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

Congrats on the hard work, and the idea is fine, but the problem is that tech like this is a cheap commodity in a massively oversaturated space, and without a hook that makes the platform exceptional (innovative/clever/beautiful design, unique aggregation features, inherently interesting content, reimagined user/content/moderation dynamics etc etc), this kind of thing is dead in the water because it lacks a network effect. Add in the upfront subscription model and failure to launch is basically assured.

When I visit the root domain I shouldn't be greeted with a marketing splash page, you need interesting content in the user's face right away, entice their curiosity and drive the user to explore the site... even as a fellow developer, my first instinct is to abandon the page as soon as I'm greeted with the cliche startup marketing page. Consider the user experience when I visit reddit.com or news.ycombinator.com or any other link aggregation competitor. What you have now is a tech demo, not a platform. Sorry if that's a little harsh, but I mean well! Good luck!

The idea of posters getting real money instead of fake internet points when their posts do well seems interesting, but maybe an unintentional experiment in unintended consequences. Moderation will be extremely important to prevent low-effort memes and content regurgitation and the like from saturating your main channels. Have you considered how you will encourage moderation and keep it free from the corrosive influence of quid quo pro? (hey moderator, you overlook this spam post and maybe I cut you in on the profits)

When real money is involved on the internet the worst kinds of stuff results, and it takes a lot of effort to avoid it. How's that going to work?

None of this is to take away from your accomplishments here, by the way. The exact opposite in fact, you've got an interesting enough idea that it prompts interesting questions of the mechanics.

P.S. do you have any long-term plans to IPO this if it becomes successful? If not, some kind of guarantee that this platform is immune to enshittification would probably be very, very popular.

The use of tags vs discrete communities keeps it from being a viable alternative to Reddit for me.

I have a real disdain for tags for user generated content. Every site I have seen use tags I end up having to wade through a ton of spam or vaugly related content to whatever tag I am looking for. The only exception I can think of is Hashtags for twitter but that is due to the character limit.

I understand that people see tages as a solution to crossposting but I think people overlook the benefits of crossposting. Being able to have seperate conversations on AI art in an art community vs programming community is more useful to me than having a single post that both communities comment on.

I'm concerned about the `#` character in the URL.

# means fragment and that's kept local and not sent to the server unless client side Javascript sends it to the server. I would use an identifier that doesn't already mean something to the URL.

See the URL spec here: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3986#section-3.5 We are using this in a lot of our projects, like https://github.com/Cyphrme/URLFormJS#query-parameters-fragme... (and https://github.com/Cyphrme/Path)

For an example where this is relevant: https://cyphr.me/ed25519_tool/ed.html#?msg_encoding=Text&msg...

The main page shouldn't be login-walled. I don't want to create an account just to find out what kind of content this community has and how active it is.

I like the concept, though I agree with a lot of the comments about people content farming and reposting comments for upvotes and I think that would kill the site (since Reddit already has enough of a problem with this and that's just for fake internet points).

The thing that I think a lot of people are missing about Reddit is that it's not a content aggregation site like HN or Digg or your site, Non.io; it's a community of communities.

I've seen so many reddit-likes which switch from 'subreddits' to hashtags, but that doesn't work for what makes Reddit great. On Reddit, you can create your own communities and control who is in them, set rules for them, moderate them how you want, and so on. For example, /r/AskHistorians has some extremely specific rules and moderation; /r/GirlGamers is a community of like-minded (typically female) individuals. /r/Trans is (in theory?) a safe place for the trans community to interact with one another. /r/BreakingMom is a place where mothers can vent without repercussions and non-mothers are not welcome to contribute content.

None of that is possible in this hashtag design. The #trans hashtag will be a shitshow of offensive, triggering, and deliberately abusive content, and there's nothing the trans community could do about that.

Toxic users on your platform will drive out anyone they don't like, and the only recourse users will have is to ask you (the admins/moderators) to ban those users - and now you have to make the decision of all of the content that is allowed on the site. Are you going to allow transphobic jokes on the site? If so, you're going to drive away trans people (and anyone with a sense of decency). If not, you're going to have to constantly be banning people from the whole site and not just part of it.

I think it's a cool site, but I think this software could be used to replace only one subreddit and not all of Reddit itself.

Mobile browser support is a little problematic.

A couple of things I noticed immediately, that you may want to consider.

  - landing page is not responsive, hard to read on Safari on iOS
  - login screen in-app couldn’t be closed, had to navigate away to exit, perhaps a hidden icon somewhere?
  - comment threads seemed to have the same issues on iOS as the landing page

Definitely like the direction you took for the UI, looks like with a little bit of work it’ll become a great platform though!

When I load the all page, I get an alert that just says "1", which feels like it's probably a successful XSS attack. Given that, I can't justify putting my credit card number directly into the site. If it took Paypal, Apple Pay, or similar I would absolutely give it a try for a few months.

Screenshot of the alert (imgur marked it as nsfw because it includes a thumbnail of a post that is mildly nsfw): https://imgur.com/a/TmwO1jg

The likely culprit: https://imgur.com/a/rJrLxfn

To be blunt, this had enough bugs out of the gate that I nearly didn't even finish registering! It feels like you rushed this out to capitalize on the reddit collapse, which I understand, but it may flop entirely because of these problems.

The registration kept failing with no indication as to why, just a red X on the button. I finally figured out that it simply didn't like my email address, trying a different one worked.

Then I tried to change my profile picture. That was failing completely silently; I guess .PNG files aren't excepted? I tried the same avatars that I use on every other site without issue. I did try a random .JPG, and that worked.

Opening the videos tab, none of the posts show the video, clicking on them doesn't expand anything, and the text isn't aligning, some of them randomly have the title in the center of the bar. I can't even figure out how to view the video.

This is on Firefox, latest version, no extensions.

EDIT: On further exploration, the submission description box has a bug. The first letter I wanted to type somehow got stuck as the last letter, and there was no way to delete/move it. "y description looked like this.M"

You should post this on /r/RedditAlternatives/ as well if you haven't already. Also, clickable link: https://non.io/#all

Please don't take this criticism harshly:

You say that you've been working on this for 4 years, but there's no content here. Have you not been using it yourself for 4 years? Where is the content that you and your friends have been posting?

