, but to
| creators. Take me for example, I write tech articles from
| time to time, and the occasional video, presentation, or
| coding live stream. As it stands I don't make any money on
| this, I just do it for fun. But with a site like non.io
| there's no reason for me _not_ to post my content there. As
| long as you get some publicity out there (like you're doing
| with this) creators should hopefully start contributing. And
| once the creators are there, so will the users be! I agree
| though that the splash page is a bit strange, maybe throw up
| a popup over the content for people who aren't logged in and
| haven't visited the site before? Or at least put this info in
| a sidebar. The business model is as you say the core value
| proposition here, so if people don't get it right away the
| interest could quickly fade.
|
| Wish you the best of luck with this. And I'll look into
| posting my stuff on there as well, as I said there really
| isn't any reason not to
| yywwbbn wrote:
| > As it stands I don't make any money on this, I just do it
| for fun. But with a site like non.io there's no reason for
| me _not_ to post my content there.
|
| I'm obviously not targeting this at you but a business
| model likes this (paying fractions of a penny per upvote)
| is not likely to attract high quality content. In fact the
| opposite it incentives a quantity over quality approach
| (i.e. content has to be just good enough to get upvoted
| spending more effort is wasted)
| jdironman wrote:
| Niche groups, high quality content, users who don't
| upvote everything I think is the goal. Not up voting 100
| cat videos or memes and then wishing you could upvote a
| post that really helps you out on something or leads to
| good discussion. I think it tries to place weight on your
| upvote to mean more than just ticking something up but
| remind you that you are putting your money into someone's
| else's pocket and has what they provided you with worth
| it? It'd small enough that you don't feel like you're out
| too much monthly, but probably big enough for posts with
| upvotes in the thousands to give back to quality content
| creators (haven't done any math but yeah)
| alvarezbjm-hn wrote:
| What if there was a large button for upvote, and beside a
| smaller button for 100x upvote?
|
| Regular users can upvote 100 cat pictures for their
| dopamine hit, and when they find an ACTUALLY VALUABLE
| post they can look for the small button.
| ryandrake wrote:
| I think if the product itself is a web page, then the root
| www.domain.name needs to point to the product itself, not a
| description of the product. Imagine if I went to
| www.amazon.com and instead of the store, that page was a
| marketing template listing Amazon's business case and a few
| screenshots of what shopping at Amazon looks like.
|
| IMO the only good reason to have a marketing/business-case
| landing page is if the product itself hasn't been built yet.
| Once the product exists, move the marketing page over to
| /about
| biorach wrote:
| maybe make the first 10,000 or 100,000 accounts free for
| life?
|
| you need to build momentum somehow
|
| maybe summarise what your users need to understand in a
| sidebar or closeable top-bar?
| all2 wrote:
| You could also incentivize early adopters. For example, if
| you're in the first 100k users, your money/upvote goes
| twice as far. Something like that.
| spdif899 wrote:
| In a way this feels similar to nebula - nebula currently has
| no comment functionality and points to reddit threads for
| communities around their videos. Wonder if that group would
| be interested in experimenting given the heavy overlap in
| business model.
| sesteel wrote:
| Why not pin your business model as the top post for awhile
| until it catches on?
| root_axis wrote:
| For sure - striking the right design balance is tough. If it
| were me, I'd try to keep content in the user's face as much
| as possible, and maybe inform the user about the unique
| value-add with non-intrusive sidebars, header/footers or
| system generated PMs.
|
| It's not easy, and the value of an expert UX designer really
| shines when walking the tight-rope between informing and
| annoying your users.
|
| Also, consider investing in reliable A/B testing
| infrastructure if you haven't already. One of the biggest
| mistakes I've seen is trying to grow a product while driving
| half-blind based on napkin sql queries as metrics. Understand
| who is using the site, how often, when they are experiencing
| errors, and which types of changes actually encourage growth
| KPIs - but be careful, loading up the site with 3rd party
| trackers and intrusive js will introduce bugs and kill site
| performance - another balancing act hehe.
| this_user wrote:
| The font on the root domains is also really small, at least on
| a desktop FF. You also can't really interact with anything
| except for the (very small) "log in" and "register" buttons at
| the top right corner, which is really frustrating if you are
| looking for some actual content. In fact, there seems to be no
| way of getting to the content at all via link. Lastly, the
| image in the top right is distracting, because it drags the
| user's focus there and away from the left side where the text
| starts; your eyes aren't really sure where they should be
| looking.
| SkyMarshal wrote:
| Mostly agree. The screenshot in the top right looks good, like
| professional app I might actually use. But I want to actually
| browse the site and check it out without first slogging through
| a registration process. If it's free to view/browse anyway,
| then enable doing that without registering. Register and pay if
| you want to post.
|
| Edit: You can browse without registering after all, here's the
| link: https://non.io/#all (didn't see it on the landing page or
| OP post).
| neogodless wrote:
| Oof, I clicked one of those posts and immediately lost all
| back-button functionality to an endless stream of history
| events.
| jjcm wrote:
| Was it the "Daniel's Site" post? There's some weird
| interactions I'm finding with that iframe'd html upload and
| the history events.
| jefozabuss wrote:
| As someone who dealt with payment iframes in SPAs I'm so
| happy I don't have to use any iframes nowadays. There are
| a few articles how you can "kind of track" when the
| iframe caused extra history entries then you need to
| increase your back navigation by the count of them, it
| was a mess back in the days so not sure how is it solved
| nowadays.
| willio58 wrote:
| The fact that this isn't on the landing page doesn't bode
| well for a 4 year old project.
| javajosh wrote:
| Too harsh. That's normal if it's only now seeing light of
| day.
| willio58 wrote:
| Are you being serious? The landing page had 1 job and it
| failed at doing it. I'm all for reddit alternatives but
| c'mon, a page showing off a product that fails to clearly
| link to said product is just funny.
| thallium205 wrote:
| The marketing page is not readable on mobile either.
| alvarezbjm-hn wrote:
| On Firefox Android, I could read the landing page and
| browse afyer creating an account.
|
| I was not able to create an account. (I had to go desktop)
| basch wrote:
| For a site to work it either needs to
|
| a) seed itself with tons of j referring links. At the end of
| the day people come for the content not the platform.
|
| b) target moderation groups and convince individual smaller
| communities to transport themselves wholesale. Go down the dark
| list and start marketing to each mod team one by one.
| 1270018080 wrote:
| Option b would work so well this month. Hundreds of thousands
| of motivated users and moderators just waiting for that
| better option.
| digitallyfree wrote:
| If you ask me to make an account before I can see your content
| (even if it looks interesting) that's a turn off and I'll go
| somewhere else. Maybe have a button at the top that says
| "explore as guest" or something like that?
|
| Also you should advertise that this is an open-source project
| on the landing page, as that may cause more people to be
| interested in trying it out.
| ctenb wrote:
| https://non.io/#all
| benreesman wrote:
| I think a lot of this is exactly the kind of constructive
| critique the OP is looking for, and I upvoted your comment for
| being high-value.
|
| But I'm currently working on being a _little_ more diplomatic,
| and too often I regret throwing in low-signal "this is a tech
| demo" type summaries next to _my_ substantial remarks.
|
| I hope this comes off as "fellow user working on this" and not
| a person in a glass house with rocks.
| root_axis wrote:
| Yes! I made a little edit just to make it clear I'm not
| trying to dismiss the hard work, and even though it's a
| really hard space to compete in, _someone_ has to try or
| there will never be alternatives.
| benreesman wrote:
| Hey, you responded better to that feedback than I probably
| would have!
|
| Serious thank you for leading the way on high-value habits
| I'm still working on!
| TrevorJ wrote:
| This thread is wholesome AF.
| ysavir wrote:
| If you're open for alternatives, framing it in in a way
| like "I know you're trying to accomplish X, but due to Y, I
| think the outcome is more along Z". So something like "I
| know you're going for a soft launch, but without providing
| a more concrete and demonstrative user experience, the
| current status of the project is more of a tech demo".
