That is pretty interesting.  Probably an solid blog post in and of itself.

Some other fun tidbits: I&#x27;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&#x2F;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&#x27;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.

This is something you should absolutely be prepared for and guard against if you are opening a public demo account.

Looks like someone&#x27;s first action logging in was setting the password to something else. I&#x27;ve reset it back to &quot;helloworld&quot;.

The UID&#x2F;PW demo combo doesn&#x27;t work for me. Tried to actually sign up and couldn&#x27;t figure it out (maybe you can&#x27;t yet?)It sounds interesting, but I can&#x27;t figure it out.

People want to see the UI, doesn&#x27;t matter how few posts there are.The content will come later; most of the Reddit alternatives I&#x27;ve looked at look godawful, yours is the only one I&#x27;ve liked. So many people get the compact and minimal comments look wrong.

Maybe you should automatically cross post top posts from your favorite reddit subs and maybe HN... Just to have a bit of content

I just went to <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;non.io" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;non.io</a> and see something that is&#x2F;looks like an ad &quot;a platform for supporting creators&quot;, and some documentation&#x2F;sales pitch, rather than content. This is not remotely like reddit.com, or hacker news. Why don&#x27;t I see content?This is a very bad user experience, for a main page to go directly to, what should be, <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;non.io&#x2F;about" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;non.io&#x2F;about</a>. Don&#x27;t give me a long pamphlet explaining mundane details that I can&#x27;t comprehend who would care about, let me see what it actually is, and test drive it, without having to know&#x2F;type some magic url.I suggest sitting someone new down, who isn&#x27;t excited to be there, and have them type <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;non.io" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;non.io</a>, and carefully observe what happens.

Fair. I removed login requirements for browsing. You should be able to see all posts here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;non.io&#x2F;#all" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;non.io&#x2F;#all</a>As a disclaimer, this is truly me just launching today, there&#x27;s only 4 posts currently.

The main page shouldn&#x27;t be login-walled. I don&#x27;t want to create an account just to find out what kind of content this community has and how active it is.

I like the monetisation model, it&#x27;ll hopefully incentivise and reward creators, while being cheap enough that a lot of people won&#x27;t mind paying. Best of luck!

It&#x27;s quite an interesting business model. Qudos...Happy to see it at github: go server, javascript frontside.

Ah, gotcha! I&#x27;ll keep noodling around :)

Yep, still working through the financial aspects. The financials page is definitely demo data!This link should let you subscribe: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;non.io&#x2F;admin&#x2F;first-time-signup" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;non.io&#x2F;admin&#x2F;first-time-signup</a> if you&#x27;re really keen. That said, I&#x27;ve allowed all functionality on the free tier for the time being until I get things like that financials page complete.

I like the idea and am curious to see how well &#x2F; if this gains traction. Nice UI, although I&#x27;m having trouble actually subscribing on the financials page, and it seems to show demo data?Great job launching something!<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pasteboard.co&#x2F;eRp2eCMwkExq.png" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pasteboard.co&#x2F;eRp2eCMwkExq.png</a>

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.

Yea, i get your concern about fediverse and creators. I&#x27;m thinking in a similar space, though it feels like it&#x27;s non-optional these days. Ie as a user i just don&#x27;t want to be trapped into silos anymore.I think i&#x27;d still like a &quot;best we can do&quot; implementation that supported Fedi and supported creators in this manner.

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&#x2F;payout barriers.I wrote up about reddit alternatives here <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;non.io&#x2F;reddit-has-platform-user-misalignment" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;non.io&#x2F;reddit-has-platform-user-misalignment</a> , 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 &quot;wins&quot;, I think we&#x27;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.

Looks great! Silly question, but have you considered ActivityPub integration? I ask because while it may not benefit you directly, these days i&#x27;m liking the idea more and more of joining a community if they&#x27;re in &quot;the fediverse&quot;. Which is to say i don&#x27;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 &quot;the verse&quot;. Eg Tildes, i have the same concern.

Yeah, I suspect paid social media isn&#x27;t going to work. It sucks because it&#x27;s probably the only sustainable model. VC has really warped people&#x27;s perception of software costs.

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 ROIGood luck kids

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&#x27;t willing to pay for it in any way (ads or subscriptions). This is precisely why I don&#x27;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.

