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…
In plain words
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 topic tags. The platform is intended for people seeking meaningful conversations across various subjects, from technology to neuroscience, without the meme culture and low-quality content that the creator believes has degraded Reddit over time.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
In the maker’s words, at launch
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 single subreddit mostly geared towards tech and startups. It'd be nice to have an equivalent of "subreddits" Zsync's version of subreddits are tags. You can tag your posts. Instead of viewing a subreddit for, let's say neuroscience, you view the tag for neuroscience. This eliminates the need to submit the same post multiple times to many different subreddits. The core challenge is incentivizing/rewarding high quality content (I don't believe in censorship). Users can have custom avatars and links to their personal website and Twitter next to their username, which I believe provides a little more incentive to write a more thoughtful comment vs. your post merely showing up next to an anonymous handle with some autogenerated alien avatar (which you're free to still do if you prefer). Anyone who connects an ethereum wallet to their account will also have a (non-invasive) "Tip" option at the bottom of their comment, allowing anyone to directly tip commenters cryptocurrency (no middleman taking a cut here), offering a financial incentive. I was thinking of some other ideas to use crypto to reward quality, but I wouldn't want to implement anything that could be gamed or exploited ultimately defeating its purpose. Open to ideas though. In the future, we could use ML to offer options to sort comments in more useful ways, such as by sorting by "most insightful". We could determine based on your upvote history the type of content you'd be most likely to enjoy. Anyways I admittedly didn't implement this ML stuff yet, those are just ideas for future improvement. Anyways would love to hear your thoughts. What do you think of this idea, and what would it take to accomplish its mission? Regardless of whether my little project amounts to anything or not, I hope something like this will be made to exist. And thank you HN for not deteriorating in quality even remotely to the extent that Reddit has. It was really sad watching Reddit devolve into what it is today (way before all this recent stuff). We can do better, and now is a better time than ever to shake up the status quo and start envisioning what better platforms for online communities can look like. [1] https://jsavage.xyz/2022/03/13/the-downfall-of-reddit-why-re...
Does a similar job
all alternatives →- NINon.io, a Reddit-like platform Ive been working on for the last 4 years2023 · non.io · ▲1,943
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…
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I was tired of opening 2 tabs for every HN link, so I made a userscriptJul 2026 · github.com · ▲433HN 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…
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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…
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