Alternatives
Products that do what A social media site for reviewing albums, movies, books, and podcasts does
I’ve been working on a social media web app for reviewing works of entertainment with the hopes to compete against Goodreads and Letterboxd. I started working on this two and a half years ago and it has taught me a lot about full stack development, from Vue, and REST APIs, to hosting with AWS. It’s still very much so a work in progress, but it’s functional and I’d love any feedback I can get. I know other options exist, but I couldn’t find one that I like that had all of the different mediums, and I’d rather have them all in one place. Likewise didn’t give me enough freedom with rating, and…
- 1IS
Hi everyone, For the past couple months I've been working on a website with two main features: - https://book.sv - put in a list of books and get recommendations on what to read next from a model trained on over a billion reviews - https://book.sv/intersect - put in a list of books and find the users on Goodreads who have read them all (if you don't want to be included in these results, you can opt-out here: https://book.sv/remove-my-data) Technical info available here: https://book.sv/how-it-works Note 1: If you only provide one or two…
Nov 2025 · book.sv
- 2AM
Hey HN, I know reading books isn’t everyone’s thing, but it’s certainly been mine for as long as I can remember. Unfortunately, I felt like the online book space was missing a platform that does the book community justice. Goodreads is the go-to "social platform", but if you've been on Goodreads before, you'll probably agree that it's not all that social, and overall not all that exciting. So I set out to build what I personally was looking for (but could never find). The goal: to give the book community a more social and streamlined alternative to Goodreads or StoryGraph. We also felt like…
2022 · booqsi.com
- 3SA
I built this site as a quick test if a time boxed social media experience feels better than an endless one. So far I've just been using it with friends and it feels nice, but it seems like it is time to bring it to a larger audience. Let me know what you think! It is just based on EST for now, sorry.
2025 · seven39.com
- 4
- 5SD
Hey fellow HN-ers, I'd like to ask HN about my latest startup: SocialFolders. We take a Dropbox-like approach to managing your content on your social networks by mirroring all the content you have on these networks in folders on your computer. Moving this content around, between folders or between services, is mirrored in the all-mighty "cloud" (ugh, I hate this word). We'd love to know what you think. We think our approach solves the problem of managing content at scale. We put together a quick 2'30 screencast to show HN how it works: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4s2TFsVezZQ If you want…
2012
- 6IM
Hey all, I've been working hard on my side project and will be trying to turn it into my main project now. Rated is a social rating platform for media, places and products. By having everything in one place, its easier to add friends, follow and compare ratings. There are cool data features like similarity scores between each users and predicted ratings for every item. The main aim is to help people discover the best content in a fun and social way. I've made a website (not that pretty yet) and launched on the app stores, but there's a long way to go. Still haven't properly validated the…
2024 · rated.fun
- 7TA
I got fed up with the news reader apps out there so I decided to make my own. Its a simple concept where it tracks all your favorite news sources for new posts and the social shares it received. Then it ranks it HN/Reddit style using social shares as upvotes. It's not meant to be alternative to HN, just a focused way to track your favorite sources. Please try it out and let me know what do you think, http://telescope.surf/ Note: you can do 'Add to Homescreen' on mobile to make it as an app. Please leave a feedback or any feature wishlist you may have. Thanks!
2017
- 8
- 9IB
Would love any feedback
Sep 2025 · rhomeapp.com
- 10WD
Hey there, First time posting on Hacker News in about 2 years! The reason I’m posting is that I thought I’d write about the product I’ve been building, in hopes it resonates with people. Why build yet another social app? Because I deleted almost all social media around 3/4 years ago as it was just net negative on my life. There was very little that was truly interesting, I didn’t care about looking good to other people and because of the ‘media’ and ads, the apps were all designed to make me spend too much time for what I was getting. I hated it and what it meant for people’s behaviour,…
2022 · oncircles.com
- 11
- 12
- 13HL
Hi HN! A little over two years ago, Goodreads announced they were shutting off access to their API. I was using it to show what I was reading on my blog at the time, and started looking for alternatives. I found a few that showed potential. I'd been using Letterboxd for a few years at that point and felt it had something that was missing from GR and the others I found, but I couldn't put my finger on it. I decided to build it instead (I'm sure many creators can relate ). I made a post on the /r/cofounders subreddit about the idea, and found Ste. With me as a full-stack product dev…
2023 · hardcover.app
- 14AN
Hey HN, I'm soft launching my MVP today and would love to hear your honest feedback. For the past few months I've been working extremely hard on this side hustle in my spare time (I have a day job as a CTO). I'm building a platform for writers, bloggers and content creators that's built for them rather than for investors and advertisers like most similar products and social media platforms backed by VCs. I wrote about why I built it here: https://persumi.com/c/persumi/u/fredwu/p/welcome-to-persumi-... And the landing page is here:…