"A place for all content types - No matter what you make, Nonio is equipped to support it. With no advertisers, you aren’t at risk of having your content demonetized."

How far are you willing to go to defend this? There's been lots of technical talk in this thread so far, but I'm curious on this portion.

So far I'm LOVING the UI. I actually think you should drop the payment part ASAP and just push for more users in the standard social media format.

I also think a staggered release of new "tags" is a fantastic idea, but needs to scale ASAP (until the site is ready for users to create their own hashtags/subreddits)

EDIT: After using this more, it's so exciting and fun to see something so new and fresh. It really feels like I'm back in 2010.

I like the idea and the price is fine. But I'd rather pay $2 for the servers instead of rewarding posters. The problem is that once they start making money it will become too clickbaity/commercial. I strongly dislike the mass content most "pro" YouTubers like Linus tech tips and the like generate.

Reddit never really had this because all you could give was subscription time. Paying causes this mainstream focus and clickbaiting.

Maybe you feel the need to attract content generators to your platform but it will only create more mediocre content IMO.

What was so great about Reddit was that people created amazing content that they were passionate about, regardless of whether it paid well or not.

Requiring a login to see anything at all is too much friction for this kind of thing. (Or at least I couldn't find a link that let to content from the main page without logging in.)

The UI is nice though. Minimal dead space in the comments.

Cool project! For something like this to succeed at Reddit's scale, it should stay snappy under load (which admittedly Reddit doesn't). So clicked through to Github to see what it's written in:

> Languages

> Shell 100.0%

I admired the absolute chadliness of this decision - until i realised this was just a top-level super-repo.

Big mistake, I open non.io and I don't see content. I see you trying to sell me something. I haven't read a single word of it.

If this wants to be a "reddit like" platform, it needs to be like reddit and actually present content on its homepage.

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

Some other fun tidbits: I'm trying to make this an API-first service, with the frontend being just a representation of how to use it. Because of that, I wanted to make the frontend as reusable/refactorable as possible, regardless of frontend framework. I relied on webcomponents for everything, and the full app is a SPA built purely in vanilla js.

I'd never recommend anyone take that approach, it was masochistic. Use react or something. It was a great learning experience, but writing everything in vanilla js does slow down dev time overall.

I've spent enough time [Edit: on HN] to remember App.net¹ which was launched with similar fanfare but was shut down after few painful years of trying to find a PMF. The lesson I learned from that saga was HN might not be the best place to validate your product. We're too smart to diss even good ideas like DropBox.

Go and talk to your potential customers and I hope the App.net story gives you some inspiration.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13387723

Depending on how fast you can execute it may be too late, but right now you have a brief window of opportunity to get a seedbed of users.

Reproduce the Reddit API exactly such that these soon-to-be-defunct client apps can work with minimal changes (ideally, just a configurable root domain). Reach out to the client authors and see if they will enable your site. Maybe you'll capture some of those user communities.

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

I'm the developer of Sync for Reddit. If you want to explore making an Android app I'm about to have a lot of time on my hands...

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.

Pretty cool! I would consider changing your URL patterns though. It's not ideal to change them after launch, but it will be harder to change them a year from now if/when you run into issues.

1. Using '#' in URLs is not great.

  - When requesting a page, the browser doesn't include anything after the hash, which means:
  - Tag pages rely solely on client-side routing — they'll never work with JS disabled. You might not support no-JS right now, but if you ever want to allow for it in the future, it's incompatible with hash-based routing.
  - SEO will probably be impacted; not sure how well crawlers deal with hash-based routing.
  - If someone links to non.io/#dog on social media, I think the opengraph preview will also ignore the hash.

If you want client-side routing, you should use a library or the JS history API[0]. That way you can use normal URLs and potentially support server-side rendering to allow for no-JS clients.

2. Putting user-generated URLs at the root of your site could be bad.

  - Keep that namespace for yourself: what if you want to make a page at non.io/support but someone already named their post 'support'?
  - Some stuff needs to be at the root (currently non.io/robots.txt 404s and seems to be trying to render a post).
  - There are other standards that look for specific URLs, or non-standards: e.g. BlueSky was authenticating domain names in a dumb way [1]

To be fair, Twitter does put usernames at the root (not sure if they regret that), but they have some careful exceptions (/home, /i/, etc). If you don't want to switch your post URLs away from the root, you should at least set aside some of the useful URL real-estate.

If you do decide to make these changes, you should try and set up redirects for any existing URLs, at least for a while.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35820368

I like the monetisation model, it'll hopefully incentivise and reward creators, while being cheap enough that a lot of people won't mind paying. Best of luck!

> hope it's a better [model] than the freemium model we've been relying on for the last few years.

It may be a better model for something, but it's impossible for this to be used on a "reddit-like" site.

Reddit is a large community where many users are anonymous. A paid model means it will never be a large community and posters will never be anonymous.

And while reddit has tried to make freemium work, I'm pretty sure it has never worked and their real business model is ad based. Advertisements are a centuries old model that has proven to work well, I encourage you to switch to that (and on your API, make it a requirement to show ads).

Also don't allow people to remove the ads by paying - you need to show ads to people with enough money to buy the stuff you're advertising. Exclusively showings ads to poor people does not work. Just make sure your ads aren't annoying.

It's your site, you can do what you want with it, but it won't be like reddit with your proposed business model.

A couple thoughts after trying to submit a post (on firefox):

- no way to post a link/URL? But I can upload an html file? Am I supposed to make the URL the description of the post?

- "audio" does not appear to have a file upload button (probably a bug)

- the text submission box sometimes does that glitchy thing some javascript'd text boxes do where everything I type comes out backwards until a refresh

Seems like a cool platform, glad I registered. I'm trying to post a video, and I think this would be better if the encoder worked in the background so I don't need to leave the page up. Console is also full of CORS errors.

Edit: after waiting for a while with "480" checked, got an error message with a frowny face file icon

Another edit: Seems posting of any kind is currently broken, at least as an unsubscribed account. Too bad, it's a nice idea with about the best timing it'll ever have, but this is a very soft launch.