|
| This approach acknowledges what the person is trying to
| accomplish, and lays out the obstacles before arriving at
| the conclusion, which then feels more natural. The
| recipient is able to follow your thinking and hopefully
| "arrive" at the conclusion along with you. When you start
| with the conclusion, you risk having a jarring moment where
| you start with something unexpected, and that can generate
| friction.
| 98codes wrote:
| 100% -- I'm not creating an account if I can't use the app,
| demo the app, or otherwise get a proper idea of what I'm
| signing up for, in order to see if it'll be worth my time to
| begin with.
| ctenb wrote:
| There is https://non.io/#all
| ipaddr wrote:
| Should be the homepage.
| [deleted]
| varenc wrote:
| Another minor nit: the homepage isn't really very mobile
| friendly. I think any Reddit replacement needs good mobile
| usability and the homepage not being too mobile friendly isn't
| a great sign.
|
| I absolutely love the project though! Will check it out now.
| sitkack wrote:
| Only start charging when the sub or channel becomes large
| enough (something like boosts)
|
| But yes, it needs a new capability that is the hook.
| WWLink wrote:
| Instead of a splash page, I'd recommend making a box that shows
| as like, top 2 posts introducing the site and welcoming the
| user to create an account and stuff.
| activiation wrote:
| I agree with most of it and the mobile layout sucks for the
| marketing page.
| EGreg wrote:
| Make it costly for creators to actually post something. They can
| recoup in upvotes. That's the proper incentive structure ... by
| posting you're imposing on other people actually, and their
| attention. If what you posted recoups and goes on to get you a
| lot of points, great! But if you posted crap, make that be
| costly.
|
| In fact, make "upvotes" be zero-sum transfers from the user to
| another. They have a limited amount and their upvotes will mean
| something. If you have downvotes then I guess the person is
| willing to lose that amount, just so the other guy does also.
|
| Here is the full tokenomics:
| https://community.qbix.com/t/preventing-spam-and-sybil-attac...
| akiranews wrote:
| I hope this is the Reddit killer! Good luck <3
| [deleted]
| goncalomb wrote:
| So posts need to have a unique/custom path directly under the
| main domain?
|
| https://non.io/avo-jump
|
| Sounds like a recipe for disaster. At least it should be in a
| sub-path (/post/?), and probably include some sort of unique id.
| replwoacause wrote:
| I don't think users should get any input on the URL. I'm
| failing to see the upside in allowing this.
| thedeepself wrote:
| [dead]
| PUSH_AX wrote:
| You know I often daydream of creating a social media site that
| has a small monthly subscription, a way to show users they are
| not the product, a way to maintain integrity and not have to
| appease any VCs.
|
| But when faced with it here I couldn't help but recoil a bit, and
| I'm not sure why.
| DANmode wrote:
| Because you're not the party with whom the trust lies.
| tjoff wrote:
| Really hope it succeeds!
|
| Maybe there could be an low-effort area where you don't get paid.
|
| I get the site is targeting creators, but I also get the
| impression that it is about general discussions etc? As a user it
| feels weird to give equal money to a discussion as someones
| awesome multi-month project, especially since there will probably
| be more discussions than awesome multi-month projects.
|
| I really like the lurk for free but pay to participate approach.
| Getting paid however feels like a possible distraction that might
| just overcomplicate things, both technical and
| moderation+incentives. I don't think most people would be doing
| it for the money (and for most people it would at best be pocket
| change anyway). Getting rid of ads is the killer-feature that
| hopefully builds a good community, I guess/hope.
|
| Getting people to enter their credit cards is probably harder
| than the actual amount, so the appeal of getting the money back
| is still red in the balance-sheet for pocket-change amounts.
|
| My biggest gripe is that payments kills anonymity (which some
| might see as a big thing).
| bee_rider wrote:
| It could be interesting to be able to mark a bits of content as
| dependents, and have them pay a portion of their reward to the
| parent. This could be recursive.
| chillbill wrote:
| Mobile web needs to be addressed...
| jjcm wrote:
| 100%. I'm still working on it. I announced today without it
| purely because of what's happening with Reddit. Mobile designs
| are here:
| https://www.figma.com/file/DStwulDd9Vd3TLjrMuxZ9y/nonio-desi...
|
| Probs will be another month before I get the branch merged
| however.
| chillbill wrote:
| Very happy to hear that, I looked more into your service and
| I'm really hoping you can succeed!
| loufe wrote:
| I love the business model. Have you checked in with credit card
| processors yet regarding "no content type demonitization"? Cool
| in principal but many sites like onlyfans have gone through hell
| with credit card issuers playing the moral police.
|
| Also, have you considered making it a foundation or non-profit as
| a business model? IMO the for-profit nature of Reddit is behind
| its troubles right now. You could pay yourself a handsome salary
| as the foundation's CEO while still keeping things pro-user.
| benreesman wrote:
| As others have said, congratulations on what is clearly a lot of
| solid work and a very interesting bet about how to dodge some of
| the traps e.g. Reddit is in all this grief over.
|
| And this is the kind of moment that projects like this get a
| chance: struggling incumbent, #1 on HN, this is a great moment!
|
| My 2c is that I'd stay flexible on the revenue model, even if
| you're pretty sure you don't want to do adds there are a variety
| of interesting variations on the paid model, there's kinda left
| field stuff like Brave's BAT thing (probably worth emailing their
| people for a fun chat either way) and lots of Patreon-style
| stuff.
|
| I'd really nail the simple-sounding but critical stuff (and
| you're well on your way!) before I got too attached to a revenue
| strategy.
| kernal wrote:
| Is there any written guarantee that all of the user created
| content is public domain in perpetuity and can be exported by
| anyone? Because if not than this is just another Reddit wannabe
| clone that will flip on a dime once it gets a sniff of user
| traction a potential exit.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| Reminds me of retroshare, which is fully peer to peer and
| anonymizing. Anyone here try it before? Meant for closed
| communities and not open/global so a different niche I suppose
|
| https://retroshare.cc/
| ColoursofOSINT wrote:
| [dead]
| jshreder wrote:
| I like the idea and am curious to see how well / if this gains
| traction. Nice UI, although I'm having trouble actually
| subscribing on the financials page, and it seems to show demo
| data?
|
| Great job launching something!
|
| https://pasteboard.co/eRp2eCMwkExq.png
| jjcm wrote:
| Yep, still working through the financial aspects. The
| financials page is definitely demo data!
|
| This link should let you subscribe: https://non.io/admin/first-
| time-signup if you're really keen. That said, I've allowed all
| functionality on the free tier for the time being until I get
| things like that financials page complete.
| jshreder wrote:
| Ah, gotcha! I'll keep noodling around :)
| lunaticneko wrote:
| It's a strange concept, but interesting. You might need to ensure
| that the system is difficult to game, though.
| brody_hamer wrote:
| How will you combat plagiarism?
|
| I wouldn't want to see someone else profiting off my content.
|
| I'm guessing you'd place a hold on any payout, until you've
| reviewed their content? But I'm thinking about the claims /
| reporting process.
| cryoz wrote:
| You should post this on /r/RedditAlternatives/ as well if you
| haven't already. Also, clickable link: https://non.io/#all
| jjcm wrote:
| I did, but they weren't a fan of the paid model for
| interaction:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/147qzfb...
| danem wrote:
| So people want a social media platform that has broad reach,
| high availability, (some) algorithmic curation, never ending
| content, moderation, first-class mobile support, but aren't
| willing to pay for it in any way (ads or subscriptions). This
| is precisely why I don't see anyone replacing Reddit. Niche
| communities will continue to exist and thrive on the internet
| but the mega social media aggregators like twitter, reddit,
| etc only seem to be viable (who knows for how long) with the
| same old business model: ads and VC money.
| sosodev wrote:
| Yeah, I suspect paid social media isn't going to work. It
| sucks because it's probably the only sustainable model. VC
| has really warped people's perception of software costs.
| shmatt wrote:
| I swear, the current protests have shined a very odd light on
| the average commenting Redditor, they want
|
| * The website to be free
|
| * The API to be cheap
|
| * The ability to use a 3rd party app that does not track,
| advertise, or monetize you in any way
|
| * VCs to continue to pour hundreds of millions of dollars to
| run the site and never ask for an ROI
|
| Good luck kids
| jasonlotito wrote:
| > they want
|
| ... the product that exists.