I don&#x27;t mind A paid model for interaction personally, but as others have pointed out it is difficult to make the call when you can&#x27;t view the content.You already did open up your content, but personally I&#x27;d lead with that. Make lurking free and any interaction part of the subscription. This would include posting content, as it does remove the most blatant spam and gaming of the system.Having said that, while I do think it is commendable that you want to reward the people that provide content, I am not sure if you should do so based on votes. Because that will just make it so people will try to game the system with clickbait and fluff content.As we are on HN anyway:&quot;The Fluff Principle: on a user-voted news site, the links that are easiest to judge will take over unless you take specific measures to prevent it.&quot;Source: Article by Paul Graham (the guy that started HN and funded reddit way back in the day) <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.paulgraham.com&#x2F;hackernews.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.paulgraham.com&#x2F;hackernews.html</a>.What this means is basically the following, say you have two submissions:1. An article - takes a few minutes to judge. 
2. An image - takes a few seconds to judge.So in the time that it takes person A to read and judge he article person B, C, D, E en F already saw the image and made their judgement. So basically images will rise to the top not because they are more popular, but simply because it takes less time to vote on them so they gather votes faster.Some things out the top of my head you can do to mitigate this are:- Don&#x27;t tie it to voting, make it a different action people have to explicitly give. Basically reddit gold, but then still with the monetary reward tied to it. 
- In addition to that, don&#x27;t make it an infinite resource people but a monthly budget people can spend (this might already be the case? I didn&#x27;t check too closely) 
- Technically a bit more challenging, but if you could tie it to engagement time in addition to votes it would mitigate the fluff content issue somewhat. Some metrics you might be able to use are time spend in comments, time between clicking on an outbound link and voting (don&#x27;t count votes with no outbound interaction either), etc.As a seperate thought, I am not sure if there are liability issues when you reward posted content with money. Not all posted content will be owned by the person posting it, but they are effectively being paid for it. So that might make you as a platform more liable for copyright claims and such. Not a lawyer though, just something I thought of.

I did, but they weren&#x27;t a fan of the paid model for interaction: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;RedditAlternatives&#x2F;comments&#x2F;147qzfb&#x2F;tossing_my_own_into_the_mix_my_personal_project&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;RedditAlternatives&#x2F;comments&#x2F;147qzfb...</a>

You should post this on &#x2F;r&#x2F;RedditAlternatives&#x2F; as well if you haven&#x27;t already. Also, clickable link: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;non.io&#x2F;#all" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;non.io&#x2F;#all</a>

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.

I think it basically does? I think they pay out a big chunk of the subscription fees to songs based on plays.

It&#x27;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.

I like the subscription model. Wish Spotify worked like this

Obviously it isn&#x27;t, when you&#x27;ve just posted it here!

&gt; instead of testing password length&#x2F;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&#x27;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&#x27;ve already put at a high level due to requiring payment.

LastPass. I think maybe you&#x27;re not detecting when LastPass fills it in, only when typed?

Interesting, I was able to sign up with it.Can I ask if you&#x27;re using a password manager &#x2F; what browser you&#x27;re using?Also for context, instead of testing password length&#x2F;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.

Your site doesn&#x27;t think &quot;$&amp;m22KPBeB$!7&amp;^l&quot; is a strong enough password.Uhm… okay?

You probably lose a lot of control on ads and tracking

This is why I&#x27;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&#x27;t matter if it&#x27;s a third-party app or if it&#x27;s on your main site. I just cannot figure out the long-term logic behind this move (ofc short-term it&#x27;s about $$ and their IPO but this&#x27;ll hurt their model in the long-run)

It would be easy for app developers to quickly port their app to non.io.

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.

Saidit has a (mostly) compatible API by running a fork from when Reddit was still open source. It isn&#x27;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.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;saidit.net&#x2F;dev&#x2F;api" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;saidit.net&#x2F;dev&#x2F;api</a>

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?

Make the API compatible with Reddit&#x27;s and you&#x27;ll have a bunch of third-party clients starting on day one!

Anything you incentivize is going to be abused. That&#x27;s the way it is. Begun the karma wars have.

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.

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.

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&#x27;t need to be monetized but which still would benefit from more eyeballs (via upvotes).

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.

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.

your upvote is worth 0.4 cents but the other upvotes are worth different amounts. if i upvoted once each month that&#x27;s a dollar there.

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&#x27;s already quite a lot of upvotes, enough to get on the first page of a reasonably big sub. Posts on r&#x2F;all (today, which may be abnormal) are at 10-50k, so would earn $40-$200.$200 would be nice to have! But these don&#x27;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.

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.

I feel like having people get paid for upvotes is going to create a massive amount of bad incentives.

Sorry I don&#x27;t have a mobile css yet. Working on some designs here however: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.figma.com&#x2F;file&#x2F;DStwulDd9Vd3TLjrMuxZ9y&#x2F;nonio-designs?type=design&amp;node-id=6-11072&amp;t=g2be1crVsMumjcap-0" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.figma.com&#x2F;file&#x2F;DStwulDd9Vd3TLjrMuxZ9y&#x2F;nonio-desi...</a>

The rendering of the main page in my iphone 8 is pretty bad…
Is bot designed for mobile?
Maybe I’m doing something wrong?

I just had this issue with lemmy today. caused me to bounce. maybe will try again later.

&gt; I&#x27;m tired of websites deciding that a password is not strong enough simply because it does not contain enough random subsclasses of basic ACSII charactersme too. and i&#x27;d guess at least half of people put 1! at the end to fulfil the requirements anyway.

Same. Seems to need &quot;special characters&quot; in the password, even though I got a green check mark when putting in a long&#x2F;strong password with no special chars.No information in the error feedback, just a red X.As a side note, I&#x27;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.

I wasn&#x27;t able to register initially due to some password strength requirements that aren&#x27;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&#x27;s a cool idea.

Ah yes, Webkit on mobile continues to be the bane of every web dev&#x27;s existence.

Definitely problematic. I have a local branch that has mobile css that&#x27;s ~60% complete. Designs for it are here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.figma.com&#x2F;file&#x2F;DStwulDd9Vd3TLjrMuxZ9y&#x2F;nonio-designs?type=design&amp;node-id=6-11072&amp;t=g2be1crVsMumjcap-0" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.figma.com&#x2F;file&#x2F;DStwulDd9Vd3TLjrMuxZ9y&#x2F;nonio-desi...</a>Aiming to have mobile css in a couple weeks time. Apologies for the poor experience!

Mobile browser support is a little problematic.A couple of things I noticed immediately, that you may want to consider.<pre><code> - 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
</code></pre>
Definitely like the direction you took for the UI, looks like with a little bit of work it’ll become a great platform though!

Working now, thank you!! Feels great to be in on the ground floor, haha.

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!

A couple thoughts after trying to submit a post (on firefox):- no way to post a link&#x2F;URL? But I can upload an html file? Am I supposed to make the URL the description of the post?- &quot;audio&quot; does not appear to have a file upload button (probably a bug)- the text submission box sometimes does that glitchy thing some javascript&#x27;d text boxes do where everything I type comes out backwards until a refreshSeems like a cool platform, glad I registered. I&#x27;m trying to post a video, and I think this would be better if the encoder worked in the background so I don&#x27;t need to leave the page up. Console is also full of CORS errors.Edit: after waiting for a while with &quot;480&quot; checked, got an error message with a frowny face file iconAnother edit: Seems posting of any kind is currently broken, at least as an unsubscribed account. Too bad, it&#x27;s a nice idea with about the best timing it&#x27;ll ever have, but this is a very soft launch.

when you dont rely on advertiser support you arent beholden to their desires of moderationwhen a sub-forum crosses a threshold of insensitivity, just remove it from search and let those fans direct linksub 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

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&#x27;ll get different behaviour from different sets of people.

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.

A moderator who does this consistently will be crucified, and no one will want to post in the community while they remain.

I think the simplest around that is to pay the moderators. So given the $2- $1 goes to the server- $.67 goes to the users you upvote- $.33 goes to the moderator(s) of the group you upvoted in.So there&#x27;s actual incentive to want to mod to begin with, and less incentive to risk that by trying to game for post votes as well.Now ofc I already see a half dozen issues here, so we&#x27;d need to deviate strongly from reddit to make this work:- you can&#x27;t just create subs willy-nilly. You don&#x27;t even want that in the beginning anyway because you shouldn&#x27;t splinter a small community. There would need to be a formal way to talk to an admin and request any new sub. Or at least, we need to delineate from a monetized sub vs. non-monetized, with ways to transition from one to the other.- This encourages small mod groups and you don&#x27;t want mods to be able to pick&#x2F;kick at will now that money is involved. Again, new mods would need some more admin intervention for moderator changes.- As you can assume, A senior mod won&#x27;t be equal to a newly recruited mod. So it probably isn&#x27;t the best idea to spread that mod fund equally per se.- Mod posts would need to be taken into account as well. Maybe moderators (and possible alts) can&#x27;t make money off their own posts to avoid double dippingLot of interesting ideas to go about. So I hope this site does at least get some visibility

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

Yes ish, as currently I&#x27;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.