I wasn't able to register initially due to some password strength requirements that aren't written anywhere, and got errors without an explanation of why. Generally I would have bailed at this point but wanted to give your project a look.

Good luck, I think it's a cool idea.

I just created a new account using the free tier, and then afterwards decided I would like to play.

I went to my profile, clicked on "view financials", but when I press "Change Subscription Amount" the page just freezes. Why won't you let me give you my money?

Having a look in the console... Every time I press the "Change Subscription Amount" button there is a 500 API error from https://api.non.io/stripe/subscription and this is printed: {error: 'no customer for the user'}

Seems like this is a great way to monetize content theft, since almost every single post in high traffic subs is currently a repost of a recycled meme or Tiktok.

I have to recommend that this platform doesn't give users a profit motive. It encourages quantity over quality and only "front-page" worthy content. Niche communities won't get traction this way. A few Gallowboob-level posters will be making most of the profit.

That's not to say that a financial incentive is a bad idea, though. If you capped the amount that a user made per month to the cost of their subscription - $1, then there's no profit for users to make. They're just saving money on the subscription cost.

Nothing against paying to take part in something but having money paid out to people you upvote seems to set up a very perverse incentive structure. There's now a direct monetary incentive for clickbait. I would much rather 50% to the running of the site, 50% to a charity chosen by the sub that I'm posting in. Anything but rewarding people for drama creation.

I signed up, but immediately lost my password because the password manager didn't save it. Your signup password field doesn't seem to play nice with password managers. Just thought you should know!

Is it open-source? Is it based on open protocols? Does it support federation?

If the answer to any of these questions is no, then your product is irrelevant.

It's nothing personal. It's just that I'm sick and tired of centralized solutions running on somebody else's computers. At least this product makes its business model clear (a $2/month subscription fee for interacting).

But hey, I'm a guy who used to run phpBB forums on a Pentium 1 under my bed 20 years ago. Back then there were tons of those forums, most of us didn't ask users for any subscription money, there was no centralized gatekeeper, and everybody was happy. All of us used to curate our own small gardens and the model was sustainable at all levels.

Can I just get that back, with some federation protocols on top to allow multi-instance interactions? Seriously, everything else is pointless, it's a waste of time, and it doesn't make the digital world any better. I won't jump from a centralized platform to another, and probably nobody should.

So, I signed up, paid and I am already concerned by the financial information page.

1: Within the financial page, I have a wallet of $844.33 -- Can you elaborate on what this is?

2: https://non.io/admin/financials appears accessible by all.

a: I selected $7 for my monthly subscription, however the financial page displays as $9.

b: I can't amend the amount nor can I cancel my subscription. The UI buttons are not working on Chromium & Firefox on FreeBSD.

c: What are all these other contributions?

3: Your support page leads me to GitHub, I don't own a GitHub account.

4: Text editor is so very broken: https://non.io/itsverybroken

Maybe maintenance mode is required? Good for the first stress test and I've learnt a lesson of maybe not paying for something that's not a final product ;) Although hope to see these improvements.

I really like the idea of a micro-subscription. I want to contribute to online content but nearly always people are asking north of $5/month, and I have massive subscription fatigue at that level.

I wish the UI was more basic. All the work to create fancy UIs just makes them worse. Just clone old Reddit and stop there, it was nearly perfect.

The fundamental problem with Reddit isn't ads, or freemium, or venture capital, or who is CEO, or even the API changes.

The fundamental problem is lock-in.

Once a site becomes big enough, its "users" effectively become owned by the site, because everything they care about is there, and the site controls access to it. Preventing another Reddit/Tumblr/Digg disaster entails solving this problem.

And with all due respect for the work you did on Non.io, I fail to see how it represents even the tiniest amount of progress in that regard. Notably, the payment model does not solve the problem, because if the site ever takes off, the temptation to milk the userbase for all they can give will become irresistible. And that means ads, dark patterns, blocking of third-party clients, censorship to appease advertisers and the mainstream press, etc. And then we're back to zero.

Four years of work and I instantly nope out when you can't keep my scroll position when I click Back. Don't mess up the basics.

My first 5 minutes have been positive. I've worked for years on a similar platform but never expected to have the time to ship, so I appreciate that you've implemented a few patterns/features that I was hoping for, namely tag-based subscriptions.

Bug report: on latest Firefox with uBlock Origin, I have a strange UI bug on the root/home page: without any activity from cursor or otherwise, there is a dropdown that appears to show emails saved in my browser for form auto-fill. This is visible in the top left which seems to be in the same place where your registration sidebar is.

I have quite a number of thoughts and questions which I'll move to the platform. Great job.

It is a nice start, but I cannot image that tags are sufficient organization of the content to scale this idea. And while the UI looks nice, it is incomplete. I saw no tag options when posting, and before logging in I didn't even see sufficient navigation to understand how to find and filter content.

The monetization idea also feels like it won't scale - the more someone is active, the less their vote is going to mean. Seems like an odd incentive, as creators then will be targeting those users who pay for the site, but don't use it much.

Overall, this looks like a well-coded but half-baked idea of a site.

The back button doesn't remember scroll position, it always takes me to the top. Can't really use this as is.

Please gzip-encode javascripts and css.

They are transmitted raw (also: not minified, but that'd be more acceptable if you gzipped them) and also they are returning Accept-Ranges header. That's IMO not a sensible default; they are not big resources supposed to be downloaded with retries - they are needed as a whole, in a fastest way possible. Gzipping them will shorten the page load - which is actually quite good already - congrats for that!

Please work on the area for setting up bio and picture. I've paid $2 - I believe in you and want this to work! :) Thank you for all that you're doing!!

This seems like a great idea, I'd consider popping in and registering but I would have to wonder how you would handle things like NSFW content?

I don't know what payment processor you're using but I have to assume it'd fall prey to the same issues that onlyfans and others had.

What about keeping objectively terrible content off the platform? I won't name it but we all know what I'm talking about.

I think spelling out API usage from the get-go would be a good idea.

Really hope it succeeds!

Maybe there could be an low-effort area where you don't get paid.

I get the site is targeting creators, but I also get the impression that it is about general discussions etc? As a user it feels weird to give equal money to a discussion as someones awesome multi-month project, especially since there will probably be more discussions than awesome multi-month projects.

