Growth · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Zsync, a Reddit Alternative with the Goal to Reward Quality Comments
I built this last year but never posted it anywhere, but now with Reddit hiatus it seems like the right time to give it a shot. The main goal of zsync is to foster high quality content and discussion. That's it. If it can't accomplish that, then to me it is a failure. I watched Reddit go from having high quality discussion in 2008-9 to devolving into the PC meme dumpster it is today [1]. HN still has the highest discussion quality of any "forum" I know of, but (1) it can sometimes randomly be very hostile/toxic to new tech, the most glaring example being crypto. (2) HN is basically a…
Zsync is a discussion platform designed as an alternative to Reddit, structured around tags rather than subreddits. It prioritizes high-quality content and thoughtful discussion by allowing users to organize posts by… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Zsync, a Reddit Alternative with the Goal to Reward Quality Comments launched in 2023; newer entries below may have overtaken it.
- 1
Heya HN, I've been working on a reddit-like platform as my primary side project for the last few years. Doing a (very) soft launch today, mainly because I want to use it to encourage discussion of alternatives. How non.io works: 1. Free to browse, paid to interact. 2. Minimum subscription is $2 (though you can choose more). I take $1 to run the servers, everything left gets split evenly between everything you upvote that month. It's a simple model, but I hope it's a better one than the freemium model we've been relying on for the last few years. Fundamentally I feel like any ad-supported…
2023 · non.io · its alternatives →
- 2HB
Hey guys, I love HN! I wanted to extend the same aesthetic and community towards things beyond tech-related news. I thought it would be cool to get the same quality of community gathered around the latest and greatest research coming out. Let me know what you guys think of what I have so far. It's still early so there are probably bugs and other quality issues. If there's any features missing that you'd want let me know. ALSO, if any of you are familiar with the map of the territory of any particular field, please let me know! Would love to pick your brain and to come up with a 'most…
2024 · papertalk.xyz · its alternatives →
- 3
A few days ago, I responded to a comment by bloggergirl offering to read anyone's web copy and help. I shot off an email hoping for a paragraph or two of feedback on my startup's copy. Instead I received a professional, detailed deck of tons of invaluable well thought out feedback. It must have taken her an entire afternoon. Here's a link to it: http://www.slideshare.net/shereefb/recommendations-for-bettermeans To top it off, this isn't someone with a lot of free time on her hands, she's only days away from launching her own startup (page99test) This community blows my mind!
2010 · slideshare.net · its alternatives →
- 4RH
Link: https://www.reddit.com/r/hnblogs/ Old Reddit Link: https://old.reddit.com/r/hnblogs/ Hi HN, Inspired by this post earlier this week: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23237559, I thought we could make blog discovery easier by having a place to find interesting, unusual, niche, or really any kind of non-marketing blogs that are posted by the people that write them. There are a ton of interesting blogs on the web, probably more than there were when the web was new, but even though there's more they're a smaller…
2020 · its alternatives →
- 5
HN is great for the links people share, but a big part of the value I get comes from reading the discussion around them. I realized I was always opening the article in one tab and the comments in another, constantly switching back and forth. I figured there was probably a simpler way, so I threw together this userscript to merge the two. 1. Clicking a link from Hacker News opens the article with a side panel containing the discussion. It doesn't require your credentials, is resizable, and is easy to tweak if you want to customize it. 2. If you land on an article that has previously been…
Jul 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 6QAQ&A for HN users▲142
2012 · askolo.com · its alternatives →
- 7IB
I’ve been messing around with Bluesky for a while, and one thing I really missed was a proper way to browse discussions in a structured, Reddit-like way specially myself being daily reddit user. So, I ended up building a Reddit-like client for Bluesky that scratches that itch: Threadsky.app It pulls in trending topics, lets you explore conversations with a threaded view (so no more getting lost in replies), and even allows users to create channels with customizations, basically, like subreddits but on Bluesky. That said, this is still pretty barebones, and there’s a lot to improve. I really…
2025 · threadsky.app · its alternatives →
- 8
Today's internet is filled with dopamine wells of content. I wanted to steer away from that and foster meaningful writing. So I made a site where you can only have a single post. The intention is to encourage thoughtful posts like the blogs we all love here at HN (Paul Graham's, fasterthanlime, Bartosz Ciechanowski's, etc). For now posts are only markdown, but I intend to make some markdown extensions to make posts more dynamic.