In every jurisdiction where tax exists a receipt would suffice, which even the most ghetto payment implementation will have (it being the case that the receipt is essentially how the total is made).

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?

Yes it seems quite clever. People who upvote zero effort memes willy nilly will spread their share thin.

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.

&gt; I want a site that rewards quality, not view counts.That&#x27;s what the objective of the site is. Viewing doesn&#x27;t reward anything (whereas views do reward in the video you just linked). My hope as well is that for nonio, knowing you&#x27;re contributing a share of your monthly pool will make people more conscientious about what they upvote, thus improving quality.

Ditto. I hate this idea. We all know the type of content that revenue drives: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc</a>. I want a site that rewards quality, not view counts.

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&#x27;s when you&#x27;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.

Please make it possible to pay without a credit card.  I want to support the site but without sacrificing privacy or anonymity.

&gt; 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 &quot;user is the customer&quot; alignment. One issue with going public is it then means shareholders become your primary customer, with your users becoming second tier. I&#x27;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.

Sounds like I prime example of Moral Hazard where people would justify shitty behavior because they pay for it. It&#x27;s also more difficult to ban people in one way or another because they are paying customers now.

I wonder though whether people will upvote differently knowing that there&#x27;s real money involved.

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&#x2F;attention seems like it could pencil out (if N bots can generate some multiplier of attention)

&gt; If you go to a quality tech subreddit and sort by &quot;Top&quot; comments, they will mostly be memes. They won&#x27;t be from an expert solving your very specific problem.Wouldn&#x27;t it be highly coincidental if the Top posts contain a solution to your specific problem.

&gt; maybe an unintentional experiment in unintended consequencesJust 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 &quot;Top&quot; comments, they will mostly be memes. They won&#x27;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&#x2F;politics.Very interesting trying to puzzle out how a given incentive structure will play out in practice.

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.

&gt; If he can get 50k paying users, he&#x27;s a millionaire.How did you reach that conclusion?

&gt; The goal for sites like this is never &quot;high quality content&quot;, it&#x27;s &quot;maximum traffic&quot;.so how do you feel about HN personally?&gt;If that means low effort meme posts, who are you to slap those dollars out of his hand?If so, congrats. I&#x27;ll keep searching and be glad some rags to riches site came about in a time of multibillion dollar empires.&gt;these sites are for entertainment not elucidation and discovery.put it this way. I&#x27;ve been on the internet for decades, and I know that to really find quality content you gotta either pay for it in money behind a paywall, or in a lot of time digging through the muck. I have done both.I&#x27;m not going to pretend there won&#x27;t be a lot of muck to dig through here, even with the idea of a paid subscription site. But the goal here is that there will be enough nuggets underneath to make it worth it. And currently, that line is pretty low given what I dig through reddit to find.

Completely disagree re: moderation. The goal for sites like this is never &quot;high quality content&quot;, it&#x27;s &quot;maximum traffic&quot;.If he can get 50k paying users, he&#x27;s a millionaire. If that means low effort meme posts, who are you to slap those dollars out of his hand?The &quot;intelligentsia&quot; of the Internet need to get a grip on what people want; these sites are for entertainment not elucidation and discovery.

I liked someone&#x27;s idea in non.io #feedback of subscribing to multiple moderators, whose filters are applied to your view. Makes the moderator&#x27;s job easier too, if its more distributed.I could subscribe to a couple moderator&#x27;s idea of &quot;low effort&quot;, a few more for &quot;spam&quot; moderation, etc . Could even have &quot;#racist&quot; and &quot;#woke&quot; mods, whatever bubble you choose to subscribe to.

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.

I would say reward &quot;good posters&quot; 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 &quot;attention whore&quot; you can reasonably be.

&gt;Having it also cost money to use the site will help a bit, but it&#x27;ll also filter out many good users due to not wanting to spend money on a subscriptionfrom my experience, there will be a LOT more ne&#x27;er do wells being filtered than good users. Not because there aren&#x27;t a lot of good users, but simply because there are a lot more low effort ne&#x27;er do wells attracted to internet forums.Other users can still browse at the very least. I think this will capture that nice medium of &quot;good user who doesn&#x27;t mind a little incentive&quot;. Because ofc the highest quality users aren&#x27;t posting their ideas on public forums at all

Yeah, earning money for posting on a service like this sounds good at first, but it&#x27;s often a magnet for folks that don&#x27;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 &#x27;hustle culture&#x27;).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 &#x27;spam the crap out of a service for the chance to make more money&#x27; 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 &#x27;pay to earn&#x27; 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&#x27;ll also filter out many good users due to not wanting to spend money on a subscription, and create a mental calculus of &quot;can I make more from my content than it&#x27;ll cost me to sign up&quot;, which isn&#x27;t ideal in itself.