I really like the lurk for free but pay to participate approach. Getting paid however feels like a possible distraction that might just overcomplicate things, both technical and moderation+incentives. I don't think most people would be doing it for the money (and for most people it would at best be pocket change anyway). Getting rid of ads is the killer-feature that hopefully builds a good community, I guess/hope.

Getting people to enter their credit cards is probably harder than the actual amount, so the appeal of getting the money back is still red in the balance-sheet for pocket-change amounts.

My biggest gripe is that payments kills anonymity (which some might see as a big thing).

I really like the idea of a place where a creator can post anything. The upvotes = money angle makes me skeptical, but idk, maybe it could work.

I know you just launched, so you're probably thinking about this already, but from what I've seen in the loginless browsing link, discoverability is nothing like reddit. It just feels like an unorganized dump of content, like I accidentally opened a link to a spam blog, or opened the "federated" tab on a mastodon server.

If I was looking to join a community, I wouldn't know where to start. I see tags under random posts, but it seems like some posts don't have tags, and I can even add tags to other peoples' posts myself. It all seems too fluid and ephemeral, and I have to spend too much time trying to connect stuff together in my head. By contrast, it's obvious how a subreddit works to most people, and it's easy to find the content you're interested in.

There's no way to get from https://non.io/#all back to https://non.io without manually editing the browser URL?

Is this a real project or another collect-HN-users-IP-addresses scheme?

So posts need to have a unique/custom path directly under the main domain?

https://non.io/avo-jump

Sounds like a recipe for disaster. At least it should be in a sub-path (/post/?), and probably include some sort of unique id.

I suggest decluttering main view. Hide all tags or make them visually hidden (e.g. grey on white, no outlines etc.), also make a headline at the top, and all the service metadata like date, comment counter, author name at the bottom and to the side. Also as a nice to have next improvements make actual fixed categories/subreddits/subforums thing. Because used based tags doesn't work at all at scale. At best they are a secondary thing helping in search and used by 0.1% of all users. Categories should be more fixed, maybe initially user created but not changing (existing ones).

Otherwise you will get an endless scroll of doom/memes page with everything dumped there, and we already have tons of networks in such format - facebook, twitter etc.

Make it costly for creators to actually post something. They can recoup in upvotes. That's the proper incentive structure ... by posting you're imposing on other people actually, and their attention. If what you posted recoups and goes on to get you a lot of points, great! But if you posted crap, make that be costly.

In fact, make "upvotes" be zero-sum transfers from the user to another. They have a limited amount and their upvotes will mean something. If you have downvotes then I guess the person is willing to lose that amount, just so the other guy does also.

Here is the full tokenomics: https://community.qbix.com/t/preventing-spam-and-sybil-attac...

I love this. And I would like to say that I think many of the highest-voted comments have it wrong: I WANT TO PAY for using the app in exchange for good privacy/ethical practices of the app/company making it. I don't even comment here on HN much but I was moved to speak out about your post. (And its the right day to post this, given the protest of so many subreddtits due to their API pricing and terms)

That said, yes you may still get a "network effect" from not enough people registering/using the app. But hey, I applaud the attempt and hopefully it will get some users/traction.

Last question I would have is: how does it compare/contrast/integrate with other, possibly federated, social services such as Mastodon?

I searched for a random tag and it showed me all of the front page content.

Seems it's not allowed to simply return "Nothing found" anymore. I don't want blackbox algorithms serving me stuff it thinks I want.

I like the design. I like the domain. I don't understand grouping of content at all. People want siloed communities. If this is just tags, I'm not interested. Twitter had that and it was a nightmare.

EDIT: also, yeah. Parroting other answers. non.io should take me directly to content. I went there to take a look as I got home and it's... a marketing page, with no information (at least, from a cursory glance) as to how to get to the content.

I think this is a great idea! I'm surprised by the vaguely shrouded negativity in the comments. It's so easy to poke holes. This is great work and whatever problems arise can be dealt with at that time.

Here are some of the lazy thinker comments:

- If there's money involved, things go askew!!

Yes, well look: Google, FB, "open"AI etc. etc. What's new? The difference is this is a new approach and could potentially work.

- You make me sign up without showing me the stuff?! The gall..

Sigh...

- It's not pixel perfect on my special unique Moto-galaxy-iphone!

Really? You realize it's in the process of being made right? Soft launch it says. Recall how shit ChatGPT UI was, and it's not significantly improved since.

I think the subscription and redistribution idea is the future of a sustainable internet. You will need some way to make sure this money given to the original content creators, or the website will be completely overrun by spammers re-posting other people's material that they know will net them the most money. Or am I tripping?

It's a bad choice to have all images in Google file format if you want your website to be accessible to as many people as possible. Not everybody is on Chrome browsers.

Why haven't you seeded your platform with high quality content before launching? Now it is a desert.

I assume self promotion for people and businesses is allowed and encouraged, since it costs money to post?

I gotta point out a UI issue on account registration. Firefox generated a random password for me, and filled in the password fields. When I clicked the Create Account button, the button changed to red, and shook as if to say, "NO." There was no message indicating the problem.

I had to retry with my dev tools open to see that the response code from the request triggered by clicking Create Account contained a message about username, e-mail, and password being required.

This error was presented even though I had all fields with valid data, and I was unable to create an account until I manually edited both password fields, which I had not dirtied myself previously.

First of all thanks for sharing this!

Secondly, not sure if anyone has mentioned this before but in Safari on macOS there's something odd happening. On the page I see a small '1Password' popup and when I click it, it asks me to to unlock 1Password.

However I don't see any login form on the page and I don't see any other text input fields so I'm not sure why this would be.

I'm sure it's a perfectly innocent bug but it's probably something you want to address otherwise maybe it might put some people off.

See screenshots: https://imgur.com/a/3CcDFcg

Best of luck with the app!

Your site doesn't think "$&m22KPBeB$!7&^l" is a strong enough password.

Uhm… okay?

Well done for launching! Kudos for using Web Components.

RE: Landing Page. Keep the marketing side, after all you've a paid Model. I'd split the Landing Page on non-mobile devices:

----33% Marketing ----|----66% Endless FEDD----|

Could hide Marketing pane after some time / or button.

