gemini://moddedbear.xyz/logs/2021-03-18-designing-a-reddit-clone.gmi

Even though I have no intentions to ever actually build a Reddit clone, I've been thinking on and off the past few days about how I might design one. I've been using Reddit since... 2015-ish? I've only been using it less and less since then, and I can't pinpoint whether that's due to Reddit changing or how I use social media changing. Probably both.

And while some decent Reddit alternatives are quickly gaining traction (looking at you, Lemmy), they still don't solve many of the problems I have with a platform like Reddit.

So why not redesign it? Here's a few of my ideas for what the ideal social link aggregator site would be like.

I'd redesign the idea of the front page entirely to encourage more thoughtful and purposeful browsing. Reddit has a feature called multireddits that I think go criminally underutilized. Basically they're user-managed groups of subreddits and give you a way of curating a feed consisting of select sources.

My design would scrap the front page completely. Browsing would instead be done by creating your own groupings of communities and browsing by those groups. So I might create a grouping called Linux to put the equivalents of r/linux, r/archlinux, r/linuxmemes, etc. in, then I can browse by that Linux group that I've created to see posts from all those communities. Then I'd probably do the same with a Games category, a Music category, a Memes category, a Cats category... you see where this is going.

The idea behind doing away with a front page and instead relying on user-made community groupings is to encourage purposeful browsing. Nothing is stopping you from just tossing every community you follow into one giant grouping called Front Page if you want. But groupings are made the default.

You can also share a community grouping that you've made, but when you do the person you share it with gets their own copy of your grouping. This way they can easily add to and subtract from it as they want. Dynamically sharing a grouping so that others automatically see changes you make is deliberately not part of the design. This takes away user control and could allow some users to become weak moderators of sorts if their grouping is popular enough.

Ideally it'd be nice to keep things simple with only link and text posts but it's not a hill I'd die on. There's a few decent reasons to allow image and video posts too.

Voting on posts is one element of Reddit and sites like it that works pretty well with not many downsides, so I'd keep that around.

Reddit's nested conversations are also a nice feature, so that gets carried over too. What does get the axe is comment voting (at least by default). I think voting is helpful on posts because it gives the community a way to sort of self-moderate, promoting high quality posts while burying low quality or off topic ones. Comments are a different story though and I find that comment scores more often than not are just a measure of which comments got the strongest reactions. At best this means that the highest voted comments are all just little quips and one liners trying to be funny. At worst it can promote extremism and bury nuanced discussion (just take a look at almost any of the big political subreddits).

Turning comment scores off isn't going to be a great fit for all subreddits though, which is why I'd probably allow moderators of communities to enable it if they choose. But it definitely stays off by default.

For comment sorting when scores are turned off, I think I'd give moderators a choice to default sorting to most recent, oldest first, or most replies.

The only meaningful change I'd make here is not tracking total post karma for each user for what I hope are obvious reasons. 99% of people don't care about it, and the 1% who do shouldn't.

One feature that's somewhat controversial for some reason about Lemmy is its derogatory speech filter which is baked into the source code. While I'll admit their implementation might not be perfect, you only need to look as far as other Reddit alternatives to see why this kind of platform-wide filter isn't a bad idea.

I'd take this filter and expose it to instance admins to edit as they see fit. Each instance's filter would also be publicly viewable to help moderation be transparent. I realize that making this filter so easy to edit might seem like a bad idea, but hear me out. Anybody who knows enough to set up their own instance is going to know how to dig into the source code to edit the filter if they really want to. Burying the filter in the code is only security through obscurity. We may as well allow edits to be made easily to the filter and also make sure that the filter is at least easily and pubicly viewable.

That's about all the ideas I've had for an improved Reddit clone. Again, I've got no intentions to carry any of this out any time soon, and if I did I definitely don't have the time for it. But it's something to think about and maybe someone out there can do something with it (or at least tell me why my ideas are awesome/stupid).

Designing a Reddit Clone

Front Page

Posts

Comments

User Profiles

Moderation

Conclusion

Links