Stacker News has succesfully use satoshis instead of fake internet points.

&gt; 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.

Have you considered a limit on user interactions per day? 10 posts&#x2F;comments a day and 10 upvotes a day?It seems counterintuitive to restrict users interacting with your platform, but I could also see it working the other way (I want to login and use my daily allowance instead of losing it).

&gt;Moderation will be extremely important to prevent low-effort memes and content regurgitation and the like from saturating your main channelsThis idea more or less surfaces in the book &quot;Fall; or, Dodge in Hell&quot;, where in the not-too-distant future the internet is so polluted that you are pretty much expected to hire a full-time &quot;editor&quot; to curate your social media feed. This doesn&#x27;t scale particularly well, of course, so in reality particularly wealthy families hire an editor to present a cohesive stream of social media to their whole family-tree. Meanwhile the masses typically subscribe to an &quot;off the shelf&quot; stream (or several?) that most closely matches their tastes.

I want a social site where you: Pay to sign up ($10.00), pay to upvote ($0.01 = 1 vote), get paid when your content is upvoted. There&#x27;s no advertising system because everything is an ad.

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&#x27;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&#x27;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.

Are you using a password manager? If so which? If you add the letter &quot;a&quot; at the end, and then delete it, does it work then?I&#x27;m using webcomponent form elements, the spec for which is relatively new. I suspect it isn&#x27;t working well with auto-filled passwords from them.

I tried to register, but my 30 character random letter password with numbers letter and characters &quot;wasn&#x27;t complex enough&quot;.

Mobile experience is pretty bad right now.

Oof, I clicked one of those posts and immediately lost all back-button functionality to an endless stream of history events.

The fact that this isn&#x27;t on the landing page doesn&#x27;t bode well for a 4 year old project.

The marketing page is not readable on mobile either.

Aaanndd it&#x27;s instantly overrun with spam

The ui feels like it was designed for mobile as well, everything is on the far edges of the page and the center is entirely blank space unless you resize the window to be smaller horizontally

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&#x2F;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: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;non.io&#x2F;#all" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;non.io&#x2F;#all</a> (didn’t see it on the landing page or OP post).

Yes! I made a little edit just to make it clear I&#x27;m not trying to dismiss the hard work, and even though it&#x27;s a really hard space to compete in, someone has to try or there will never be alternatives.

As someone who has also built websites alone and on zero budget, I thank you both.

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.

There is <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;non.io&#x2F;#all" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;non.io&#x2F;#all</a>

100% -- I&#x27;m not creating an account if I can&#x27;t use the app, demo the app, or otherwise get a proper idea of what I&#x27;m signing up for, in order to see if it&#x27;ll be worth my time to begin with.

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.

&gt; this kind of thing is dead in the water because it lacks a network effectWhich is why launching any social network is a dice roll. You need that initial momentum to propel it further, or some &#x27;lucky break&#x27; 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 &#x2F; MAUs which is the only metric social media networks care about.

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&#x27;s capabilities.

&gt; without a hook that makes the platform exceptional (innovative&#x2F;clever&#x2F;beautiful design, unique aggregation features, inherently interesting content, reimagined user&#x2F;content&#x2F;moderation dynamics etc etc), this kind of thing is dead in the water because it lacks a network effectI 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&#x2F;practical UX.

That folding ideas video is excellent. I implore anyone who wishes to unseat Reddit or any monopolistic website to watch it, so they don&#x27;t fall into the trap of creating a clone with the same architectural flaws.

&gt; “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”.

Thanks for the reference on the Folding Ideas, great video!

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&#x2F;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: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;r3snVCRo_bI" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;r3snVCRo_bI</a>

maybe make the first 10,000 or 100,000 accounts free for life?you need to build momentum somehowmaybe summarise what your users need to understand in a sidebar or closeable top-bar?