RE: Paid Subscription. Re-think the model you've got, won't scale (direct wealth-distribution by vote) as it's presented (e.g tipping creators by vote: could be done/seeded by Agents/Affiliates etc), unless I'm missing a twist to this.

You've done the right thing to not accept money atm (while you iron out platform/user issues)

The site is surprisingly fast. It's unlikely I'll use it since I'm not an early adopter of social media, but I do like that it's fast. The animations are slow, which could be changed, but each page loads fast.

Thanks for building this and I hope you don't get discouraged by HN's tendency to shoot stuff down. It's best to pretend like it's the hottest new thing, for the highest chance of that actually being true.

I just tried it and it could do with improvement.

* How do I post a link. I just want to post a damn link. Images, audio, blogs not no link option... The page I'm trying to post already has meta tags with a the description and thumbnail so I want you to suck that content down.

* So whatever I posted an 'image' with a link in the content. The link didn't actually turn into an <a href>

* I clicked on some post and a video started playing WITH SOUND!

* The financials page says I have over $800 in my wallet. Lol OKAY let's go!

* I connect my stripe only to find that it won't work for non-US people.

* I guess I'll just cancel now but the cancel sub button is broken.

This is cool, but I actually feel right now it leans more towards being twitter-like in a reddit UI than a reddit-like. The analogy to tagging on Reddit is posting to a subreddit, but it differs on Reddit in that posting isn't inclusive but exclusive to the discretion of the moderators(owners) of the subreddit(tag). The creates distinguishably different cultures in the comment sections between subs sharing the same content. How you go about approaching how moderation and classifying works will have a major effect on how the commenting and reaction experience will feel.

Back when I don't even know what PHP is, i was dreaming of creating this Facebook like social media. Now 7 years later, I have the knowledge of creating. I was not even interested in creating another social media, just because I know I am nobody, I am not an MIT graduate, I don't have a network, my social/communication is terrible. Now I am settled on a working day job, those big ambitions are buried when I fully grasp the reality that I am not gonna be that one lucky enough to launch a successful billion dollar social networking app.

I love this idea but I cannot figure how to sign up.

On mobile the site does not really work at all. Everything’s scrolled off the page and then way to small. When I zoom out.

I click sign up, nothing happens…

I guess I’ll have to go see if my laptop is charged up

How will you combat plagiarism?

I wouldn’t want to see someone else profiting off my content.

I’m guessing you’d place a hold on any payout, until you’ve reviewed their content? But I’m thinking about the claims / reporting process.

Others may have covered this but I think you should have the landing page be the site itself, that will be an good advertisement rather than a product sell page. Also, the tags are interesting, but I find them distracting and would rather a single 'upvote' count with specific tags. The navigation needs some improvements, the submit button is somewhat hidden near the top and should be made more prominent (grey on darker grey is hard to see). Other than that, I have been interested in a similar payment model for sometime.

I've always liked the idea of this monetization model. But have you thought about how to disincentivize content stealing? Feels like these models end up needing a very thorough verification system.

Awesome! I added a post about accessibility. Since the accessibility community is getting hit hard by the reddit API cost. Let's see a more accessible platform than reddit. https://non.io/a11y

For anyone not aware, read about r/blind here: https://twitter.com/rumster/status/1668004686610178048

I recently found that more sites has Stripe code on pages that actually don't require payment. First it was a calendar site to schedule meetings, now this.

As many of you, I have a bunch of blockers installed in my web browser and I strip off the Strip code when I am opening non.io 'register' page. Unfortunately, it prevents me from registering.

I believe the code there is to build my profile and start using metrics/features about who I am. I am not sure if it is really necessary at that point.

Would you consider removing Stripe snippets on registering page?

This reminds me of Coil subscriptions that was built on a similar micropayments concept for paying out creators. Sadly they shut down. Worth looking into their efforts, what went wrong...

I love the business model. Have you checked in with credit card processors yet regarding "no content type demonitization"? Cool in principal but many sites like onlyfans have gone through hell with credit card issuers playing the moral police.

Also, have you considered making it a foundation or non-profit as a business model? IMO the for-profit nature of Reddit is behind its troubles right now. You could pay yourself a handsome salary as the foundation's CEO while still keeping things pro-user.

Hm, I don't really see how this is Reddit-like. It doesn't seem to have anything like subreddits.

If I wanted to recreate a subreddit on non.io, how would I do that? How would I enforce rules?

You are charging the people who volunteer content for your site. You’ve got this completely backwards. PAY money for the privilege of giving you value? No thanks.

%98 lurk, %1.9 comment and %0.1 make content that make the rest of the group come in and lurk / comment in the first place. You probably want to invert the payment model in a way and still give money to content creators, or make it a platform which content creators can get paid and take a cut, like substack.

But you have a chicken/egg issue there too, which is why coke when it was first getting started gave coke to various soda fountain places to bootstrap demand in the first place.

You should scrape the popular posts off of Reddit's /r/all and post them on here as well.

And, IMO, you should ignore (and possibly even actively flaunt) any of Reddit's TOS.

Looks like the website has been overwhelmed with spam, and, possibly hacked/exploited [1]. It looks like someone has been able to create directories & upload scripts [2]?

I do bug bounty in my spare time so this was an interesting live find.

[1] https://non.io/expoity

[2] https://html.non.io/upload-demo.html

I find the concept interesting, but I see no reason to spend money when platforms with larger communities only want easily-obfuscated personal data or easily-blocked advertising impressions. If anything, the number of sites which are advertising themselves as "like Reddit, except..." today is proof that Advance Media (and Spez) are right in exerting their influence over Reddit's users and their channels of engagement.

On the landing page: "$2/mo min." is confusing, is it talking about minutes? consider "just $2/mo" or "from just $2/mo"

I like the idea, but it's almost like your sales model and distribution model is conflicting with itself. You realize how important the content creators/submitters are to the platform so you agree to split money with them, but you also are charging them to use the platform.

If anything the most valuable members are the contributors. Stats on this very, but something like 1% of users ever make a submission, and only 10% or so comment.

