We've been working on Rhyme.com for two years. We talked about it for two years before that. We wrote it off probably a dozen times along the way because starting a social media platform is the ultimate entrepreneur joke (it's the cold start problem on steroids, the marketplace effect is brutal, and we don't have a million dollar marketing budget to throw at it). So far we're totally bootstrapped.

We posted our waitlist on one subreddit last week and got a little over 1,000 signups in 24 hours. In the grand scheme of social media that's not a huge number but it was more than enough to validate that people actually want what we're building.

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The project is called Rhyme. It's a topic-first social platform...the closest comparison is Reddit, though weuti don't really consider it a Reddit alternative and it's structurally pretty different. I'll spare you the full feature pitch (it's on the site if you're curious) but a few of the decisions that took us the longest to land on:

* One canonical topic per subject. We generate the topic taxonomy ourselves (~88,000 topics so far) instead of letting whoever showed up first own a community. Topics are hierarchical so a post about Patrick Mahomes lives in Kansas City Chiefs, but also bubbles up into AFC West and NFL.

* No public like counts. The platform doesn't reward performing.

* Global moderation instead of volunteer mods. We watched too many communities get strangled by a single biased or checked-out moderator.

* Optional phone OR ID verification. And this is the part I'm excited about...anyone can filter their feed to only show posts/comments from verified users when they want to. You're verifying for everyone else's benefit, not your own.

* Powerful filters to show or hide categories (tones? vibes?) like humor, politics, drama, education, etc.

The thing I wanted to actually talk about here, though, is the stuff I don't have figured out, because this is the entrepreneur sub, and I'd rather hear from people than pitch at them.

**Monetization.** We don't want to sell out the platform. The whole point is that we're not beholden to investors trying to wring engagement out of users at the cost of their wellbeing. The good-faith answer right now is something like the cosmetics-and-optional-subscription route a lot of games take. Maybe a small badge that says "hey, this person chips in to keep the lights on." We have enough runway to see if the platform pops, but I don't have a clean answer for the long-term economics yet.

**Not reinventing the wheel.** One thing we tried hard to avoid is the trap I see constantly in tabletop games and trading card games: someone enters an established space and feels they have to differentiate by renaming standard concepts. Something well-known like "draw a card" becomes "gather a single resource." It's exhausting and Reddit alternatives do the same thing. Most of the ones that pop up are carbon copies that think the problem with Reddit is the name on the door, and if they just clone it with looser rules people will come in droves. We tried to identify what's actually broken and fix those specific things, and leave alone the things that work.

**Coexistence over conquest.** I don't think we need to kill any platform to win. I think we're at a societal breaking point where people want task-specific tools again...you see it with people carrying iPods and vintage digital cameras, and you can feel it in how exhausted everyone is with platforms trying to do everything. If someone wants short-form video, great, there are five platforms for that. If they want to find their family, Facebook still exists. If they want actual constructive conversation about things they care about, that's the lane we're trying to occupy.

The deeper why, if you'll indulge me for a second: we started noticing the rot from social media spilling into real life. People are ruder in person. Customer service interactions are nastier. There's this weird collective acceptance that "online" and "real life" are separate moral universes and we're watching that wall collapse in real time. The current platforms have zero incentive to fix it because outrage is engagement and engagement is the metric. We're not beholden to that, so we're trying something different.

Anyway. One day in. 1,000 signups. Two years of work. A hundred unanswered questions. I'll keep posting updates here for accountability if nothing else.

If anyone has thoughts, especially on monetization that doesn't compromise the thing, I'm all ears. And if you want to grab a spot on the waitlist, it's at Rhyme.com.

Thanks for reading!

First of all, thank you! Over 1,000 of you joined the Rhyme.com waitlist in the first 24 hours after we announced, and the feedback was something like 99.9% positive. The suggestions have been thoughtful and the whole response affirmed two things for our team: that this is a platform people actually want, and that the hours we've spent building it have been time well spent. Please keep the feedback and suggestions coming.

With that out of the way, We want to start a series of posts walking through the different pieces of Rhyme. The goal is to explain what each part does, why we built it that way, and open the door to feedback on each individual area during this beta period. Today's post is about the most foundational piece: topics, and how posting actually works.

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Topics are created by the platform, not by users

This is probably the single biggest structural difference between Rhyme and other platforms, so it's worth leading with: on Rhyme, topics exist at the platform level. We create them, not users.

Right now, the platform has roughly 88,000 topics. We bootstrapped that initial layer largely from Wikipedia and Wikidata, which was admittedly a bit of a nightmare on our end! But that's our problem, not yours, and the result is that it's now genuinely rare for someone to want to discuss something and find that no topic exists for it today.

The system can also get pretty granular. There's a topic for Apple. There's a topic for AirPods. There's a topic for AirPods Max. The same logic applies across every subject area.

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A common question we wrestled with internally was: how granular do we go? The rule of thumb we landed on was basically: do people talk about this thing on its own? Do people talk about AirPods? Yes. Do people talk about AirPods Max specifically? Yes. Do people talk about the specific battery inside the AirPods Max? No. That's where we stop. Silly example, but it's the logic.