To be honest I don&#x27;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&#x27;t make any money on this, I just do it for fun. But with a site like non.io there&#x27;s no reason for me _not_ to post my content there. As long as you get some publicity out there (like you&#x27;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&#x27;t logged in and haven&#x27;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&#x27;t get it right away the interest could quickly fade.Wish you the best of luck with this. And I&#x27;ll look into posting my stuff on there as well, as I said there really isn&#x27;t any reason not to

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&#x27;s business case and a few screenshots of what shopping at Amazon looks like.IMO the only good reason to have a marketing&#x2F;business-case landing page is if the product itself hasn&#x27;t been built yet. Once the product exists, move the marketing page over to &#x2F;about

For sure - striking the right design balance is tough. If it were me, I&#x27;d try to keep content in the user&#x27;s face as much as possible, and maybe inform the user about the unique value-add with non-intrusive sidebars, header&#x2F;footers or system generated PMs.It&#x27;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&#x2F;B testing infrastructure if you haven&#x27;t already. One of the biggest mistakes I&#x27;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.

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.

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&#x27;re actually paying your best users rather than charging them.

Why not pin your business model as the top post for awhile until it catches on?

you should try and get an API that has full parity with Reddit, an app that does that will replace Reddit because all third party apps simply need to change urls for Reddit to your domain.

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&#x27;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 &#x2F; landing on content is a hard one, but I think you&#x27;re right. I am worried though that without conveying the initial business model, it&#x27;ll be harder for users to understand that this isn&#x27;t a direct reddit clone.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;non.io&#x2F;#all" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;non.io&#x2F;#all</a>

If you ask me to make an account before I can see your content (even if it looks interesting) that&#x27;s a turn off and I&#x27;ll go somewhere else. Maybe have a button at the top that says &quot;explore as guest&quot; 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.

Not to mention the marketing page is not responsive for mobile. Doesn&#x27;t really feel like a modern design, either. Doesn&#x27;t tell good about the site&#x27;s mobile UX.

The font on the root domains is also really small, at least on a desktop FF. You also can&#x27;t really interact with anything except for the (very small) &quot;log in&quot; and &quot;register&quot; 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&#x27;s focus there and away from the left side where the text starts; your eyes aren&#x27;t really sure where they should be looking.

Option b would work so well this month. Hundreds of thousands of motivated users and moderators just waiting for that better option.

For a site to work it either needs toa) 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.

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.

That being said, how far can you drive a service purely based on &quot;we don&#x27;t have &lt;person&gt; working here&quot;?I&#x27;d be willing to wager a good chunk of people don&#x27;t care who runs their platforms so long as they can talk to the majority of their friends &#x2F; see large swathes for new content &#x2F; etc. - see Facebook, for example.

The hook is that it&#x27;s not run by spez, IMO.And I&#x27;m not trying to pile on, I&#x27;m just saying there&#x27;s value to people in that fact.

I agree with most of it and the mobile layout sucks for the marketing page.

Twitter is edging on charging to post if we consider exposing content related to blue checkmarks.

Charging to post is also pretty much a non-starter.

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.

Design is artistic and artists don&#x27;t collaborate well due to art being a personal endeavor? Unless it has a &#x27;decision maker&#x27; 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&#x27;t actually know.

I dont think UX is &quot;harder&quot;. 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 &quot;Linux&quot; side of this than the UX side. It&#x27;s like trying to find the perfect Programmer&#x2F;Artist hybrid to make a game with; it&#x27;s simply two different mindsets that rarely get taught together.As an example, look at most of Linux Distro&#x27;s UX since you brought it up. They aren&#x27;t meant for the layman the way Mac&#x2F;Windows was. the deeply technical audience, for better or worse, puts up with a lot of UX issues for their tools. That doesn&#x27;t work the same way for a general audience website or app.----But that&#x27;s from the &quot;why can&#x27;t programmers art&quot; side of the argument. Of course, that begs the question &quot;why can&#x27;t programmers find artists to work with them?&quot;... well, there&#x27;s a dozen different reasons. Culturally, historically, socially, and so on.But to list the one big reason; there aren&#x27;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.

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&#x2F;fail nature of codeGenerally 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&#x27;s BDFL in a very trial and error fashion.

What is it about insanely great user experience design that&#x27;s hard to &quot;open source&quot; in the same sense that engineers are able collaborate on software, like Linux, and achieve massive distribution?

The hook is called „Reddit becoming more ans more aggressive with monetisation”Its really enough for ppl to start looking for alternatives.

Indeed. At this point, you need a reason to not put that $2 in the ChatGPT subscription bin.

Instead of a splash page, I&#x27;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.

Also, don’t neglect the role of moderation.I tried browsing, but the top post is a photo of Hitler with the title “A man who did nothing wrong” and several upvotes.