|
| > VCs to continue to pour hundreds of millions of dollars
| to run the site and never ask for an ROI
|
| VCs are free to ask for an ROI.
|
| They are not owed an ROI.
|
| Only the kids think they are. Especially childish people
| who think people are owed money for a crap product just
| because they put money into a business before where the
| goal was growth, not necessarily profitability.
| sosodev wrote:
| That's just the average internet user. They want something
| for nothing and often get it.
|
| If you do ask for a few dollars a month you have to provide
| a ton of perceived value. That's despite the fact that they
| would spend it on snacks without hesitation.
| kcatskcolbdi wrote:
| Then sell them snacks.
| bardak wrote:
| Look at the vitriol that YouTube premium gets. I get it
| there are a lot of people that know how to have an ad
| free YouTube without paying. I don't like that some basic
| app features like background video playing are locked
| behind premium.
|
| But at the end of the day the I am sure that for a large
| portion of people complaining they spent the majority of
| their video watching time watching YouTube. If it's not
| worth it to you to pay the equivalent of a big mac meal
| month to get rid of ads that's fine but don't act all
| morally superior to those that do.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| That is the sad truth, the minds of most people
| disintegrate completely from all kind of logic or
| soundness when "free" is in the equation. People line up
| for long times to get free food that would've cost them a
| couple of bucks, people who are highly paid spend hours
| and weeks of their life arguing on the internet about why
| they can't and won't pay $5 for some software or online
| service.
|
| As patience of creators and curators begin to run more
| thin, today's information society will split into tiers
| of those who pay and get good information vs those who
| demand free and will splash around in the filth of the
| free information sewers. The filth being ads, spyware,
| malware, low quality content, spiritually harmful
| content, government propaganda and worse.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| OpenStreetMap costs a few hundred thousand dollars a year
| to run. Wikipedia is about $3 million. Redditors are cheap,
| but you can have a backend doing the heavy lifting for a
| community (assuming mods work for free) at a cost that can
| be sustained with a small pool of financial contributors.
|
| > VCs to continue to pour hundreds of millions of dollars
| to run the site and never ask for an ROI
|
| None of this needs to cost hundreds of millions of dollars.
| joshjob42 wrote:
| Yeah, if they just dropped image/video hosting on the
| site, it's just a bunch of text and javascript (aka
| text), etc. Serving that is extremely cheap. They went
| from 400 employees in 2019 to 2000 now. I subscribed to
| Premium for years (not anymore due to their recent
| actions), and they should absolutely be able to run the
| site easily on the ~$600M in revenue they make now and be
| handily profitable.
| marssaxman wrote:
| I guess they want Usenet.
| jrflowers wrote:
| > VCs to continue to pour hundreds of millions of dollars
| to run the site and never ask for an ROI
|
| Where have you seen somebody say that they wouldn't post
| without venture funding for a given platform?
| DSMan195276 wrote:
| > * The ability to use a 3rd party app that does not track,
| advertise, or monetize you in any way
|
| I disagree on this point - I'm pretty sure all the big 3rd
| party apps at least have ads. The problem is fundamentally
| just that the 3rd party apps are a lot better than the
| official app, and have been for some time. If Reddit had
| made the official app better (which they've had _years_ to
| do) then significantly less people would care about any of
| this.
|
| They also could have gone the Spotify route, which I think
| would have gone over significantly better - Keep the API
| as-is, but require a paid premium account login to use it.
| Functionally it's not even really a difference, but it
| means Reddit deals with all the details rather than the 3rd
| party apps. However, functionally the goal was to simply
| price the 3rd party apps out of existence, so that's
| probably why they didn't do this.
|
| It's also pretty clear from the response that they never
| thought this through, which is hard to believe. They had to
| have it pointed out to them that tons of stuff currently
| uses the API which has no replacement, you'd think they'd
| have reviewed what currently uses the API before
| drastically changing it. Reddit has gotten significant
| value for free by having people write code against their
| API, that's code they didn't need to write themselves.
| chrisdhal wrote:
| > I'm pretty sure all the big 3rd party apps at least
| have ads.
|
| I use(d) Relay for Redit, paid a small ($5?, maybe) one
| time fee for the "Premium" version a few years ago and
| have never see an ad. You are correct in the sense that
| if you use the free version of Relay (and possibly
| others), you would have ads from the app, not Reddit, but
| if you're willing to pay a small amount, you can get rid
| of them.
| Nagyman wrote:
| People will always want free things; that's nothing new!
| Especially on an Internet that was born free (aside from
| the cost to connect).
|
| The average "Reddit" business is pretty odd; they want:
|
| * Paying subscribers _and_ advertising revenue
|
| * Free content: posts & comments
|
| * Free moderation: voting & ToS enforcement
|
| * The ability to monopolize said content
|
| * Contributors to continue to pour millions of man-hours to
| make content for the site and never ask for anything like
| ad-free viewing, an enjoyable user-experience, tooling,
| etc.
|
| Social platforms present a difficult balance between the
| users, contributors, moderators, and business - all within
| a very hostile internet (in terms of security, spam, etc).
|
| For payment to happen, users do demand significant value to
| be parted from their $. In Reddit's case, the 3rd party
| apps are strongly desired because the 1st party app does
| not meet their needs (users _pay_ for these apps!). Reddit
| doesn't want to compete on UX, as they're demonstrably bad
| at it; partially due to lack of skill and due to mismatched
| incentives.
|
| It seems like they incorrectly assume that they own the
| community, rather than the other way around. Reddit's
| primary value is in the content they are _given_ in
| exchange for hosting & tools - both of which are have
| significant downward cost pressure (which _should_ trend
| towards free, given a large enough community).
|
| Reddit is trying to switch their customers from users to
| advertisers in order to make a profit, which is difficult
| after years of _generally_ serving users. It is bait and
| switch at it's finest and most egregious.
| f_souza wrote:
| The 3rd party app issue, and most of the API problem
| consequently, wouldn't be such a big issue if they didn't
| take forever to release the official app, only to put out
| an awful one when they finally did. You don't see many
| people using 3rd party apps for other social media.
| shmatt wrote:
| You think Facebook would let a large percentage of users
| use a 3rd party app that blocks all advertisements,
| tracking, and other monetization? Look at how Meta
| treated the whole Apple tracking ordeal
|
| If a lone dev would have made an app like Apollo for FB,
| they would be under 10,000 pages of litigation the next
| day
|
| People don't use the FB app because its great. They would
| love a non-tracking version of the same service. It's
| just not allowed
| dale_glass wrote:
| Partly it's because Reddit is in an antagonistic
| relationship with its users. People want a good message
| board. A good message board doesn't make for very good
| advertisements. What do you advertise on /r/ChangeMyView ?
|
| Partly it's because Reddit has squandered its users'
| goodwill. I'd be willing to pay for Reddit if it was clear
| Reddit was going to work in my favor. Since right now it's
| doing its best to run off the mobile app I'm using, why on
| earth would I do that?
| DANmode wrote:
| > What do you advertise on /r/ChangeMyView ?
|
| Drink protectors and antidepressants.
| pie420 wrote:
| See: Wikipedia, Craigslist, AO3. all perfectly great
| websites not ruined by spam, tracking, backend, fancy
| graphics. Just great content, lightweight and clear UI.
| GordonS wrote:
| Could these goals could actually be achievable, via a
| community-sponsored model, similar to how Wikipedia works?
|
| I'm not sure it would work, there are just so many
| challenges, over and beyond the initial bootstrapping.
| tayo42 wrote:
| Without vc, cheap and ad supported is reasonable. Vc
| pumping in millions and expecting returns that requires
| building a company is the problem
|
| Does reddit really need, hr, middle managers, sales,
| marketing, design teams. It wouldn't if it had a focused
| goal. Now it has all sorts of crap and extra features to
| try be profitable.