I like the idea of paid to comment / interact.

I mostly lurk reddit / read.

But understanding its balance between sustainability and popularity, is there a lower bound to free that can ensure the content is posted to seo the space popular?

1-3 free submissions per month would be enough for me.but if I started a sub (which I’ve considered a few times) I’d see enough value to pay.

Love the idea. Good luck. The timing is great. The audience is ready for a new model.

The poor mobile experience, and the seeming inability to even find the content without manually adding #all to the URL, makes this a non-starter.

When looking at #all, there doesn't appear to be any way to register or login without removing that from the URL and going to the splash screen.

It's not clear what posts are videos, and when I clicked one that happened to be, having it auto-play with sound is terrible.

Everybody's been working on a Reddit-like platform, including Paul Graham, who called his Hackernews.

I think it's fine if you realize that the value lies in the community, not the platform itself. Online communities used to cluster around the 31 flavors of forum/web BBS, so if you have interesting topics to build a small community around your software may flourish based on those.

Looks like an interesting model, I’d love to try it out. But signup on mobile didn’t have auto suggest for my password manager (1pass), and I’m not going to separately create a username/password in 1P and then copy it over.

Maybe passkeys? Or better mobile support? Sorry to add on to comments from a few others — it does seem like an interesting model! Similar to FloatPlane, Patreon, etc. but in reverse.

> 1. Free to browse, paid to interact.

This is exactly what I have been pondering recently about maintaining a website with useful content not prone to some of the problems we are seeing from all of the "free to interact" websites. Only serious contributors would pay for the ability to aggregate and interact with a community.

Thank you for your work on this, will be looking into this further.

I’ve noticed people are entering a lot of test content on the app which ruins the experience for new users. Why don’t you force people to enter a title and either a picture or a description? And block posts with the word “test” that are under 20 characters or something? Just to make the front page better and not ruin the conversion rate for new people.. just a thought!

I tried to register, but my 30 character random letter password with numbers letter and characters "wasn't complex enough".

There is a platform that has some similar ideas, it's called Stacker News. I especially like the idea of splitting income between the builers/hosters and posters and voters of posts.

Furthermore, each comment under a post can earn by being upvoted.

See: https://stacker.news/faq

The homepage needs to be the content. Without doing that you are gonna be dead in the water because only a small fraction of people are going to bother registering just to test the water.

Also look at how the current and past generations of forums grew up. Lots of time it was their site owner linking to the content on whatever site they are on...

I command clicked (on a Mac, equivalent to Ctrl click on Win) on a link. It did not open in a new tab, but the same tab. That alone makes me not want to test it further, because 1) that should be default and 2) whenever I see a list of links, I would like to be able to open more than one of them in the background before actually checking them out.

I like the idea and am curious to see how well / if this gains traction. Nice UI, although I'm having trouble actually subscribing on the financials page, and it seems to show demo data?

Great job launching something!

https://pasteboard.co/eRp2eCMwkExq.png

Ha, I had almost the exact same idea but just today. In my version though the subscription fee minus the dollar would be split evenly between all the subcommunities you follow, and within them by votes (by anyone).

This would incentivize creating communities that people would like to follow, not only for the content but also for the moderation.

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

‪I logged in using the loginless browsing link. I could not see where to create a new post, nor where the "subs" are, if they exist. I tried to reply to a post, but instead of a functional HTML textarea I got some javascipt box that seemed to add two newlines after every character that I typed in.

Can https://non.io/#all just become a part of https://non.io homepage? So that the marketing goes first, and #all goes after it.

Looks great! Silly question, but have you considered ActivityPub integration? I ask because while it may not benefit you directly, these days i'm liking the idea more and more of joining a community if they're in "the fediverse". Which is to say i don't need to worry about the instance being small and isolated, i get benefits of the fediverse regardless of where i am in it.

Ie, i get friction currently when looking at alternatives not in "the verse". Eg Tildes, i have the same concern.

Nice work!

I love the idea of requring $ to subscribe, but expect that sharing $ based on upvotes will corrupt the system.

Reminds me of retroshare, which is fully peer to peer and anonymizing. Anyone here try it before? Meant for closed communities and not open/global so a different niche I suppose

https://retroshare.cc/

You know I often daydream of creating a social media site that has a small monthly subscription, a way to show users they are not the product, a way to maintain integrity and not have to appease any VCs.

But when faced with it here I couldn't help but recoil a bit, and I'm not sure why.

Would be great if one could have at look at the site without being forced to register.

I don't think this can be successful as an alternative to reddit. I'm a broke unemployed person from a third world country who's not gonna pay to ask a question on /r/work to find a job. Just the thought that I have to pay for talking is alien to me.

I'm blaming it on a lack of originality that everyone's been working on a Reddit-like system for the last 2-4 years. But the real kicker is everyone announcing theirs today, with how many years they've been working on it in the subject.

Is there any written guarantee that all of the user created content is public domain in perpetuity and can be exported by anyone? Because if not than this is just another Reddit wannabe clone that will flip on a dime once it gets a sniff of user traction a potential exit.

- test login doesn't work

- loginless browsing drops user into New which is full of garbage

- when I click popular, I still don't see any interesting content.

:-| - i think you have a chicken and egg problem. Why pay to post somewhere without readers? why read when there isn't any interesting content?

Dude you need to figure out your landing page ASAP. The marketing splash thingie isn't doing you any favors. Route the root to /all and allow a simple registration. This is the moment when you can get the users, the current splash page is horrible for it.

It's quite an interesting business model. Qudos...

Happy to see it at github: go server, javascript frontside.

> everything left gets split evenly between everything you upvote that month

Does that include comments that are upvoted? I mean, in some cases the submission itself is just a question and all the value is in the contribution from the users in the comments.

Using the # anchor in the url as the subreddit/tag/category etc is really clever!

Why can posts not be links/URLs? Isn't that a pretty huge part of reddit posts?

When submitting a post, why do I need to come up with a URL like non.io/example-i-made-up? If I leave that blank I would expect it to just assign a random or UUID URL.

I think with some very basic UI/UX tweaks this can very quickly look, feel and perform 10X better. I applaud your efforts and if you need help. Just ask (details in bio). Happy to lend a helping hand or give you a few quick wins.