HIre writers and or friends and create tons of posts with tons of comments ... true or not. Though nowadays you could get something like Chat GPT to create all the fake posts and comments until you marketed where a few users come and interact with the AI content then a few more and more and more and then less AI fake crap and more authenticity.Im pretty sure this is how Reddit and many popular sites started. Fake it before you make it! Without interesting content you DOA.

This is definitely the idea, but are there enough educated consumers willing to spend money to avoid being trapped in shittified experiences? That&#x27;s the question that matters.

Funneling money toward karma farmers is a dark pattern.

&gt; .. 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&#x2F;clever&#x2F;beautiful design, unique aggregation features, inherently interesting content, reimagined user&#x2F;content&#x2F;moderation dynamics etc etc), this kind of thing is dead in the water because it lacks a network effect.How about said hook being? &quot;absence of dark patterns&quot; .. which is possible because of stable funding, so there&#x27;s no enshittification dynamic needed to make money.

I love the idea. Reddit was the best of the social media platforms. That it&#x27;s open source, means we can help fix these things. I&#x27;d love to help.

Maybe it&#x27;s the ol&#x27; HN hug-of-death but I&#x27;m getting a mostly blank screen on the #ALL page with a single post from &#x27;Krazy&#x27;, contents a single &lt; symbol, and nothing else. Browsing tabs doesn&#x27;t change the main screen, seems to be no content here.If it helps, I&#x27;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.

&gt; cheap commodity in a massively oversaturated space, and without a hook that makes the platform exceptional (innovative&#x2F;clever&#x2F;beautiful design)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&#x27;s audience with something that looks as ugly but works as great as old.reddit does.

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&#x2F;clever&#x2F;beautiful design, unique aggregation features, inherently interesting content, reimagined user&#x2F;content&#x2F;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&#x27;t be greeted with a marketing splash page, you need interesting content in the user&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;s a little harsh, but I mean well! Good luck!

I hope this is the Reddit killer! Good luck &lt;3

Very happy to hear that, I looked more into your service and I’m really hoping you can succeed!

100%. I&#x27;m still working on it. I announced today without it purely because of what&#x27;s happening with Reddit. Mobile designs are here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.figma.com&#x2F;file&#x2F;DStwulDd9Vd3TLjrMuxZ9y&#x2F;nonio-designs?type=design&amp;node-id=6-11072&amp;t=g2be1crVsMumjcap-0" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.figma.com&#x2F;file&#x2F;DStwulDd9Vd3TLjrMuxZ9y&#x2F;nonio-desi...</a>Probs will be another month before I get the branch merged however.

It&#x27;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.

I&#x27;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.

My first 5 minutes have been positive. I&#x27;ve worked for years on a similar platform but never expected to have the time to ship, so I appreciate that you&#x27;ve implemented a few patterns&#x2F;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&#x2F;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&#x27;ll move to the platform. Great job.

Oh, that kind of Coke!#samebusinessmodel

%98 lurk, %1.9 comment and %0.1 make content that make the rest of the group come in and lurk &#x2F; 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&#x2F;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.

What would be really powerful is an API compatible alternative to Reddit.  There&#x27;s a ton of already developed apps just itching for a new platform to use them with.

I also saw this and was initially both equally horrified and impressed.

Cool project! For something like this to succeed at Reddit&#x27;s scale, it should stay snappy under load (which admittedly Reddit doesn&#x27;t). So clicked through to Github to see what it&#x27;s written in:&gt; Languages&gt; Shell 100.0%I admired the absolute chadliness of this decision - until i realised this was just a top-level super-repo.

On the landing page: &quot;$2&#x2F;mo min.&quot; is confusing, is it talking about minutes? consider &quot;just $2&#x2F;mo&quot; or &quot;from just $2&#x2F;mo&quot;

Big mistake, I open non.io and I don&#x27;t see content. I see you trying to sell me something. I haven&#x27;t read a single word of it.If this wants to be a &quot;reddit like&quot; platform, it needs to be like reddit and actually present content on its homepage.

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

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&#x2F;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.

Just patched it. I very quickly reverted the free-tier interaction blocks, and I missed a final check on submissions. Should be working now.

Looks cool and I appreciate the different model.FYI - you mentioned letting free accounts post for now but that doesn&#x27;t seem to work.

Hmm, is there a way to switch between tags without editing the url? I can&#x27;t find any list of current ones.