| herpdyderp wrote:
| Can't open links in new tabs :/
| wellthisisgreat wrote:
| Dude you need to figure out your landing page ASAP. The marketing
| splash thingie isn't doing you any favors. Route the root to /all
| and allow a simple registration. This is the moment when you can
| get the users, the current splash page is horrible for it.
| mvuijlst wrote:
| Is there a way to actually pay yet?
| gardenfelder wrote:
| It's quite an interesting business model. Qudos...
|
| Happy to see it at github: go server, javascript frontside.
| Zetice wrote:
| You should scrape the popular posts off of Reddit's /r/all and
| post them on here as well.
|
| And, IMO, you should ignore (and possibly even actively flaunt)
| any of Reddit's TOS.
| Quikinterp wrote:
| I like the subscription model. Wish Spotify worked like this
| jjcm wrote:
| It's funny, I originally pitched this about 8 years ago to some
| VCs, and Spotify was the example I used as a platform that
| could do things much better.
|
| Turned down the funding offers I got, and kicked things off in
| more of a slow-burn sideproject style after that.
| ericd wrote:
| I think it basically does? I think they pay out a big chunk of
| the subscription fees to songs based on plays.
| HellzStormer wrote:
| From what I remember last time I checked on this. % of money
| goes to a pot. Money is then globally distributed based on
| time listened globally (nothing is specific to you for the
| distribution).
|
| So barely any of the money you put in goes to the artists you
| actually listen to.
| krm01 wrote:
| I think with some very basic UI/UX tweaks this can very quickly
| look, feel and perform 10X better. I applaud your efforts and if
| you need help. Just ask (details in bio). Happy to lend a helping
| hand or give you a few quick wins.
|
| Congrats on the launch.
| jhatemyjob wrote:
| I dont mean to sound harsh but I believe this project is a waste
| of your time. If you want to make money, I would abandon this
| immediately. Cut your losses and start something new.
| hbarka wrote:
| Sorry for the trivial nitpic but in the interest of reducing
| ambiguity the login asks for email and "hackernews" is literally
| not an email address.
| artisanspam wrote:
| I have to recommend that this platform doesn't give users a
| profit motive. It encourages quantity over quality and only
| "front-page" worthy content. Niche communities won't get traction
| this way. A few Gallowboob-level posters will be making most of
| the profit.
|
| That's not to say that a financial incentive is a bad idea,
| though. If you capped the amount that a user made per month to
| the cost of their subscription - $1, then there's no profit for
| users to make. They're just saving money on the subscription
| cost.
| bardak wrote:
| The use of tags vs discrete communities keeps it from being a
| viable alternative to Reddit for me.
|
| I have a real disdain for tags for user generated content. Every
| site I have seen use tags I end up having to wade through a ton
| of spam or vaugly related content to whatever tag I am looking
| for. The only exception I can think of is Hashtags for twitter
| but that is due to the character limit.
|
| I understand that people see tages as a solution to crossposting
| but I think people overlook the benefits of crossposting. Being
| able to have seperate conversations on AI art in an art community
| vs programming community is more useful to me than having a
| single post that both communities comment on.
| jjcm wrote:
| It's a hybrid model, and I'd be curious if people like this or
| not as it's been something I'm fiddling with.
|
| Note that when you vote, you upvote the tag itself. The vote
| within the tag determines its order when browsing the tag
| itself. So if something is tagged with #formula1 and has 483
| upvotes for the tag, it will appear high in the #formula1 list
| view. If it's also tagged with #funny with 1 upvote, it will
| appear low in the #funny list despite the high votes on
| #formula1.
| geuis wrote:
| Yah the main feature I'm looking for on your site is to be
| able to create my own subs for different topics like I have
| on Reddit. I like the pay to vote feature, but missing subs
| is really a deal breaker.
| bardak wrote:
| That is a pretty good solution to the relevant tags and spam
| issues I was worried about. Good thinking there. One half of
| my issues gone.
|
| The single conversation is still a big problem for me. I
| really like being able to have conversations within a
| specific community and get specific angles on a topic. I also
| like to look at a conversation on the same topic in different
| subreddits to see how different communities react. It's not
| to say that one way is inhertly better but more of a personal
| preference.
| GordonS wrote:
| I like hashtags - but, like you, I don't think they work as the
| _primary_ means of content discovery.
| bardak wrote:
| Honestly I believe that hashtags only work on twitter due to
| the character limit. If hashtags were exempt from the
| character limit it would be a complete mess.
| kraftman wrote:
| I think an option to only show comments from people subscribed
| to the same communities as you, or the community you're viewing
| the content from could solve this.
| bardak wrote:
| What do you do when there are comment threads between
| subscribers of different tags. Or what if somebody is
| subscribed to both tags but wanting to comment based more on
| the viewpoint of one of the tags.
|
| I'm not saying it couldn't work but I don't think it would be
| as trivial as that.
|
| I also like that subreddits were able to foster their own
| communities with different expectations and cultures. I feel
| like using tags you are more or less forced to have a single
| overall community vs many smaller ones.
| kraftman wrote:
| I took a stab at this a long time ago and I came up with
| two solutions,
|
| The first is an account setting for the user that allows
| them to hide all comments from people that arent part of
| any community that the post shows up in: https://github.com
| /kraftman/TenTags.io/blob/bc6f3046dda4815b...
|
| The second is to allow filtering all of the comments by the
| communities the comments came from:
| https://github.com/kraftman/TenTags.io/blob/dev/api-
| cdn/view...
| 1270018080 wrote:
| Is it pronounced nonio?
| DomRao04 wrote:
| i love how you divy up all the funds for upvotes. thats so
| creative
| danudey wrote:
| I like the concept, though I agree with a lot of the comments
| about people content farming and reposting comments for upvotes
| and I think that would kill the site (since Reddit already has
| enough of a problem with this and that's just for fake internet
| points).
|
| The thing that I think a lot of people are missing about Reddit
| is that it's not a content aggregation site like HN or Digg or
| your site, Non.io; it's a community of communities.
|
| I've seen so many reddit-likes which switch from 'subreddits' to
| hashtags, but that doesn't work for what makes Reddit great. On
| Reddit, you can create your own communities and control who is in
| them, set rules for them, moderate them how you want, and so on.
| For example, /r/AskHistorians has some extremely specific rules
| and moderation; /r/GirlGamers is a community of like-minded
| (typically female) individuals. /r/Trans is (in theory?) a safe
| place for the trans community to interact with one another.
| /r/BreakingMom is a place where mothers can vent without
| repercussions and non-mothers are not welcome to contribute
| content.
|
| None of that is possible in this hashtag design. The #trans
| hashtag will be a shitshow of offensive, triggering, and
| deliberately abusive content, and there's nothing the trans
| community could do about that.
|
| Toxic users on your platform will drive out anyone they don't
| like, and the only recourse users will have is to ask you (the
| admins/moderators) to ban those users - and now you have to make
| the decision of _all_ of the content that is allowed on the site.
| Are you going to allow transphobic jokes on the site? If so, you
| 're going to drive away trans people (and anyone with a sense of
| decency). If not, you're going to have to constantly be banning
| people from the whole site and not just part of it.
|
| I think it's a cool site, but I think this software could be used
| to replace only one subreddit and not all of Reddit itself.
| JustBreath wrote:
| Yeah one key missing feature is subreddit creation and
| moderation.
|
| Without all the free labor from moderators curating content for
| topics with different tastes and ideas about what the community
| should be, it's going to be a struggle to build a community.
| afterburner wrote:
| Yeah, creating a community is hard work, all those free
| moderators made it possible, if not perfect.
|
| Also, I'm mainly on sites like Reddit for the discussion, so
| those people creating millions of comments in communities are
| the main draw for me. Finding the perfect karma model was
| never the solution, we only ever needed one that was "good
| enough". And that's actually very easy, provided you aren't
| trying to frankenstein the algo-feed to serve advertisers.
| demizer wrote:
| Maybe that extra dollar should go to the mods? And the
| communities get to elect their mods so they can be held
| accountable. Maybe we won't get the MrBabyMan or
| POTATO_IN_MY_ANUS situation.
| galaxyLogic wrote:
| Cool. Can you shed some light on how you handle the logistics of
| charging for it? Which payment processor etc. ?
