But as a Reddit user I find the platform incredibly limiting , as the same topics are repeated again and again. Often within a few days of each other.
Also the downvoting aspect of Reddit is kinda horrible.
There’s got to be space for another broad based forum with a different format. Even if you got just 10% or 5% of the traction you would have a serious business on your hands.
Forums aren’t dead and Reddit proves that.
Reddit does some things well, but can also be a frustrating user experience.
I want to find somebody interested in this idea and look at it and see if we wanted to pursue it and also somebody with technical skills. I can raise the funds.
Building a forum is easy. Gaining users is hard (“just” 10% or 5% of the traction? Get the f’ outta here! ). Funding it while you scale is expensive. Not driving off users while you monetize is difficult.
I know a rich former apple employee who ran a relatively large, but tiny compared to reddit (several hundred thousand active users) forum. He wasn’t looking to make money out of it but would have liked it to be self sustaining (forum focused on one of his hobbies) - he sold it after a decade+ of out of pocket 6 figure losses. And that was with an army of volunteers helping him run it rather than paid staff.
Yes I know, I am not suggesting to use that fully manual way for a large forum, we can use AI to manage it quite efficiently. If anybody doubts that look at some of the mods on here in the past.
Why would I aim for 1% when I can aim for 10%?
Reddit makes a lot of money from AI companies screening it’s posts. The content itself is valuable. If I aim for 10% and get 1% I’m still in the money.
With several hundred thousand active users he had the potential to make money if he changed the way it was managed. The data on niche forums can be valuable and the membership targeting can be valuable to advertisers. He could offer subscriber deals and discounts also.
Reddit proves there’s still a large number of people interested in forum interaction. The forum I’m thinking about would have to offer some incentive for people to get onto it first. It might be some kind of hot discounts applicable to a given forum interest, such as travel to a given country. From an international perspective international travel could be one that drives a global userbase. Travel discount providers could reverse auction to place their ad or offer every week on each forum.
Volunteers vs staff wasn’t regarding mods - it was supporting infrastructure: code, upgrades, bug fixes, cloud connections, etc, etc.
Sure. But it’s not “just”. That’s 50M active users. That’s a fucking shit ton. “Just” make a Facebook social network competitor and Google search competitor.whilr at it. These aren’t original ideas.
He had ads and subscriptions. And donations. And still couldn’t make it break even. His hosting costs were astronomical despite having some structural bemefits most other startups wouldn’t be able to (he leveraged another company he owned (a very successful photo site)). And yes, it had value, which is why he was able to sell it to sell it to someone willing to make a go of it.
Images. Lots of images. Reddit has relatively little images vs text (at scale, still a lot obviously), but still has 200+M in hosting costs.
I don’t know how much he sold it for, but it felt more like stop.the bleeding vs make lots of money. He sold to verticalscope, which has a business model of buying forums and flooding it with ads - some sites literally ads between ever two posts, header and footer ads, and popovers. I’ve left every forum I was on they’ve taken over because the experience ends up horrendous, and some have flat out died. Apparently milking forilums to death is a viable business.
All that said, if you can raise the money, go for it. I mean, FB killed Myspace and Google killed altavista, so hey.
Interestingly this site allows as many images as you want (within reason) but very people except me in fact , post images in many threads. Except for the image specific threads of course.
Admittedly it’s nice to have images but Reddit does very well with very few images added.
Nothing wrong with it, works for us as small group to message/pass time.. I guess not good as a business, older members, same people visit, not good market for ads.
