mybestaccount

Free speech platforms: People have tried to create content platforms where the premise is "we're just like <insert social media site>, but you can say whatever".

e.g. parler, voat, gab, etc...

The problem is that because they are not actually providing any technological innovation over competitors, and are basically just a low-rent clone of twitter, facebook, etc... (except you can say what you want), there is very little incentive for mainstream, sane people to migrate away from the current mainstream platforms. So these new platforms become a cess-pool of people that were too fringe and kicked off twitter, and ultimately the platform becomes unappealing to mainstream users.

A "free speech" platform is not enough of a value proposition for mainstream users to migrate. The only people who will be incentivized to move will be toxic/fringe/controversial people and their followings. If you want to make a community for those people, go ahead. See gab.com, voat.com, 4chan.org, parler.com etc... All these places are similar to reddit/facebook/twitter but without censorship. However, the whole point of a "free-speech" platform is to encourage an open exchange of ideas. If you only serve one side of the political spectrum, what ideas are you exchanging? It's just an echo chamber.

My point is that a real competitor to reddit will be highly dependent on some technical innovation that convinces a "normal users" to migrate. Our only hope is that this new platform will be wiser in terms of censorship policies. No normal person is going to waste their time signing up, actively post, check, and sink their time into a platform who's whole pitch is "a twitter/reddit clone with less users, but you can say racial slurs".

read "will it fly"

you shouldn't be working on an idea for many months full time without showing it to customers. The sooner you get a minimal viable product in front of customers, the quicker you'll know if your idea has legs. The assurance gained from customers that like your product will be more than enough to motivate you. If they don't like your product, you wont feel bad about abandoning it.

Wouldn't this devolve into people asking the same questions over and over?

There are a couple of reasons:

- It's uncomfortable. You are typically so excited about an idea that the thought of learning it doesn't have mass appeal is uncomfortable. People avoid uncomfortable realities. In other words: "I KNOW this is a great idea, I just KNOW it. If I don't build this NOW, someone else will beat me to it. I don't have time to waste talking to customers. If Henry Ford would've asked people what they wanted, they would've said a faster horse."

- People are proud, if they're going to show a product to their friends/family, they want to make sure it's well-built, fully featured, etc... The idea of "just getting something in front of customers that works" aka an MVP is embarrassing for some people. They think that if they release a "amateur" product, people will think they're amateur.

- People are irrational. They think that their idea is so special that asking people about it, getting validation, etc... could make them a target for idea theft. So they isolate themselves, validate with a few close friends (who are unlikely to give honest, brutal feedback) and build a huge product so that when they launch, they'll be far ahead of their competitors. The problem with this is that you'll likely build the wrong product the first time around.

Airtable API apparently is throttled, the don't recommend using it as a backend.

read the book "traction" - you'll have a better idea on how to spend it without wasting it.

I would strongly recommend not doing this. The worst thing you can do when creating a piece of software is isolate yourself for x number of months and build it out entirely in isolation. I've effectively done this in the past, only to find out the product I built was not something people wanted to use.

If it's just for personal use, and/or you don't care about people using it, go for it. But if you care about adoption/traction, I would suggest surrounding yourself with people that may use your software, and constantly solicit their candid feedback (e.g. show them the software, but not tell them it's yours, etc...). Building software should be a collaborative process between you and your customer.