For the genuinely niche stuff that doesn't deserve its own topic but does come up occasionally…like AirPods Max cases, AirPods Max skins, that kind of thing…we do have a tagging system that makes them surfaceable when someone needs them. I'll save the details for a future post.

Hierarchy: topics live in a tree

The other thing to know upfront is that topics aren't a flat list, they live in a multidirectional tree with parents, children, and siblings.

Apple sits under Technology. Under Apple, you've got macOS, iPhone, iPad, Apple Vision Pro, Final Cut, Logic, and so on. Apple's siblings (same level in the tree) might be Microsoft, Dell, Sony, and other companies of similar scope. We're actively refining the system that decides which siblings to surface most prominently (because "most relevant sibling" is a fuzzy concept), but there's a detailed map view you can click into to explore the tree yourself.

We’re going to dedicate a whole post to hierarchy later, because it has some interesting downstream effects on how posts surface. For now, just know: it's a tree, and the tree matters.

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How posting works

You can create a post from anywhere on Rhyme. There's a "new post" button on your homepage, on every topic page, and on every thread. The first thing the system notes is where you were when you hit that button, which becomes useful later when a post's intent is ambiguous.

From there it's familiar: you write a title, a description, optionally share a link or image, hit submit. While you're typing, the algorithm is quietly working in the background trying to figure out where this post belongs. It uses a bunch of signals like the content of the post itself, where you started writing it, what topics you've been viewing recently, your posting history, and so on.

Here's where it gets interesting: a single post can live in multiple topics simultaneously.

Say you write:

"I've been a longtime Apple fan and I really love macOS, but lately I've been considering switching to Linux. Anyone been down this path who can offer recommendations?"

The algorithm reads that and figures out that the conversation is going to come primarily from the Linux community, but there's also going to be meaningful engagement from macOS and Apple folks. So the post gets assigned to Linux as its primary topic…and it also surfaces in macOS and Apple, just at lower visibility.

On top of that, hierarchy compounds the effect. If a post's primary topic is macOS, it also surfaces in Apple (the parent) less frequently, and in Technology (the grandparent) less frequently still. So one well-placed post can naturally reach the right audiences at the right intensities without you having to cross-post anywhere.

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Quick aside on something we get asked a lot: the system is very good at not being gamed. Old-school attempts to force a post into the "wrong" topic by stuffing it with irrelevant keywords just don't work. The algorithm is looking at intent and substance, not surface-level pattern matching. And an important note: the algorithm isn't acting as an arbiter of what you're allowed to say. It's making sure posts end up where they belong. There's a separate post coming on the broader analyzer, and I'll get into the "what does it actually decide" question there.

What happens when a topic doesn't exist yet

So what about new things? New products, new bands, new everything. Let's say the Clicks Communicator (a real, niche Android phone with a physical keyboard) launches tomorrow. You write a post:

"Anyone seen the Clicks Communicator? Big Android fan, was a big BlackBerry fan back in the day, curious if this seems viable and whether you'd buy one."

The algorithm reads it and immediately identifies that you're talking about Android, a little about BlackBerry, and a thing called the Clicks Communicator. Android and BlackBerry both have topics. Clicks Communicator doesn't…yet. But the algorithm determines pretty quickly that this is a real product people are going to want to discuss, so it goes off and does its homework. It figures out what the Clicks Communicator is, generates a topic for it, grabs an appropriate image, writes a description, and slots it into the hierarchy (probably under cell phones, with Android and BlackBerry as siblings). Your post then lives primarily under the new Clicks Communicator topic, and also surfaces in Android and BlackBerry because it's relevant there too. All of that happens in the time it takes to submit a post.

A natural follow-up worry: won't this generate a million junk topics? In practice, no. The algorithm is pretty conservative about whether something is actually a thing people will discuss, and it almost always gets that right. Our incentives lean toward generosity here. Server resources for this are effectively unlimited on our side, and because of how hierarchy and multi-topic posting work, an unused niche topic doesn't hurt anyone. The post about it still surfaces in the broader topics it relates to, so conversations don't die in empty rooms.

Community input on topics

Topics aren't fully locked once they exist. There's a flagging system, and "flag" here doesn't mean "report for badness," it's more general than that. You can flag a topic to say "this description is inaccurate" or "this image is wrong/low-quality" or basically "something here needs attention." When enough flags accumulate (the threshold scales depending on topic size/age/engagement/etc), it gets reviewed and corrected.

We're also actively experimenting with giving communities a bit more direct input on their topics. The example I keep coming back to: right now the Pop Music topic might really want a Michael Jackson avatar. We think there should be some way for that to happen organically without it being a free-for-all. We're prototyping things that look a bit like polls or proposals…someone with enough account history could propose a topic image change, which opens a submission window, then a voting window, then a result. Something like that. Probably rate-limited per account so it doesn't get abused. We're not committed to a specific design yet, and I'd genuinely love feedback on what people would want here.