Congrats on the launch.

Has the cost of lawyers and moderation been modelled? At $2/month spammers break even if they get like 5 clicks from all their posting on the platform, huge magnet for them, and content copypasters, if the platform gets some traction.

I’m willing to give this a try if you can clean it up a bit. UX is rough on mobile. I also prefer subs to hashtags but whatever, I’m easy. I bailed on Reddit like 2yrs ago and there’s really no alternative that I can find except HN.

Title seems oddly similar to another “Reddit-like” post from today!

Show HN: FlingUp, a Reddit-like platform Ive been building for the last 2 years (https://flingup.com)

I like the monetization model and wish you the best of luck.

IIRC, the get paid to post model can make users feel like they are working which can have negative consequences. Deal with that later... hopefully you can get traction/network effect.

My first thought is that there should be something like a star system, so I could also upvote something simple, without having to be afraid of lowering the value I gave to a complex, interesting, high-effort post I upvoted.

For what it's worth, you should add openid/google/apple/etc auth. Registration friction is going to be one of the hardest things you face, especially on mobile, which is where a lot of people are these days.

Awesome. I've had a very similar idea for about as long, the main difference is you did something about it and I navel gazed. Awesome to see this idea of paying into this instead of users being the product.

The model of users paying money for the site means that there probably can’t be any discussion about file sharing or piracy at all. I remember this becoming an issue for the Something Awful forums a point time ago.

https://html.non.io/.well-known/Motherfucking%20Website.html

Definitely make it browseable without signing in.

When reddit launched they used fake accounts to create posts and engagement and avoid empty-site syndrome, not saying you should/could do that with an AI.

You should probably visually distinguish posts from the test account(s), and delete them after a short time, or content from actual users will be drowned out.

Or maybe move test accounts to a separate instance?

If there is money to make then anti-fraud and anti-spam is a topic besides gpt-bots / ai-agents that will be coming up. I like the idea of course but i see dark clouds coming up.

I applaud upur efforts, and hope it catches on!

However, the current top post is NSFW and the preview is rendering in the timeline, that would be something to change so folks can safely browse on the job.

I don't want to belittle your work, but there is zero chance for me to register just to check the place. If someone sent me that link I would open and close the tab immediately.

Hey, that looks nice but I can’t look at it on a older, small iPhone. The page resize in loop.

But from what I can see it’s a landing page; I would need to see conversation and links right away.

I dont mean to sound harsh but I believe this project is a waste of your time. If you want to make money, I would abandon this immediately. Cut your losses and start something new.

I'd like to be able to view content when not logged in. Also, the site is not mobile friendly, which is my primary method of access for these types of sites.

The UID/PW demo combo doesn't work for me. Tried to actually sign up and couldn't figure it out (maybe you can't yet?)

It sounds interesting, but I can't figure it out.

Congrats on the soft launch Jake! Did not realise this was yours, I share some similar feedback on the front page as per others here.

Wish you all the best from Australia!

I gotta say I’m impressed, this thread has over 300 comments and everything still feels smooth, for a dynamic site that’s quite the feat to escape the hn hug of death.

You should probably have a responsive homepage. Being greeted by a static page that gives me sideways scroll on mobile doesn't exactly fill me with confidence.

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

60% of web users are phone users. Probably more for a site like this. Would be better if it supported mobile screens. Not just supported but that should be the default.

Are signups working? I tried to sign up, but the login form shook at me and said "X", which is not among the most informative error messages I've seen.

Sorry for the trivial nitpic but in the interest of reducing ambiguity the login asks for email and "hackernews" is literally not an email address.

You need to put some content in here even if you have to add it all yourself under a few different accounts. All I can see are blank messages and testing123

Wow, we almost had a name collision with the service nonan.io I'm currently launching :) (not really related. It's a data cleaning app)

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?

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

bro there is a crazy high amount of bugs on your site.

I click the link and get to a landing page with ZERO way I can see in 5 seconds to browse the content... Nothing to see here, moving on

You need to hire people to "create" content, and do it soon, if you want capture the feedback loop that could make it a success.

The homepage had no content on it so I closed the tab.

Give me a preview of whats inisde without logging in

In concept very similar to https://steemit.com/

I hope this is the Reddit killer! Good luck <3

I tried to register by clicking multiple times and nothing is happening. I tried to register in Brave, Firefox and Chrome

Looks cool and I appreciate the different model.

FYI - you mentioned letting free accounts post for now but that doesn't seem to work.

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

IOS registration window is broken - it pops up for a split second and then disappears. On the latest iOS 16 (not 17)

You're asking me to sign up before I can even see what I'm signing up for. Let me look at the content first.

so, people would have to pay in order to do the thankless "job" of sorting through content. "pay for the ability to rank and moderate!". great sales pitch. very enticing. seems like a failure to understand why 'upvotes/downvotes/points' exist and what do they accomplish.

Hey how did you do the tilted / perspective effect on the browser window screenshots on the landing homepage?

Cool. Can you shed some light on how you handle the logistics of charging for it? Which payment processor etc. ?

How do you prevent users from posting artwork by other people and stealing money from the real content creators?

How do you prevent users from posting other peoples artwork and stealing money from the actual content creators?

On the provided link I’m unable to register on safari, the pop up shows up for a second then goes away.

Neat idea.

Can it just open to the front page of articles in view mode instead of first signing up?

That would be a little more like Reddit.

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

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

I applaud any attempt to compete with existing social networks.

That said, user expectations are very high these days. The site looks awful on a phone, and I completely lost interest after about 5 seconds of trying to read the contents. Given how easy to make a site responsive these days and how relatively simple the main page is, that was quite disappointing.

Still, I hope you keep working on improving it!

on a desktop display i would expect some kind of limit on content width, plus centering. right now the content is left-aligned to about 15% of the full page width: https://non.io/#all

Do you plan to support Activity Pub?

man i want to like it, but had I not scrolled to the comments, i wouldn't have seen the link to view all without registering.

also, when I watched a video, no video controls appeared until the video ended and then they didn't work anyways.

I clicked your link but you didn't sell me. I closed it and didn't register.

