Granted he left the db open to public, but some meat powered startups did exactly the same few years ago.
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.
And I have a pretty decent career behind me as a aoftware developer and my peers percieved me as kinda good.
Even capable coders can’t create a Reddit clone in a week. Because it’s not just a glorified CRUD app. And I encourage you to think a bit harder before arguing like that.
Yes you can create a CRUD app in some kind of framework and style it like Reddit. But that’s like putting lines on your lawn and calling it a clone of the Bernabeu.
But even if you were right, the real barrier to building a Reddit clone is getting traction. Even if you went viral and did everything right, you’d still have to wait years before you have the brand recognition and SEO rankings they enjoy.
In what way (that's not related to the difficulty of scaling it, which I already addressed separately)?
The point of my comment was:
"Somebody with AI cloning Reddit in a week is not as special as you make it to be, all things considering. A Reddit clone is not that difficult, it's basically a CRUD app. The difficult part of replicating it, or at least all the basics of it, is its scaling - and even that wouldn't be as difficult for a dev in 2026, the era of widespread elastic cloud backends".
The Bernabeu analogy handwavingly assumes that Reddit is more challenging than a homegrown clone, but doesn't address in what way Reddit differs from a CRUD app, and how my comment doesn't hold.
And even if it did, it would be moot regarding the main point I make, unless the recent AI-clone also handles those differentiating non-CRUD elements and thus also differs from a CRUD app.
>But even if you were right, the real barrier to building a Reddit clone is getting traction.
True, but not relevant to my point, which is about the difficulty of cloning Reddit coding-wise, not business wise, and whether it's or isn't any great feat for someone using AI to do it.
This is, like, not the industry's first run-in with "this makes you 10x more productive!"
Anyone could insert themselves AI or not. Anyone could post any number of likes.
This isn't a Reddit clone. This is Reddit written by Highschoolers.
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.