| nickspag wrote:
| I've always liked the idea of this monetization model. But have
| you thought about how to disincentivize content stealing? Feels
| like these models end up needing a very thorough verification
| system.
| jjcm wrote:
| It's a hard problem for sure. My hope is that paid users are
| easier to moderate than unpaid users, especially when Stripe
| Connect (what I use for payouts) verifies identity quite a bit.
| RileyJames wrote:
| I like the idea of paid to comment / interact.
|
| I mostly lurk reddit / read.
|
| But understanding its balance between sustainability and
| popularity, is there a lower bound to free that can ensure the
| content is posted to seo the space popular?
|
| 1-3 free submissions per month would be enough for me.but if I
| started a sub (which I've considered a few times) I'd see enough
| value to pay.
|
| Love the idea. Good luck. The timing is great. The audience is
| ready for a new model.
| alekratz wrote:
| You're asking me to sign up before I can even see what I'm
| signing up for. Let me look at the content first.
| afterburner wrote:
| I don't see a scroll bar in the feed window?
| AegirLeet wrote:
| Hm, I don't really see how this is Reddit-like. It doesn't seem
| to have anything like subreddits.
|
| If I wanted to recreate a subreddit on non.io, how would I do
| that? How would I enforce rules?
| coding123 wrote:
| What are you serving it using?
|
| It's surviving what I imagine to be a huge hug of death.
| 58x14 wrote:
| My first 5 minutes have been positive. I've worked for years on a
| similar platform but never expected to have the time to ship, so
| I appreciate that you've implemented a few patterns/features that
| I was hoping for, namely tag-based subscriptions.
|
| Bug report: on latest Firefox with uBlock Origin, I have a
| strange UI bug on the root/home page: without any activity from
| cursor or otherwise, there is a dropdown that appears to show
| emails saved in my browser for form auto-fill. This is visible in
| the top left which seems to be in the same place where your
| registration sidebar is.
|
| I have quite a number of thoughts and questions which I'll move
| to the platform. Great job.
| novok wrote:
| %98 lurk, %1.9 comment and %0.1 make content that make the rest
| of the group come in and lurk / comment in the first place. You
| probably want to invert the payment model in a way and still give
| money to content creators, or make it a platform which content
| creators can get paid and take a cut, like substack.
|
| But you have a chicken/egg issue there too, which is why coke
| when it was first getting started gave coke to various soda
| fountain places to bootstrap demand in the first place.
| InCityDreams wrote:
| Oh, that kind of Coke!
|
| #samebusinessmodel
| leeoniya wrote:
| on a desktop display i would expect some kind of limit on content
| width, plus centering. right now the content is left-aligned to
| about 15% of the full page width: https://non.io/#all
| [deleted]
| ljdawson-sync wrote:
| I'm the developer of Sync for Reddit. If you want to explore
| making an Android app I'm about to have a lot of time on my
| hands...
| capnjngl wrote:
| Listen to this guy. Sync is a fantastically well-designed app.
| hbn wrote:
| I haven't been on Android for a few years now, but the years I
| was, your client was my favorite. Thanks for making it!
| jjcm wrote:
| Extremely interested in talking. I was actually going to reach
| out to you/RIF/Apollo.
|
| Do you mind sending me an email at j@jjcm.org? Would love to
| talk more.
|
| I have some plans for 3rd party app revenue sharing I'd love
| your thoughts on. What I'm thinking is that with the $1/mo
| server fee I charge users, I'd carve out 30c of that as the
| "frontend fee", which I would distribute evenly between the
| frontends that user was using that month. If they were only
| using an app, I'd pay that app $0.30 for the month for that
| user. If they were using the app and the website, each would
| get $0.15 for the month.
| BudaDude wrote:
| Do you plan to support Activity Pub?
| parker_mountain wrote:
| For what it's worth, you should add openid/google/apple/etc auth.
| Registration friction is going to be one of the hardest things
| you face, especially on mobile, which is where a lot of people
| are these days.
| RaderH2O wrote:
| [dead]
| vxNsr wrote:
| I gotta say I'm impressed, this thread has over 300 comments and
| everything still feels smooth, for a dynamic site that's quite
| the feat to escape the hn hug of death.
| stickfigure wrote:
| Depending on how fast you can execute it may be too late, but
| right now you have a brief window of opportunity to get a seedbed
| of users.
|
| Reproduce the Reddit API exactly such that these soon-to-be-
| defunct client apps can work with minimal changes (ideally, just
| a configurable root domain). Reach out to the client authors and
| see if they will enable your site. Maybe you'll capture some of
| those user communities.
| JustBreath wrote:
| Definitely, two killer features:
|
| - Nearly plug-n-play with the Reddit API
|
| - Support for subreddits with mod management
| ApolloFortyNine wrote:
| I like the idea, but it's almost like your sales model and
| distribution model is conflicting with itself. You realize how
| important the content creators/submitters are to the platform so
| you agree to split money with them, but you also are charging
| them to use the platform.
|
| If anything the most valuable members are the contributors. Stats
| on this very, but something like 1% of users ever make a
| submission, and only 10% or so comment.
| bonestamp2 wrote:
| > everything left gets split evenly between everything you upvote
| that month
|
| Does that include comments that are upvoted? I mean, in some
| cases the submission itself is just a question and all the value
| is in the contribution from the users in the comments.
| jjcm wrote:
| No, comments are outside the contribution model.
|
| I have some early designs that show a user setting that lets
| you allocate a % split between comments and posts, but for now
| I wanted to preserve the simplicity of the model.
| bonestamp2 wrote:
| Fair enough, but for some submissions (like questions), all
| of the value is in the comments.
|
| Also, I think a lot of long time users contribute a lot of
| value in the way of: helpful comments, upvotes, downvotes,
| spam reports, tech support, etc and they're not recognized
| for the value that they add. I'm happy to see that your
| product has the opportunity to recognize that and hopefully
| that will be enabled in the future.
| SignalM wrote:
| Fantastic idea and great work!
| aziis98 wrote:
| Wow, it looks like this has a Vanilla JS frontend
| jdlyga wrote:
| What would be really powerful is an API compatible alternative to
| Reddit. There's a ton of already developed apps just itching for
| a new platform to use them with.
| knorker wrote:
| Your site doesn't think "$&m22KPBeB$!7&^l" is a strong enough
| password.
|
| Uhm... okay?
| jjcm wrote:
| Interesting, I was able to sign up with it.
|
| Can I ask if you're using a password manager / what browser
| you're using?
|
| Also for context, instead of testing password length/number of
| characters, I look for overall entropy in the formula of
| [alphabet length for char set used]^(number of letters in
| password). The one you described is well above the limit.
| alexb_ wrote:
| > instead of testing password length/number of characters, I
| look for overall entropy in the formula of [alphabet length
| for char set used]^(number of letters in password).
|
| You should do none of this. It shouldn't be the websites
| concern if my account gets hacked - basic password
| requirements are fine, but anything that goes past a
| character count is just making the UX worse. The requirements
| increase friction, which you've already put at a high level
| due to requiring payment.
| john-radio wrote:
| Obviously it isn't, when you've just posted it here!
| cwkoss wrote:
| - test login doesn't work
|
| - loginless browsing drops user into New which is full of garbage
|
| - when I click popular, I still don't see any interesting
| content.
|
| :-| - i think you have a chicken and egg problem. Why pay to post
| somewhere without readers? why read when there isn't any
| interesting content?
| pxoe wrote:
| so, people would have to pay in order to do the thankless "job"
| of sorting through content. "pay for the ability to rank and
| moderate!". great sales pitch. very enticing. seems like a
| failure to understand why 'upvotes/downvotes/points' exist and
| what do they accomplish.
| dotancohen wrote:
| I logged in using the loginless browsing link. I could not see
| where to create a new post, nor where the "subs" are, if they
| exist. I tried to reply to a post, but instead of a functional
| HTML textarea I got some javascipt box that seemed to add two
| newlines after every character that I typed in.