Mobile web needs to be addressed…

Lets see if this will eventually take in VC cash. Bitwarden did the same thing.

Great Work!! I'd say to give yourself room and charge atleast 99$ per year.

I wonder if this could be used to launder money for a cost of $1 per month. :)

I am now imagining endless rows of North Korean inmates posting cat pictures.

This is why you build a MVP and test it before working on it for 4 years

There are window.alert() popping up, the website is vulnerable to XSS.

What are you serving it using?

It's surviving what I imagine to be a huge hug of death.

Please allow password generator to be used when creating my account.

i love how you divy up all the funds for upvotes. thats so creative

At least on iOS Safari its not responsive. Kind of a no go, sorry.

what is gonna prevent someone from upvoting their own (or alt accounts', or friends') hundreds of post, inflating away the value of a single upvote?

I like the subscription model. Wish Spotify worked like this

Love it. Will be big. But most VCs again won't get it

Loving the ui.

A bit more rich text features for the comments might be nice.

I really like this idea, and would love to subscribe when you’re ready!

I think many commenters have pointed out reasons why this model is not suited to widespread user adoption, but I just want to say that may not be a bad thing. Meme content moderation is not a big problem if your users are not the type to submit or upvote a lot of low effort memes in the first place. A paywall will inherently limit your user growth, but if the users you get end up being people who are happy to create and support high quality content, that seems pretty ideal to me (unless you are looking for maximal growth, VC level returns, and/or an IPO).

If there’s a mailing list or other way to get notified when you’re ready to do a full launch, I’d love to sign up for that!

I had to login to upvote and hopefully get it to 1337.

Karma farming, but now for money.. cant end well.

Wow, it looks like this has a Vanilla JS frontend

As a heavy Reddit user - love it.

But can’t seem to register on iOS

replace the homepage with the loginless feed dude

I don't see a scroll bar in the feed window?

great effort!

Do you think can you remove the css animations when loading any page? It's a bit annoying to see the fading in at each load.

I love it. I hope the internet one day will move to paid models. The current state of affairs is untenable. Ads, privacy issues, the lot. One thing I have tried doing recently is using a pre-paid model + free tier. Perhaps I am in the minority, but I absolutely dislike subscriptions. They make me stay up at night wondering if I have some subscription still active I no longer need. With a pre-paid model, users can pay for usage and not have to worry until next time they come back. It can be very cheap, too

ps. text box background colors look better when they are different than main page background colors (slightly darker or brighter)

Note: I think someone changed the hackernews pw

nice, https://ibb.co/w72r31d

Mobile experience is pretty bad right now.

Can't open links in new tabs :/

Mobile version is pretty much unusable

What is your content policy? Will this be another leftist echochamber like reddit, lemmy.ml, lobste.rs and so on, or do you plan to allow more diverse opinions to be posted?

Is it possible to create opt-in communities that do not appear on the frontpage by default? This is required for minority communities to thrive.

The $2/month fee sounds quite reasonable to me, but I don't plan to pay for a service where I have to kowtow to leftist political activists like the ones that rule reddit.

Congratulations on your work, but I think society needs to wake up to platforms.

Given the repeated destruction of public squares by corporations, there is zero reason to trust centralized social media. It's still a business, it exists in this psychopathic market system, and will still succumb to financialization. No matter who started it.

If a for-profit platform is providing value, it's because it's at the beginning of the enshittification cycle.

Ignore the shiny, people. Use your brain.

Is there a way to actually pay yet?

Fantastic idea and great work!

> went to non.io

> no mobile view

Instand turn off. I don't get why these kind of platforms aren't "mobile first".

Hello OP, I haven't read all the comments in this thread, please forgive me if I duplicate someone else's ideas:

First off, I really like what you've done so far, this is fantastic and I dig the idea despite some of the potential payout exploits that you'll need to guard against.

My suggestion is to find the moderators who have wishlists of features that they want reddit to implement. Don't try and entice them onto your platform, just ask them for advice on what features the moderation tools should have. Implement those tools and ask for feedback. Places like AskHistorians, AskScience, gonewild, and other specialist subject subreddits will all have very specific requirements for their mod tools. If you can support those requirements, or at least make it so that it's easy for someone else to build those tools, then I think you'll have a headstart over others.

A couple of other items:

reddit has edited user's comments in the database before. Perhaps consider implementing public key signing of comments on the backend, such that once a comment is made, it can be verified. Hide the gory details from the users unless they're a power user and want to see that stuff. Being able to say "I wrote this and it hasn't been modified", well that's pretty powerful in my opinion.

Allow users to set their profiles such that when someone buys gold for them or otherwise rewards them, the money is instead donated to a charity of their choice. Said charity can be displayed in their profile, comments, or neither.

Talk to lots of people, watch how they use reddit and other sites that include moderation, learn from what they say. Mods are going to be an important customer for you, they manage the communities that will create content and draw people in.

Decide very early on what your personal values are and what the values of the site are. Not in a corporate useless bullshit kind of way, but instead to clearly state what people should expect. Decide what rules mods must follow vs those that are optional. Same for users. Transparency and clear open communication is something people are really missing right now.

Allow people to display the site in multiple different ways that suit them. For example I use ublock origin rules to display hackernews comments no wider than about 8 to 10 words. Some people like old.reddit.com, others hate it. Give people options and make it easy to switch between them.

Allow people to not see advertising if they don't want to, as long as those costs are covered via a subscription (which you seem to be doing, nice!)

If you haven't already, implement a rich text github markdown text entry widget.

Don't bait and switch.

I'm looking forward to seeing your progress, I hope you succeed and that I'm using your site in 5 years! Good luck!

EDIT: I also wanted to add, make your site as fast as hackernews. Can you load the text first, then the rest of the stuff, without reflowing and shifting content around? Speed keeps the site feeling snappy and doesn't "punish" people for clicking discussion links etc.

Awesome idea, great work

this is a much better experience then Lemmy for sure. Congrats!

Is it pronounced nonio?

I like the name. Non.io

replace the homepage with loginless site dude

it looks more like slack to me than reddit

pay to post? Naaa bruh... naaa

Keylogger?

mmmr no DOCTYPE? :)

Is it part of fediverse?

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