- Like reddit, there are topics (subreddits)
- each subreddit has a chat room and a forum
- code is open source (warning : it's a little rough) [0]
- there is currently no support for community moderation, but when I build the moderation features, I plan to make the moderation logs public
- I plan to explore ways to prevent abuse of mod status : have some of sort of community re-approval of mod status every n months, so any mod that the community feels is not operating in good faith/too harsh etc can be removed.
- there's currently a single chat room for each topic, but I plan to add support for mod created chat rooms
- the forum uses a dumbed down HN like sorting algorithm [1]
- I also plan to build an api for bots and maybe host them myself on aws lambda since expecting users to host their own bots might be too much to ask. Since no other major site seems to host users' bots, it might encourage users to build creative bots and not worry about hosting fees. All bots will be opt in, so users have to explicitly subscribe to bots to view the messages in the chat and forum.
This was actually one of my abandoned side projects that I decided to try and bring back to life. You can read a little about the 1st version and the fun experience with 4chan trolls here [2].
A little about the plans to grow the site :
- I'm thinking about focusing on cryptocurrency communities to start with, since they might appreciate the open mod logs + accessible chat and forum accessed through a web browser.
- SEO traffic seems to be picking up slowly, 30-50 hits per day and 3-4 signups, but I'll need to learn more about SEO to try and increase SEO traffic. Any tips?
Would love to hear your thoughts on my sideproject.
[0] https://github.com/ploggingdev/hackerschat
[1] https://github.com/ploggingdev/hackerschat/blob/master/maina...
[2] https://www.ploggingdev.com/2018/01/the-strange-launch-of-ha...