"But what if I want to create my own topic?"

This is the question we've gotten the most, and there are two different answers depending on what you mean.

If you mean "I want to start a niche community where like-minded people can hang out away from the broader conversation", that's intentionally not how Rhyme works, and we want to be upfront about that. A point worth making clearly: Rhyme isn't trying to replace other platforms where this is the norm. Those platforms still exist and still do what they do. We're trying to occupy a different spot in the ecosystem.

The specific thing we're trying to do differently is this: when something happens in the world…like breaking news, a major release, a cultural moment…it currently gets discussed in 30 different corners of every platform, each with its own preexisting bias, each reinforcing whatever spin its members already agreed on. We think that's part of why public conversation feels broken right now. Rhyme's bet is that there's value in everyone showing up to the same table for a given subject and working it out together. Taylor Swift drops a new album? It gets discussed in the Taylor Swift topic. Not separately in "Taylor Swift Lovers" and "Taylor Swift Haters." Fans and skeptics are both welcome; they're just expected to actually talk to each other rather than past each other.

That's a real tradeoff, and we understand it's not for everyone. If what you love about other platforms is the ability to carve out a small, like-minded space, Rhyme isn't trying to take that from you, it's just not what Rhyme is for. Those other platforms aren't going anywhere.

If you mean "I'm starting a company/band/project and I want a topic to exist for it", that's something we want to make easy, and we're actively building it right now. The plan is a simple submission form: tell us what it is, why it should exist, and we'll review it quickly. Because new genuine person/place/thing topics cost us essentially nothing and add real value, we expect to approve the vast majority of these. The reason we don't just let the algorithm do it on the fly for these cases is that for a truly new startup, there's no public information for the algorithm to draw on yet, so it'll (correctly) pass on auto-creating the topic. The submission form bridges that gap.

And worth noting: the platform isn't a spam-and-promotion free-for-all (there's a whole separate conversation coming on how we keep that from happening), but it also isn't hostile to people building things. If you made a great piece of screen recording software, posted about it, and it's genuinely interesting, today it's going to surface in macOS, in Video Editing, in Technology, in the places where people would want to know about it. That's kind of the point.

Wrapping up

That's topics in a nutshell. I've left plenty out like hierarchy mechanics, the analyzer, moderation, verification, feed filtering…and each of those is getting its own post in the coming weeks.

If you're on the waitlist, hang tight. We're letting more people in every day. If you're not on it yet and any of this sounds interesting, Rhyme.com is the place.

The single best thing you can do to help right now is spread the word. We'll talk again soon.

Happy Monday!

Hi. I'm on the team that is building Rhyme.

Rhyme is a topic-first social media platform, but instead of individual communities owned by whoever got there first, we maintain the topic taxonomy ourselves (about 88,000 topics so far), hierarchically organized so a post about Patrick Mahomes lives in Kansas City Chiefs, but also appears upward in AFC West, and eventually NFL or Football. One canonical room per subject (no duplicate communities to sift through).

A few other specific decisions/differentiation:

• One topic per subject.
• Topic hierarchy (posts often appear, less frequently, in parent topics)
• Posts can and often do appear under multiple topics (no need to cross-post, better visibility).
• No public "likes" numbers. The platform doesn’t reward performing.
• Global moderation (no volunteer mods with widely varying rules/policies/interests).
• OPTIONAL verification (anyone can filter by verification tiers in more serious threads/topics if/as needed).
• Powerful filters - the ability to show or hide specific things (humor, drama, politics, education, etc).

I will gladly answer any questions and I'd love to hear ideas/suggestions. The Why Rhyme link on the website explains a bit more in detail.

https://Rhyme.com

Thanks for reading!

This week, we’re celebrating small businesses and the communities that support them across Reddit! Drop a comment below and shout out a small business you love. Bonus points if the business is on Reddit...feel free to tag their username so they can see the love!

If you’re a small business owner in this community, we’d love to hear from you. Which other small businesses here do you think are really getting it right? What are they doing that makes them stand out, and what can other businesses learn from them?

Hello! I'm looking for a game that has enough depth that I can get lost in it. Fallout/Skyrim/Fable come to mind, but I'm specifically looking for something SNES/GBA-ish (to play on a TrimUI). I really want to feel like I'm a part of whatever tiny universe.

I'm going to contradict myself and say I'm not a HUGE story guy so I'd prefer the depth to be on the gameplay side just as much as the story.

Maybe another way to describe it is I'm looking for a game that isn't super repetitive (less "do this puzzle 50 different times in 50 different locations and you win the game" and more "you have reasons to do these things and decisions to make to get there")

I know this is word salad. Just curious if anything comes to mind based on this bad description. Thanks!

Requesting r/rhyme - To be paired with a new startup we're launching, Rhyme.com

I understand that r/rhyme is banned and I'm unsure the reason (rule 6), but hoping it was not banned for violating content and can be repurposed.