2022 · app.pressnt.net · its alternatives →
- 9AT
Hi HN, I spent a few weeks looking at the top HN posts of all time. This included exploration, clustering, creating visualizations, and zooming in on what (to me personally) seems like some of the best discussions on here. Three things in this post: 1- The interesting groups of HN posts 2- The interactive visualizations that you can explore in your browser 3- The data from this exploration -- this includes CSV of the titles as well as the text embeddings of 3,000 Ask HN articles. Blog post about this whole process here: [1] ============ 1- The interesting groups of HN posts From the…
2022 · its alternatives →
- 10
Hey HN We loaded a BigQuery dataset of all of Hacker News, every comment, story and user, into camelAI. You can ask questions like: • “When does dang tend to comment during the day?” • “Which domains have gained the most submissions since 2015, year-over-year?” • “How has average comment length changed each January since 2007?” • “Top five users who link to arXiv papers the most.” It's behind a log-in to prevent abuse but free to use for 10 messages. No payment info required. We use OpenAI o3 or Claude sonnet 3.7 for the agent which can be really expensive. Would love feedback especially…
2025 · app.camelai.com · its alternatives →
- 11HN
I made a little website with a server that collects only HN submissions with > 500 upvotes chronologically. https://hn.moritz.pm/ It's quite simple because I wanted to learn from the project. But I think it's useful, to get a summary of what was important over the last days. The UI is almost identical to the HN frontpage, you can click on the comments to view the thread and on the username to see the profile. The rest of the cards takes you to the submitted URL.
2024 · hn.moritz.pm · its alternatives →
- 12VT
2016 · timqian.com · its alternatives →
- 13
Overlead▲146Here's the problem: I launched two products. I wrote blog posts. I posted on X, built in public. I tried running ads. And you know what actually got me customers? Replying to someone on Reddit who asked, "What's the best tool for this?" One reply. Three signups. I felt like an idiot for not doing it sooner. But here's the issue: I don't have time to refresh Reddit all day looking for these posts. I have products to build. Bugs to fix. Emails to answer. Life to live. So I built Overlead to do the searching for me. Overlead scans Reddit, Quora, and Hacker News (and many more to come) for…
Feb 2026 · overlead.co · its alternatives →
- 14IM
I noticed the who's hiring threads are very popular every month, so I decided to create a job board specifically for hacker news. You can tag jobs, search, view user's profiles and more. Tell me what you guys thing! Any feedback is appreciated.
2013 · hnjobs.org · its alternatives →
- 15SH
I built this tool to help me find interesting discussions on Hacker News. I love reading HN discussions almost more than the articles themselves. However, I found that full text search, although highly performant, is not always good at surfacing interesting discussions on a certain topic -- especially if you don't know what to search for exactly. I built this by scraping the most recent ~6 million posts (that's about 2 years of history) and putting the resulting posts and their vector embeddings into Postgres. Let me know what could be improved, and if you'd like a more detailed writeup of…
2024 · searchhacker.news · its alternatives →
- 16
A Gnus backend for Hacker News. Contribute to dickmao/nnhackernews development by creating an account on GitHub.
2019 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 17
- 18
I figured, "what better way to look at a list of (hopefully) inspiring projects?" The upvotes work and are globally synced.
2024 · guycombinator.net · its alternatives →
- 19
This server started a few weeks ago via some HN comments. It's very unofficial! There'll probably be some negative comments about discord. I know that many people dislike discord. (Side note: I hope more founders build discord alternatives) If you're active on discord and would like a HN channel, feel free to join. The server has the same guidelines as HN: > On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity. > Off-Topic:…
2023 · discord.com · its alternatives →
- 20T1
HN has some of the best discussions on the internet, but I don’t love reading 100 comments to find 10 great insights. This site analyzes top HN threads with LLMs and summarizes the key ideas, disagreements, and resources — while preserving links to the original discussion. Useful for revisiting old threads as well. Updated daily, manual-assisted for quality, no spam, fan project only. Would love thoughts from the community. https://hn-discussions.top
Jan 2026 · its alternatives →
- 21SP
Hey, HN -- I just received the following email and I'm not sure what to do about it. Obviously I want to discourage requested-posting like this; is there some structured way that we can do that? One of the things I love about HN is how high the signal-to-noise ratio is relative to...pretty much the rest of the internet. I wouldn't ordinarily call someone out like this, but I want to innoculate HN against this sort of thing. ---- Hey doches, Not sure if it's conventional, but thought I'd ask anyway. Would you be open to posting about my product on Hacker News? I understand that similar to…
2022 · its alternatives →
- 22AP
Hello! I’ve been reading Hacker News for years and have a bad habit of favoriting articles but never actually going back to read them. I finally built hnbuffer to scratch my own itch and help me work through that backlog. I also mainly built this as an excuse to learn/use some of the languages/frameworks/tools since I have another backlog of things I wanted to try too. It syncs your favorites into a queue with a reader mode and swipe gestures. The streak tracking is something I'm still experimenting with. Note: It requires an HN login to scrape the favorites list (credentials…
2013 · hnbuffer.com · its alternatives →
- 23SO
2016 · perfil.med.br · its alternatives →
- 24HC
Hi, I installed that HN clone for all things science. Most likely there are already others out there already, but I thought it's worth a try. Let me know what you think about the idea and what features you would like to see...a search function is on its way...Thanks in advance! http://www.heurekalab.com
2011 · heurekalab.com · its alternatives →
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- Non.io, a Reddit-like platform Ive been working on for the last 4 years alternatives
- HackerNews but for research papers alternatives
- I asked an HN member for feedback and she blew my mind alternatives
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- I was tired of opening 2 tabs for every HN link, so I made a userscript alternatives
- Q&A for HN users alternatives
Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →