Sociables, a Discord/Reddit/Patreon hybrid community platform

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Sociables, a Discord/Reddit/Patreon hybrid community platform

We've been working on Sociables in our free time over the past few years and have decided to officially launch today in light of all the recent Reddit news. While we initially intended the product to be primarily used by content creators, the platform works well as a drop-in Reddit alternative. We’ve combined Discord style voice rooms, Reddit style discussion boards, Twitch style instant messaging chatrooms, and Patreon style tiered membership plans into a singular platform. Here's a list of the core features of each community: 1. Customizable discussion boards: Community owners can set up threaded discussion boards for different topics related to their niche. For example, if a user creates a community for a niche like "Cars," they can create different discussion boards for subcategories like "Car Mods," "Car Photos," "Car Sales," etc. This is different from Reddit, where you only have a singular discussion board per community. All the posts within these discussion boards are crawlable by search engines, meaning they will show up in search engine search results. 2. Voice rooms: Community owners can set up Discord-style voice chat rooms where users can seamlessly jump between different rooms to communicate by voice. 3. Real-time text chatroom: We modeled the chat after Twitch, so communities can have a form of instant messaging-style communication. 4. Synchronized YouTube/Vimeo player: Community owners can create a playlist of YouTube/Vimeo videos. Each community has a media player that cycles through the playlist and synchronizes the playback, so people within the community can watch the same video at the same time. 5. Baked-in monetization: Community owners can offer customizable tiered monthly membership plans that allow members to financially support the admins and mods. Owners can also link their PayPal accounts to receive donations. Users can purchase post bumps within the boards and comment awards, and the revenue is shared with the community owner. (Note: Tiered memberships and paying to bump posts/comment awards are in development. Communities can currently only offer a singular membership tier). 6. Moderation tooling: Communities can set up custom user roles and assign different permissions within the community to these roles. (Note: Our moderation tooling is currently in development. We are exploring integrating AI to automatically scan and flag posts that the moderators should review). 7. Link-in-bio page: Each community has a link-in-bio style page where community owners can display a list of links related to their community. Posts from the community also appear on this page along with buttons to monetarily support the owner. One of the key design decisions was to include different methods for monetization within each community so that the community admins/mods can get paid. We take a minority cut of each transaction to help fund the platform. We are conscious of trying to ensure that the methods we add for the communities to make money don't come at the detriment of the community itself. Check out our Product Hunt page: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/sociables Thanks!