Sociables: The community platform for content creators and niches

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Sociables: The community platform for content creators and niches

Hey HN. We've been working on a community platform/Reddit alternative with a focus on building a place for people to create communities instead of just buckets of posts. We want communities to feel like a place where you want to hang out instead of just scroll. At a high level, our platform is like a Reddit/Discord/Patreon hybrid. We took all of the best features from each of those platforms and combined them under one umbrella. 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 "Sports", they can create different discussion boards for subcategories like "Soccer", "Football", “Hockey”, and "Golf". 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 appear in 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 verbally. 3. Real-time text chatroom: We modelled 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 video embeds. 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 them. 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. 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. This page is meant to act as the “cover” page of the community. 7. Moderation tooling: Communities can set up custom user roles and assign different permissions within the community to these roles. You can assign permissions such as being able to move posts between boards, remove posts/comments and more. (Note: Our moderation tooling is currently in development. We are exploring integrating AI to automatically scan and flag posts that the moderators should review).