Comment by deminature
15 hours ago
I'm working on Topicle (https://topicle.com), a Reddit-inspired link sharing, voting and discussion platform that rethinks a bunch of basic aspects like moderation, anti-abuse and privacy to try to address some of the biggest pain points. Every moderation action has an admin appeal available, bots and astroturfing are aggressively monitored and policed, comment histories are always visible, no VPNs or datacenter IPs for write operations. Everything is self-hosted (Umami analytics) and there's no data leakage to big ad networks. The full feature set is listed here: https://topicle.com/about
There are also technologies new-ish to this kind of site included like every thread is a live thread via websockets, your post and comment scores update in realtime, notifications are realtime, you can DM other users and receive your messages immediately. So it's distinct from the everything is a hard page load world of 10 years ago and blurring into native software in a browser.
What I'm working on right now is a SwiftUI iOS app, because one of the most interesting observations from analytics has been that the internet is 70-80% mobile devices now, contrary to my 10 years out-of-date conception that people were mostly using the internet on desktops. So a mobile app seems non-negotiable to reach most users. I have a PWA already, but early users have repeatedly requested an official App/Play Store presence.
The stack is somewhat unique in that it's built with a Swift/Vapor framework (https://vapor.codes/) backend, with a more standard React Router 7 (SSR) frontend. I picked this framework mostly because I'm historically an iOS dev, but have found it to be very capable in its own right. I later discovered Apple themselves are using Vapor for some web services and have a team devoted to maintaining the server library (SwiftNIO https://github.com/apple/swift-nio) the framework is based on.
Anyway, it's very early still with launch via Reddit itself only 3 months ago. One of the biggest issues is getting it in front of people without appearing spammy and cold-start on a social platform is also brutal, you need users to get users, and round and round it goes. I may do a Show HN in the future if there's any interest in a real experience using Vapor as a production backend.
Astroturfing is the biggest problem for online forums now. Bots can hide behind residential IPs and AI can generate tonnes of innocuous slop to overwhelm all other content. No human moderation will be able to keep up with it. Anyone building an online forum should think hard about this, I don't think it'll be easy to solve.
I've seen videos of LLM-based automated post generators running on Reddit and it's pretty horrifying. I've also witnessed large subreddits being entirely controlled by bad actors and users having no recourse. I'm definitely not leaving it solely up to human moderation, there are tons of automated detection mechanisms augmenting the human moderation and the system is being built upon every day. I know it won't be easy to solve, I'm keen that somebody should try to tackle this issue, because it's arguably the single biggest scourge of the internet right now and has serious real-world implications, like influencing the outcome of elections. The internet is real-life now, it should be tackled. The landscape is an arms race and there is too much benefit to be had by malign forces to stop trying to shape conversations with bot swarms.
As for residential IPs, I take your point that this complicates things even more. It is very difficult to know accurately which of those are being used as proxies. However, the site has a swiss-cheese model of defence, so if a user passes through one layer, they still come up against all the other layers, so losing one layer is undesirable but still manageable. Again, I cannot claim it to be perfect, but it's working decently so far.