Have you seen moltbook? One dude coded reddit clone for bots in less the a week. How is it not at least 10x of what was achievable in pre-ai world?
Granted he left the db open to public, but some meat powered startups did exactly the same few years ago.
Any semi-capable coder could build a Reddit clone by themselves in a week since forever. It's a glorified CRUD app.
The barrier to creating a full blown Reddit the huge scaling, not the functionality. But with AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and backends like S3, CF etc, this hasn't been a barrier since a decade or more, either.
I mean as has already been pointed out the fact that its a clone is a big reason why, but then I also think I could probably churn out a simple clone of reddit in less than a week. We've been through this before with twitter, the value isnt the tech (which is relatively straightforward), its the userbase. Of course Reddit has some more advanced features which would be more difficult, but I think the public db probably tells you that wasn't much of a concern to Moltbook either, so yeh, I reckon I could do that.
1. Do you have insider knowledge of the Reddit code base and the Moltbook code base and how much it reproduced?
2. Copying an existing product should take a minuscule fraction of the time it took to evolve the original.
3. I glanced at some of the Moltbook comments which were meaningless slop, very few having any replies.
Because its a clone.