| the_gipsy wrote:
| The back button doesn't remember scroll position, it always takes
| me to the top. Can't really use this as is.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| I like the idea and the price is fine. But I'd rather pay $2 for
| the servers instead of rewarding posters. The problem is that
| once they start making money it will become too
| clickbaity/commercial. I strongly dislike the mass content most
| "pro" YouTubers like Linus tech tips and the like generate.
|
| Reddit never really had this because all you could give was
| subscription time. Paying causes this mainstream focus and
| clickbaiting.
|
| Maybe you feel the need to attract content generators to your
| platform but it will only create more mediocre content IMO.
|
| What was so great about Reddit was that people created amazing
| content that they were passionate about, regardless of whether it
| paid well or not.
| twic wrote:
| Cool project! For something like this to succeed at Reddit's
| scale, it should stay snappy under load (which admittedly Reddit
| doesn't). So clicked through to Github to see what it's written
| in:
|
| > Languages
|
| > Shell 100.0%
|
| I admired the absolute chadliness of this decision - until i
| realised this was just a top-level super-repo.
| ZeroCool2u wrote:
| I also saw this and was initially both equally horrified and
| impressed.
| Endy wrote:
| I find the concept interesting, but I see no reason to spend
| money when platforms with larger communities only want easily-
| obfuscated personal data or easily-blocked advertising
| impressions. If anything, the number of sites which are
| advertising themselves as "like Reddit, except..." today is proof
| that Advance Media (and Spez) are right in exerting their
| influence over Reddit's users and their channels of engagement.
| UmYeahNo wrote:
| The UID/PW demo combo doesn't work for me. Tried to actually sign
| up and couldn't figure it out (maybe you can't yet?)
|
| It sounds interesting, but I can't figure it out.
| jjcm wrote:
| Looks like someone's first action logging in was setting the
| password to something else. I've reset it back to "helloworld".
| OldManRyan wrote:
| This is something you should absolutely be prepared for and
| guard against if you are opening a public demo account.
| jjcm wrote:
| First launch learnings. It's something I'd definitely have
| done a bit more if I were more prepared, but I mainly
| launched today because of the current situation, not
| because I had thought through all aspects of launch and
| felt ready.
| mvdtnz wrote:
| Four years of work and I instantly nope out when you can't keep
| my scroll position when I click Back. Don't mess up the basics.
| ConanRus wrote:
| [dead]
| darkstar999 wrote:
| The main page shouldn't be login-walled. I don't want to create
| an account just to find out what kind of content this community
| has and how active it is.
| jjcm wrote:
| Fair. I removed login requirements for browsing. You should be
| able to see all posts here: https://non.io/#all
|
| As a disclaimer, this is truly me just launching today, there's
| only 4 posts currently.
| nomel wrote:
| I just went to http://non.io and see something that is/looks
| like an ad "a platform for supporting creators", and some
| documentation/sales pitch, rather than content. This is not
| remotely like reddit.com, or hacker news. Why don't I see
| content?
|
| This is a _very bad_ user experience, for a main page to go
| directly to, what should be, http://non.io/about. Don't give
| me a long pamphlet explaining mundane details that I can't
| comprehend who would care about, let me _see_ what it
| actually is, and test drive it, without having to know /type
| some magic url.
|
| I suggest sitting someone new down, who isn't excited to be
| there, and have them type http://non.io, and carefully
| observe what happens.
| afterburner wrote:
| People want to see the UI, doesn't matter how few posts there
| are.
|
| The content will come later; most of the Reddit alternatives
| I've looked at look godawful, yours is the only one I've
| liked. So many people get the compact and minimal comments
| look wrong.
| jjcm wrote:
| Appreciate the kind words! I put a lot of sweat into the
| design details, so that really means a lot to me.
| activiation wrote:
| Maybe you should automatically cross post top posts from your
| favorite reddit subs and maybe HN... Just to have a bit of
| content
| numlock86 wrote:
| > went to non.io
|
| > no mobile view
|
| Instand turn off. I don't get why these kind of platforms aren't
| "mobile first".
| Jzush wrote:
| This seems like a great idea, I'd consider popping in and
| registering but I would have to wonder how you would handle
| things like NSFW content?
|
| I don't know what payment processor you're using but I have to
| assume it'd fall prey to the same issues that onlyfans and others
| had.
|
| What about keeping objectively terrible content off the platform?
| I won't name it but we all know what I'm talking about.
|
| I think spelling out API usage from the get-go would be a good
| idea.
| InCityDreams wrote:
| >objectively terrible content off the platform? I won't name it
| but we all know what I'm talking about.
|
| When the politicians arrive you will have a runaway success.
| Unfortunately politicians tend to be followed by more
| 'objectively terrible content'. Funny how that works.
| jonplackett wrote:
| I love this idea but I cannot figure how to sign up.
|
| On mobile the site does not really work at all. Everything's
| scrolled off the page and then way to small. When I zoom out.
|
| I click sign up, nothing happens...
|
| I guess I'll have to go see if my laptop is charged up
| EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote:
| I am now imagining endless rows of North Korean inmates posting
| cat pictures.
| abhibeckert wrote:
| > hope it's a better [model] than the freemium model we've been
| relying on for the last few years.
|
| It may be a better model for something, but it's impossible for
| this to be used on a "reddit-like" site.
|
| Reddit is a large community where many users are anonymous. A
| paid model means it will never be a large community and posters
| will never be anonymous.
|
| And while reddit has tried to make freemium work, I'm pretty sure
| it has never worked and their real business model is ad based.
| Advertisements are a centuries old model that has proven to work
| well, I encourage you to switch to that (and on your API, make it
| a requirement to show ads).
|
| Also don't allow people to remove the ads by paying - you need to
| show ads to people with enough money to buy the stuff you're
| advertising. Exclusively showings ads to poor people does not
| work. Just make sure your ads aren't annoying.
|
| It's your site, you can do what you want with it, but it won't be
| like reddit with your proposed business model.
| lucb1e wrote:
| > Reddit is a large community where many users are anonymous
|
| ...to you. Not to reddit themselves in virtually all cases.
| Maybe 1% browses through seven proxies but if the 99% is okay
| with "public anonymity", it'll work for the masses so long as
| you don't show everyone's payment details on their profile
| pages.
|
| (Whether excluding this particular 1% desirable, is a different
| question.)
| TheCaptain4815 wrote:
| "A place for all content types - No matter what you make, Nonio
| is equipped to support it. With no advertisers, you aren't at
| risk of having your content demonetized."
|
| How far are you willing to go to defend this? There's been lots
| of technical talk in this thread so far, but I'm curious on this
| portion.
|
| So far I'm LOVING the UI. I actually think you should drop the
| payment part ASAP and just push for more users in the standard
| social media format.
|
| I also think a staggered release of new "tags" is a fantastic
| idea, but needs to scale ASAP (until the site is ready for users
| to create their own hashtags/subreddits)
|
| EDIT: After using this more, it's so exciting and fun to see
| something so new and fresh. It really feels like I'm back in
| 2010.
| SignalM wrote:
| Awesome idea, great work
| binkHN wrote:
| Make the API compatible with Reddit's and you'll have a bunch of
| third-party clients starting on day one!
| googlryas wrote:
| Do any 3P clients let you point their app to backends other
| than reddit.com? Or are you just saying it would be easy for
| app developers to quickly port their app to non.io?
| mburns wrote:
| Saidit has a (mostly) compatible API by running a fork from
| when Reddit was still open source. It isn't a drop-in
| replacement but most of the core API endpoints are the same.
| Things like modmail, live threads, collections are exclusive
| to Reddit, for example.
|
| Not sure the community is welcoming or even interested in the
| potential growth, tbh. But it exists.
|
| https://saidit.net/dev/api
| digging wrote:
| The survivors are working on it. RedReader is allowed to
| continue using the API for free because it has accessibility
| features, but the creator has announced they do not plan to
| depend on that goodwill and will expand the app to connect to
| other APIs.
| binkHN wrote:
| It would be easy for app developers to quickly port their app
| to non.io.
| jacobkranz wrote:
| This is why I've been so curious as to exactly what Reddit is
| really trying to do with this api change. If the point of
| Reddit is to consume content then the content itself (and the
| amount of it consumed) is really their business model so all
| actions should support that vs. getting people to arbitrarily
| be on their site. If your business is content, it shouldn't
| matter if it's a third-party app or if it's on your main site.
