I'm thinking something like retool (frontend) and firebase (backend) combo. Is that that route I should take?
EDIT: Just to give some more context as people were asking: The features I'm looking to have are: Nothing really special but here are some requirements.
1. Allow people to login using LinkedIn, Twitter, or Gmail. 2FA auth. 2. Allow people to post news articles, comment on others, upvote, downvote. - Have nested comments 3. Scan for NSFW images and bad words to hide them. 4. Admin tasks: remove, block, throttle spam (as much as possible) 5. Have people and company profile page (similar to what you see on Twitter) - Have some special sections on those profile pages to allow folks to have links (CTAs) to things they care about.
6. Verify people for authenticity. --- Engage folks --- 1. Show Trending topics, send emails, send other notifications to get people to engage.
--- business side--- Allow companies/people to login, pay and ad display ads to show up on different places on the app.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/nocode/comments/oxsaet/i_built_a_re...
You're talking about two fundamentally very different products with very different usage patterns. It would be helpful to hear what features you are looking for from each product and how you expect users to interact with it.
"I built a Reddit clone in 2 weeks using Bubble: nocode"
It has basically everything you're requesting - both front-end and back-end, image uploads, authentication (and OAuth login via Twitter, Google, etc.), user plans/subscriptions, Stripe integration, cross-platform support with Apple Pay and Google Pay, push notifications, emails, documentation, unit tests, etc. And after some minor setup, it's immediately ready for you to publish to app stores if you wish to do so, with thorough step-by-step instructions on how to set it all up.
I should also note that it isn't a framework, so you're not locked into learning some specific way of doing things. It assembles full-stack codebases using tools and libraries most developers are already familiar with, so you'll have full control over everything. It is designed for teams, startups, and indie devs to quickly build and scale.
You'd still need to implement custom functionality like voting and reposting yourself, however.
Disclaimer: I'm the creator of Molecule.dev.
At what scale?
It’s pretty easy to do the Reddit MVP but all the stuff they added later on is a major project. That includes their gamification, avatars, spam code, moderation, wiki, chat, private forums, etc.
As for Twitter, the east part is making it. The hard part is making the backend scale. Even Twitter inc. itself took months to make it scale (remember the “fail whale”?).
You need a team (multiple teams, really) of developers to build and maintain the set of functionality on either Twitter or Reddit.
One 10x dev could probably get something going to kickstart fundraising, but to reach true feature parity, you’re talking multiple teams of engineers executing months (if not years) of work.
It has all the features you are looking for in a content aggregator/curation tool (and some more).
The features you are asking for are complex. Both Twitter and Reddit have spent years iterating with large development teams to get these features. And I don't think nocode is ready yet for this complexity.
Even in "highcode" environments these things are not trivial to set up. Have a look at some open source twitter/reddit clone codebases (which typically not even touch payments) and see how complex they are. Now imagine each of these components needs some more complexity on top to make it configurable through "nocode" platforms.