What’s the smartest way to build a Reddit competitor?
Ask Reddit’s own users for help, of course.
That’s what two Israeli programmers, Erez Shinan and Daniel Leicht, did earlier this year. The result of that group brainstorming session is Wubel, a new social news site that opened to the public last week.
Wubel’s claim to link-sharing fame is a recommendation system. Similar to how Netflix tells you what movies you might like, Wubel tells you what you’ll like based on your voting history. Reddit, for its part, sorts content on things like popularity (voting) and age, as well as subscriptions to topic-oriented channels (subreddits, in site parlance).
“Groups tend to socialize using the lowest common denominators, and the bigger the group, the lower that denominator is,” Shinan wrote. That means that in Reddit’s model, “the submissions and comments with the lowest denominator are at the top.”
By looking at voter patterns, Wubel hopes to automatically cater your feed to your own tastes. But if you’re only seeing what you want to see, will Wubel’s content stream ever challenge your tastes you or makes you think differently?
That kind of “filter bubble” really concerns Shinan and Liecht, so they’ve programmed randomness into their algorithm: once in a while a link will pop into your feed that has nothing at all to do with your voting patterns.
“Much like a chance encounter in the street, you’ll probably dismiss it and keep walking, but just maybe it will open your mind to a new direction,” Shinan wrote. The big challenge for Wubel, Shinan wrote, is to find the “right amount of randomness.”
As with another recent Reddit alternative, Hubski, Wubel’s creators are redditors, themselves. Shinan, 26, joined two years ago and became an especially huge fan of the site. Reddit “became my gateway to the Internet,” he wrote.
Shinan wasn’t the only one falling in love with Reddit: the site’s traffic jumped 300 percent last year, and it now boasts nearly 30 million unique visitors every month. For some, that popularity hasn’t been good for the site.
The “massive influx of new members” Shinan wrote, “caused the quality of discussion to decrease”
Shinan and Leicht announced Wubel’s launch to Reddit last week (though Shinan said “launch” isn’t quite right: “We believe in the ‘release early; release often’ philosophy” he wrote).
To publicize the site, the two turned to r/TrueReddit, the same section they had polled for ideas three months prior. That section is a 70,000-strong hub of Reddit purists: people who liked Reddit the way it was before the big traffic boom.
The reaction from that community was overwhelmingly enthusiastic, mixed with a fair bit of constructive criticism.
The biggest complaint—and one that we share—is the design. Wubel isn’t exactly a pretty site. Though that’s hardly a death knell: Reddit itself hardly wins any beauty awards.
Shinan’s post last week on r/TrueReddit brought a big traffic bump: the young site saw 2,000 accounts created and has since gained about 1,000 unique visitors a day. Not bad at all for a small start-up with no public relations campaign beyond Reddit itself.
Shinan and Liecht even got some advice from former Reddit engineer Jeremy Edberg, whose comment was the top-voted submission on the thread.
Edberg pointed out that Reddit started out with a recommendation system similar to Wubel’s. And even though it worked great, they eventually needed to shut it down as it failed to scale with size and diverse opinions.
“Reddit started on the exact same path that you are on now,” Edberg wrote, “so make sure you don’t get stuck the same way we did.”
One advantage Wubel has that Reddit didn’t: advice from an hold hand like Edberg—and the 70,000 readers in r/TrueReddit.
“It’s great to hear from someone with experience, who’s walked the same road we’re now taking,” Shinan wrote.
The real challenge for Shinan and Leicht is proving that the world really needs a Reddit alternative, and that Wubel has something truly special to offer. That’s something that only time—and traffic—will prove.