| I just cannot figure out the long-term logic behind this move
| (ofc short-term it's about $$ and their IPO but this'll hurt
| their model in the long-run)
| lm28469 wrote:
| You probably lose a lot of control on ads and tracking
| dbg31415 wrote:
| 60% of web users are phone users. Probably more for a site like
| this. Would be better if it supported mobile screens. Not just
| supported but that should be the default.
| bagels wrote:
| On the landing page: "$2/mo min." is confusing, is it talking
| about minutes? consider "just $2/mo" or "from just $2/mo"
| jjcm wrote:
| Good call. Updated.
| birracerveza wrote:
| Big mistake, I open non.io and I don't see content. I see you
| trying to sell me something. I haven't read a single word of it.
|
| If this wants to be a "reddit like" platform, it needs to be like
| reddit and actually present content on its homepage.
| jedberg wrote:
| I signed up, but immediately lost my password because the
| password manager didn't save it. Your signup password field
| doesn't seem to play nice with password managers. Just thought
| you should know!
| jjcm wrote:
| Well there's a name I wasn't expecting to see sign up for my
| side project.
|
| And yea, password managers right now aren't working great with
| the webcomponent inputs. Thank you for the report!
| jedberg wrote:
| I love trying new sites! I'll reserve judgement until it has
| more content, but it looks pretty so far. :)
| cridenour wrote:
| Apparently me too. Hopefully the cookie expiration isn't short
| :)
| keithasaurus wrote:
| A few quick suggestions about the landing page: - less text -
| more spacing in your text - try not to let your text span the
| entire width of the window
| Zamicol wrote:
| I'm concerned about the `#` character in the URL.
|
| # means fragment and that's kept local and not sent to the server
| unless client side Javascript sends it to the server. I would use
| an identifier that doesn't already mean something to the URL.
|
| See the URL spec here: https://www.rfc-
| editor.org/rfc/rfc3986#section-3.5 We are using this in a lot of
| our projects, like https://github.com/Cyphrme/URLFormJS#query-
| parameters-fragme... (and https://github.com/Cyphrme/Path)
|
| For an example where this is relevant:
| https://cyphr.me/ed25519_tool/ed.html#?msg_encoding=Text&msg...
| ddtaylor wrote:
| The homepage had no content on it so I closed the tab.
| bdcravens wrote:
| Seems like this is a great way to monetize content theft, since
| almost every single post in high traffic subs is currently a
| repost of a recycled meme or Tiktok.
| creamyhorror wrote:
| I like the monetisation model, it'll hopefully incentivise and
| reward creators, while being cheap enough that a lot of people
| won't mind paying. Best of luck!
| mitch_thunder wrote:
| How do you prevent users from posting other peoples artwork and
| stealing money from the actual content creators?
| rhyme-boss wrote:
| Why can posts not be links/URLs? Isn't that a pretty huge part of
| reddit posts?
|
| When submitting a post, why do I need to come up with a URL like
| non.io/example-i-made-up? If I leave that blank I would expect it
| to just assign a random or UUID URL.
| dom96 wrote:
| I really like the subtle animations in the UI. What do you use
| for the front-end/back-end tech stack?
| jjcm wrote:
| Thank you! A lot of sweat went into those. The frontend is pure
| vanilla js, and all of those animations are hand coded.
|
| Backend is in go.
|
| Source is here: https://github.com/jjcm/nonio
| jonplackett wrote:
| You need to put some content in here even if you have to add it
| all yourself under a few different accounts. All I can see are
| blank messages and testing123
| [deleted]
| v7n wrote:
| Ha, I had almost the exact same idea but just today. In my
| version though the subscription fee minus the dollar would be
| split evenly between all the subcommunities you follow, and
| within them by votes (by anyone).
|
| This would incentivize creating communities that people would
| like to follow, not only for the content but also for the
| moderation.
| gpmcadam wrote:
| First of all thanks for sharing this!
|
| Secondly, not sure if anyone has mentioned this before but in
| Safari on macOS there's something odd happening. On the page I
| see a small '1Password' popup and when I click it, it asks me to
| to unlock 1Password.
|
| However I don't see any login form on the page and I don't see
| any other text input fields so I'm not sure why this would be.
|
| I'm sure it's a perfectly innocent bug but it's probably
| something you want to address otherwise maybe it might put some
| people off.
|
| See screenshots: https://imgur.com/a/3CcDFcg
|
| Best of luck with the app!
| IceDane wrote:
| I saw the same thing, it seems to be because the login form is
| hidden off screen or something but still gets focused.
| mitch_thunder wrote:
| How do you prevent users from posting artwork by other people and
| stealing money from the real content creators?
| [deleted]
| carlosjobim wrote:
| I think the subscription and redistribution idea is the future of
| a sustainable internet. You will need some way to make sure this
| money given to the original content creators, or the website will
| be completely overrun by spammers re-posting other people's
| material that they know will net them the most money. Or am I
| tripping?
|
| It's a bad choice to have all images in Google file format if you
| want your website to be accessible to as many people as possible.
| Not everybody is on Chrome browsers.
|
| Why haven't you seeded your platform with high quality content
| before launching? Now it is a desert.
|
| I assume self promotion for people and businesses is allowed and
| encouraged, since it costs money to post?
| ColoursofOSINT wrote:
| [dead]
| [deleted]
| codingdave wrote:
| It is a nice start, but I cannot image that tags are sufficient
| organization of the content to scale this idea. And while the UI
| looks nice, it is incomplete. I saw no tag options when posting,
| and before logging in I didn't even see sufficient navigation to
| understand how to find and filter content.
|
| The monetization idea also feels like it won't scale - the more
| someone is active, the less their vote is going to mean. Seems
| like an odd incentive, as creators then will be targeting those
| users who pay for the site, but don't use it much.
|
| Overall, this looks like a well-coded but half-baked idea of a
| site.
| i_like_apis wrote:
| Hey how did you do the tilted / perspective effect on the browser
| window screenshots on the landing homepage?
| rogual wrote:
| Are signups working? I tried to sign up, but the login form shook
| at me and said "X", which is not among the most informative error
| messages I've seen.
| andersrs wrote:
| I just tried it and I didn't like it.
|
| 1) How do I post a link. I just want to post a damn link. Images,
| audio, blogs wtf... I've already created meta descriptions with a
| thumbnail on my web game I want you to suck that content down. I
| don't want to write a bunch of hot air about it. So whatever I
| posted an 'image' with a link in the content. The link didn't
| actually turn into an <a href>
|
| 2) I clicked on some post and a video started playing WITH SOUND!
|
| 3) The financials page says I have over $800 in my wallet. Lol
| OKAY let's go!
|
| 4) I connect my stripe only to find that it won't work for non-US
| people.
|
| 5) I guess I'll just cancel now since that was a waste of $2.
|
| 6) Oh right of course the cancel button is fucking broken.
| alexb_ wrote:
| I feel like having people get paid for upvotes is going to create
| a massive amount of bad incentives.
| tgv wrote:
| Anything you incentivize is going to be abused. That's the way
| it is. Begun the karma wars have.
| graypegg wrote:
| It's weird because people seem very motivated by imaginary
| internet points already. I think paying out money doesn't
| actually improve anything beyond just brining in people who's
| only incentive is a pay out.
| McAtNite wrote:
| It absolutely will. I had toyed with the idea of something like
| this before, but wasn't sure what the behavior would look like
| until I found the cryptocurrency subreddit.
|
| They have a system that rewards a monthly crypto amount based
| on the number of upvotes you received that surprisingly has an
| actual value that you can sell for. It's largely led to a race
| to the bottom where comments and posts largely ignore any long
| form discussions or accuracy in favor of majority appeal.
| nodespace wrote:
| This is subtley different though. 1$ gets split between all
| upvotes a person made. So instead of posts getting a value
| amount directly proportional to upvotes recieved, it will be
| proportional to how often those users upvote.
|
| In theory I think this would encourage higher quality posts
| to attract those who upvote rarely.
