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Today I learned that Reddit has a subreddit called /r/SomebodyMakeThis/ where people propose ideas for software, and readers often reply with existing solutions.

For instance, http://www.reddit.com/r/SomebodyMakeThis/comments/2be7sc/smt_a_maps_overlay_google_or_otherwise_that_will/ looks similar to our Measure distances and areas of geometric shapes.

Differences:

  • Impossible to add screenshots/images
  • Covers hardware and data as well
  • Different threading/ranking algorithms

Should we try to interact with them (which might get us banned by admins) or just let them live their lives?

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  • define interact. I have an answer typed out that covers cross posting, advertising and... I'm not sure if I'm over-covering stuff ;p – Journeyman Geek Jul 24 '14 at 3:54
  • Yes, cross posting, advertising, fighting to death, uniting in a world of love and peace, any kind of interaction :-) – Nicolas Raoul Mod Jul 24 '14 at 3:57
  • If we were to do this, I would message the mods first, try to come up with a plan rather than invade their subreddit – aman207 Jul 24 '14 at 4:32
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As a moderator - I'm fine with using them as a source, as long as the answers meet our quality guidelines. Nearly all my answers are from tools I have found around various parts of the internet. We do cover a much smaller scope than them and hopefully are less noisy.

I would discourage advertising there, naturally since some reddits are sensitive about it. If folk there find/reference us, thats cool though. If you hang out there, are part of the community and it comes up... awesome. Just don't do anything that can be seen as spamming, astroturfing, or worse... ;p

I have a few concerns as a user.

Firstly - is it powergaming? If someone is consistantly posting answers from there, its probably going to annoy some folk. Once again, quality would sort this out. Likewise, if people here post there, we need to respect their space.

Secondly, the main reason other sites dislike software requests - will this software be supported? I'd grant that I've asked questions on unsupported software, but it may suck to find an older hobbyist project has one version and was never updated, or worse, the site is gone.

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