Going directly to a tag view will let you browse without logging in: i.e. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;non.io&#x2F;#all" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;non.io&#x2F;#all</a> or <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;non.io&#x2F;#dog" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;non.io&#x2F;#dog</a>I&#x27;ve still got plenty of work to do on the UX of the site!

Requiring a login to see anything at all is too much friction for this kind of thing. (Or at least I couldn&#x27;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.

You should have written a post describing your experience and the platform instead of a plain landing page

Using the # anchor in the url as the subreddit&#x2F;tag&#x2F;category etc is really clever!

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&#x2F;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!

I don’t know. But I saw a post with a seagull standing on another seagull and the submission had votes, so I assume this is still going to happen.

votes aren&#x27;t free. why would i upvote the low effort?

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?

Make it costly for creators to actually post something. They can recoup in upvotes. That&#x27;s the proper incentive structure ... by posting you&#x27;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 &quot;upvotes&quot; 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: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;community.qbix.com&#x2F;t&#x2F;preventing-spam-and-sybil-attacks&#x2F;222" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;community.qbix.com&#x2F;t&#x2F;preventing-spam-and-sybil-attac...</a>

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.

It&#x27;s a strange concept, but interesting. You might need to ensure that the system is difficult to game, though.

For what it&#x27;s worth, you should add openid&#x2F;google&#x2F;apple&#x2F;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.

Are you going to Gab levels of defense? Their stance has been &quot;if it is legal speech in the US, then it is allowed on the platform&quot; is one that grates many people the wrong way. It allows for blatant racism, science denial, questioning of hallowed institutions, holocaust denial, and so on.

Obviously I can’t defend “all content types” to the level that say, the darkweb can. I’ll still abide by the law. That said, I don’t have the pressure of ad networks to filter out content.I still have pressures however. Using Stripe and credit cards for payment processing means I have to ensure the sites primary purpose isn’t adult content, as if that content dominates its very likely Stripe will choose to no longer do business with me. I can still support it, but it can’t be the primary purpose.

Also thank you for the kind words about the UI! Poured a lot of love into it, but I’ve got a lot of work to go for non-chrome browsers.

&quot;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.&quot;How far are you willing to go to defend this? There&#x27;s been lots of technical talk in this thread so far, but I&#x27;m curious on this portion.So far I&#x27;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 &quot;tags&quot; is a fantastic idea, but needs to scale ASAP (until the site is ready for users to create their own hashtags&#x2F;subreddits)EDIT: After using this more, it&#x27;s so exciting and fun to see something so new and fresh. It really feels like I&#x27;m back in 2010.

Apparently me too. Hopefully the cookie expiration isn&#x27;t short :)

I love trying new sites!  I&#x27;ll reserve judgement until it has more content, but it looks pretty so far. :)

Well there&#x27;s a name I wasn&#x27;t expecting to see sign up for my side project.And yea, password managers right now aren&#x27;t working great with the webcomponent inputs. Thank you for the report!

I signed up, but immediately lost my password because the password manager didn&#x27;t save it.  Your signup password field doesn&#x27;t seem to play nice with password managers.  Just thought you should know!

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: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;jjcm&#x2F;nonio">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;jjcm&#x2F;nonio</a>

I really like the subtle animations in the UI. What do you use for the front-end&#x2F;back-end tech stack?

Hum there&#x27;s one commit end of 2022, a few end of 2021, 3 early 2021 and then the initial repository creation in 2018.You haven&#x27;t been working on it for 4 years, you started it 4 years ago, have made disconnected updates here and there since, and are releasing a pre-alpha to capitalize on the Reddit story.

I&#x27;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.

Please don&#x27;t take this criticism harshly:You say that you&#x27;ve been working on this for 4 years, but there&#x27;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?

Heya HN, I&#x27;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&#x27;s a simple model, but I hope it&#x27;s a better one than the freemium model we&#x27;ve been relying on for the last few years. Fundamentally I feel like any ad-supported network doesn&#x27;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&#x27;d encourage you not to pay for the time being. I&#x27;m still testing the distribution algorithm for returning funds - you won&#x27;t get overcharged or anything, but I just want to guarantee your funds are properly distributed at the end of the month. I&#x27;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: helloworldEdit: Loginless browsing here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;non.io&#x2F;#all" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;non.io&#x2F;#all</a>If you want to browse the code or the api:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;api.non.io" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;api.non.io</a><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;jjcm&#x2F;nonio">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;jjcm&#x2F;nonio</a>

Show HN: Non.io, a Reddit-like platform Ive been working on for the last 4 years