| McAtNite wrote:
| I may be wrong, but I believe this is how the subreddit
| already works. They set a total amount of crypto to be
| released, and it goes in proportion to the total number of
| upvotes you receive in comparison to others in a given time
| window. I think the approaches are largely identical with
| the exception of the crypto vs direct fiat.
| bowenjin wrote:
| The difference is that the non.io model rewards more for
| upvotes from people who have a high bar for upvoting and
| upvote rarely.
| [deleted]
| artisanspam wrote:
| A cap could be put in place to avoid many of these bad
| incentives. Example: you can't make more money than your
| subscription cost per month. Maybe uncashed upvotes could roll
| over each month, too, so long as you keep your subscription.
| Springtime wrote:
| It might be feasible for a community centered on content
| creators as the site appears to showcase, though for much of
| Reddit there are all manner of posts including just OPs asking
| a random question which doesn't need to be monetized but which
| still would benefit from more eyeballs (via upvotes).
| twic wrote:
| So each user puts a dollar a month into upvote cash. I think i
| upvote ~10 things per day on Reddit. I use Reddit most days, so
| say 250 things a month. Given the same pattern of behaviour,
| each one of my upvotes is worth 0.4 cents.
|
| A post getting 1000 upvotes earns $4. That's already quite a
| lot of upvotes, enough to get on the first page of a reasonably
| big sub. Posts on r/all (today, which may be abnormal) are at
| 10-50k, so would earn $40-$200.
|
| $200 would be nice to have! But these don't seem like prizes
| that would motivate residents of first-world countries,
| considering that you have to have one of the most-upvoted posts
| on the whole site to win them.
| bee_rider wrote:
| I probably upvote more like 1-2 things a day (on Hackernews,
| I don't have a Reddit account). I'm pretty curious what
| effect it would have, that my opinion would be "worth" (in
| this sort of system of course--in reality, my opinion is
| worth very little!) around 10x as much as yours.
| stOneskull wrote:
| your upvote is worth 0.4 cents but the other upvotes are
| worth different amounts. if i upvoted once each month that's
| a dollar there.
| courseofaction wrote:
| Congratulations on your work, but I think society needs to wake
| up to platforms.
|
| Given the repeated destruction of public squares by corporations,
| there is zero reason to trust centralized social media. It's
| still a business, it exists in this psychopathic market system,
| and will still succumb to financialization. No matter who started
| it.
|
| If a for-profit platform is providing value, it's because it's at
| the beginning of the enshittification cycle.
|
| Ignore the shiny, people. Use your brain.
| highmastdon wrote:
| In concept very similar to https://steemit.com/
| f1shy wrote:
| The rendering of the main page in my iphone 8 is pretty bad... Is
| bot designed for mobile? Maybe I'm doing something wrong?
| jjcm wrote:
| Sorry I don't have a mobile css yet. Working on some designs
| here however:
| https://www.figma.com/file/DStwulDd9Vd3TLjrMuxZ9y/nonio-desi...
| go_prodev wrote:
| I like the monetization model and wish you the best of luck.
|
| IIRC, the get paid to post model can make users feel like they
| are working which can have negative consequences. Deal with that
| later... hopefully you can get traction/network effect.
| sepbot wrote:
| https://html.non.io/.well-known/Motherfucking%20Website.html
| renewiltord wrote:
| The site is surprisingly fast. It's unlikely I'll use it since
| I'm not an early adopter of social media, but I do like that it's
| fast. The animations are slow, which could be changed, but each
| page loads fast.
| prakhar897 wrote:
| Great Work!! I'd say to give yourself room and charge atleast 99$
| per year.
| subless wrote:
| Title seems oddly similar to another "Reddit-like" post from
| today!
|
| Show HN: FlingUp, a Reddit-like platform Ive been building for
| the last 2 years (https://flingup.com)
| doublerabbit wrote:
| So, I signed up, paid and I am already concerned by the financial
| information page.
|
| 1: Within the financial page, I have a wallet of $844.33 -- Can
| you elaborate on what this is?
|
| 2: https://non.io/admin/financials appears accessible by all.
|
| a: I selected $7 for my monthly subscription, however the
| financial page displays as $9.
|
| b: I can't amend the amount nor can I cancel my subscription. The
| UI buttons are not working on Chromium & Firefox on FreeBSD.
|
| c: What are all these other contributions?
|
| 3: Your support page leads me to GitHub, I don't own a GitHub
| account.
|
| 4: Text editor is so very broken: https://non.io/itsverybroken
|
| Maybe maintenance mode is required? Good for the first stress
| test and I've learnt a lesson of maybe not paying for something
| that's not a final product ;) Although hope to see these
| improvements.
| wellthisisgreat wrote:
| this is a much better experience then Lemmy for sure. Congrats!
| newman8r wrote:
| I wasn't able to register initially due to some password strength
| requirements that aren't written anywhere, and got errors without
| an explanation of why. Generally I would have bailed at this
| point but wanted to give your project a look.
|
| Good luck, I think it's a cool idea.
| brk wrote:
| Same. Seems to need "special characters" in the password, even
| though I got a green check mark when putting in a long/strong
| password with no special chars.
|
| No information in the error feedback, just a red X.
|
| As a side note, I'm tired of websites deciding that a password
| is not strong enough simply because it does not contain enough
| random subsclasses of basic ACSII characters.
| stOneskull wrote:
| > I'm tired of websites deciding that a password is not
| strong enough simply because it does not contain enough
| random subsclasses of basic ACSII characters
|
| me too. and i'd guess at least half of people put 1! at the
| end to fulfil the requirements anyway.
| bryan0 wrote:
| I just had this issue with lemmy today. caused me to bounce.
| maybe will try again later.
| cwdz1 wrote:
| I don't think this can be successful as an alternative to reddit.
| I'm a broke unemployed person from a third world country who's
| not gonna pay to ask a question on /r/work to find a job. Just
| the thought that I have to pay for talking is alien to me.
| vinnymac wrote:
| Mobile browser support is a little problematic.
|
| A couple of things I noticed immediately, that you may want to
| consider. - landing page is not responsive, hard
| to read on Safari on iOS - login screen in-app couldn't be
| closed, had to navigate away to exit, perhaps a hidden icon
| somewhere? - comment threads seemed to have the same issues
| on iOS as the landing page
|
| Definitely like the direction you took for the UI, looks like
| with a little bit of work it'll become a great platform though!
| moffkalast wrote:
| Ah yes, Webkit on mobile continues to be the bane of every web
| dev's existence.
| OtomotO wrote:
| Same for Firefox on Android
| jjcm wrote:
| Definitely problematic. I have a local branch that has mobile
| css that's ~60% complete. Designs for it are here:
| https://www.figma.com/file/DStwulDd9Vd3TLjrMuxZ9y/nonio-desi...
|
| Aiming to have mobile css in a couple weeks time. Apologies for
| the poor experience!
| diarized wrote:
| I recently found that more sites has Stripe code on pages that
| actually don't require payment. First it was a calendar site to
| schedule meetings, now this.
|
| As many of you, I have a bunch of blockers installed in my web
| browser and I strip off the Strip code when I am opening non.io
| 'register' page. Unfortunately, it prevents me from registering.
|
| I believe the code there is to build my profile and start using
| metrics/features about who I am. I am not sure if it is really
| necessary at that point.
|
| Would you consider removing Stripe snippets on registering page?
| collaborative wrote:
| what payment method would you prefer? I find Stripe to be one
| of the least invasive payment SDKs. Am I wrong?
| danudey wrote:
| It's not about which payment method is used, it's about
| Stripe's payment SDK being embedded on every page (or at
| least, more pages than it needs to be on).
| collaborative wrote:
| I misunderstood. Yes, that's not ok
| jrflowers wrote:
| The model of users paying money for the site means that there
| probably can't be any discussion about file sharing or piracy at
| all. I remember this becoming an issue for the Something Awful
| forums a point time ago.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| There's no way to get from https://non.io/#all back to
| https://non.io without manually editing the browser URL?
|
| Is this a real project or another collect-HN-users-IP-addresses
| scheme?
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