Hivemind: Guess What Reddit Said

Family Feud, but the survey is Reddit itself. Guess what the hivemind actually answered on today's hottest thread — 3 strikes, upvote-weighted points, a fresh round every day.

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Inspiration

Every big AskReddit thread is secretly a survey: thousands of people answer a question and upvotes rank the results. We realized that's the exact data shape of Family Feud — except no game show could ever poll 40,000 people a day. Reddit already does. Hivemind turns that daily ritual into a game you can only play here, because the answer board is the community.

What it does

Each round, Hivemind grabs a hot question thread from r/AskReddit, distills its top comments into 6 hidden answers, and weights each answer's points by its real upvote share. You get 3 strikes to guess what Reddit actually said.

Typo-tolerant fuzzy matching means "dentists", "the dentist", and even "dentst" all count. Find an answer and its real comment text flips open with its point value; strike out and the full board reveals. Your score lands on the per-post leaderboard, and a Wordle-style emoji grid (🟧🟧⬛⬛⬛⬛ ❌) is one tap from the comments — where the real game begins: arguing about what should have been on the board.

A scheduler posts a fresh round every day, and mods can spawn rounds on demand from the subreddit menu. No two rounds are ever the same, because the source material is live Reddit.

The hook

  • Daily loop — one new round per day, auto-posted. Streak-friendly, low commitment, high return rate.
  • Community as content — every answer is a real comment by a real redditor from a thread trending right now. The game writes itself, forever, for free.
  • Comment-section virality — shareable emoji results and "how was X not on the board?!" arguments drive the comments, which push the post up the feed, which recruits the next wave of players.

How we built it

Devvit Web (v0.13.7) with React 19 + Tailwind on the client and a Hono server. The server uses the Devvit Reddit API to scan hot posts for question-shaped titles, pulls top comments, dedupes near-identical answers by keyword signature, and normalizes upvotes into Family-Feud-style points. Rounds, per-player state, and leaderboards live in Redis (sorted sets for ranking). Guess matching is a shared client/server module: stopword filtering, crude stemming, and edit-distance-1 typo tolerance.

Challenges we ran into

  • Turning free-text comments into guessable "survey answers": aggressive stopword and filler-word filtering plus keyword-signature dedup so "The dentist" and "definitely the dentist lol" don't take two slots.
  • Fair scoring from wildly skewed upvote distributions — normalized to a 100-point pool with a floor so the sixth answer is still worth guessing.
  • Tuning one guess box to feel fair: plurals and typos should hit, but generic words ("hate", "definitely") can't be allowed to sweep the board.

Accomplishments we're proud of

A game that generates its own content indefinitely from live Reddit, with zero manual authoring — and a hook that turns every round into a comment-section debate.

What's next for Hivemind

Home-subreddit mode (play against your own community's threads), streaks and flair rewards, subreddit-vs-subreddit weekly showdowns, and a "submit your answer" phase so future boards are built from players themselves.

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