Build your own Reddit with Claude Code

A community forum with voting: communities with their own posts, upvotes and downvotes, nested comment threads and more.

1–2 weeksMore screens, accounts and a backend

The Claude Code prompt

Build my own take on Reddit: a community forum with voting. Give it an original name, logo, colours and copy, and do not use Reddit's name, branding or assets.

Version one should have:
- Communities with their own posts
- Upvotes and downvotes
- Nested comment threads
- Hot, new and top sorting
- Moderator tools

The hard part: Ranking and nested comments. Use a hot score formula and load comment trees with recursive queries.

How to build it:
1. Read this folder first. If it is empty, set up Next.js (App Router, TypeScript, Tailwind) with Postgres through Prisma or Supabase, and Supabase Auth or Auth.js for sign-in. Write a short PLAN.md with the data model, screens, third-party services and what you are leaving out of version one.
2. Build the core loop end to end before anything else: communities with their own posts, working with real data saved to the database.
3. Add the rest of the features one at a time, and seed realistic demo data so every screen looks alive.
4. Keep API keys in environment variables, and put any paid service behind a small interface with a local stub, so the app runs on a fresh machine without accounts.
5. Run it, click through every screen on desktop and mobile widths, fix what breaks, and finish with a summary of what works, what is stubbed and how to deploy it.

Paste it into Claude Code in an empty folder. It plans first, so read PLAN.md and steer before it starts building.

Version one

  • Communities with their own posts
  • Upvotes and downvotes
  • Nested comment threads
  • Hot, new and top sorting
  • Moderator tools

The hard part

Ranking and nested comments. Use a hot score formula and load comment trees with recursive queries.

Make it yours: a niche Reddit ignores, an original name and brand, and one feature it does badly done well.

More to build

More in Social · Every build idea