2023
- 15DB
Ankit Ranka and I built this for ourselves and it was kind of useful, so we decided to package it up and see if others find it useful too. Ankit is an avid reader, but never new what book to read on the weekend. I'm always trying to find a new movie on Friday night to unwind. I usually end up spending 30-45 minutes looking for a movie, and by the time I find one I don't feel like watching a movie anymore! We built ScoutFeed to monitor our Twitter feeds and help us find books and movies that people we follow tweet about. It turns out people recommend apps and songs on twitter too, so we…
2012 · scoutfeed.sherlabs.com
- 16IB
Building integrations for TikTok, X, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and LinkedIn got frustrating with how different every platform is with auth setup, rate limits, and media requirements. So we built Post for Me: one REST API that handles scheduling and publishing posts for TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, X, YouTube, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Bluesky, and Threads. It's built for developers. You bring your own app credentials from the social platform, so you're in control of your data. There's no limitations on account connections, and pricing is based on usage (not some arbitrary limitations). We…
2025 · postforme.dev
- 17MI
Hi! Recently I've launched - mybfio.io - platform for software reviews with social network aspect. Prehistory Many great system are already in place that allow people to search and rate software products, including the site I am publishing this post on. However I have always felt that those systems are not specifically centered around product/software development lifecycle (releases, real users feedback over a product entire lifetime, so on) and often too broad or not designed specifically for that type of work, which is ok. Why? As an opensource author I would like to have constant…
2021
- 18WC
Somebody said "Launch early, launch often", so I guess it's about time. WhatMyFriendsRead.com -- a social recommendation service for interesting links and content. Main idea: What is interesting for you is what your friends find interesting. I made a functional prototype hacked together in php+mysql with ugly html+css. But it works which is why I guess now would be a "launch early" moment. Or atleast show to a bunch of people for feedback :-) On the site your main source of links is from people you add as your friends or people you subscribe to. People you subscribe to provide you with links…
2011
- 19PR
www.schmeebs.com I built this site in two days. I tried to make it a fusion of Twitter + Digg in that people will be able to follow certain "domains" of news then be able to see popular stuff from there. Its as real time as it can be at this point. Would welcome any thoughts on it!
2010
- 20HM
One year ago, I downloaded the news.arc code and decided that I would teach myself programming by building a better aggregator. At that time, I had some rudimentary HTML knowledge, and little FORTRAN under my belt. I knew that I wanted an aggregator that could support a wide range of submissions, and one that could scale without losing quality for the user. Hubski is what I have to show for my time and effort. The easiest way to describe Hubski is to say that it uses a commenting system akin to HN or Reddit, but uses a sharing scheme like Twitter. You have a personal feed comprised of the…
2011
- 21TL
I built this app because I really enjoyed "Pulse" but I felt it lacked a few things. I wanted a web-based version, I wanted my news articles grouped together by topic, and I wanted an easy way to share with other people. It is early in the site's life, so somethings are missing, including the critical mobile app. If you have any feedback to give, it would be appreciated!
2011 · thread.ly
- 22MF
Hey everyone, Common advice for inexperienced hackers suggests "scratching an itch." Like many others here, I spent too much time on HN, Google Reader and Twitter searching for interesting stuff, so I decided to write an app that brings interesting links to you with no other distractions. HighFive uses Twitter and bit.ly's APIs to find interesting links in your timeline. When you log in, you'll see a group of five links with voting arrows. No HN comments or RSS feeds with hundreds of links--just a few interesting articles that you can read, then get back to work. HighFive was built using…
2011
- 23SN
Hi HN, I’ve been building a small social network where the feed is always chronological — newest posts come first, always. It’s not 100% algorithm-free (there’s still basic filtering to avoid spam or abuse), but the core idea is that every user has a real chance to be seen, even with zero followers. It’s lightweight, works well on mobile, and supports both posts and comments. Most of the content is currently in Portuguese, since it started with a Brazilian audience, but the interface is mostly language-neutral. I’d love any feedback on the concept, UX, performance, or anything else. Thanks!
2025 · qqpost.netlify.app
- 24SO
Hey HN, My co-founders and I have been working on a project for the last month or so, and we'd like to get your input on it. We wanted to hear your thoughts on what we're doing - so check out our landing page, and let us know what you think/understand. Does it sounds like something you guys would want to use? http://www.thesharedweb.com/alpha/intro We'll tell you guys more about exactly what we're doing as the conversation evolves, but we just wanted to see what the initial reaction is, and what you understand (i.e. are we describing it in a way that makes sense). Really excited to hear your…
2010 · thesharedweb.com
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