[simias]

What if each subreddit was an independent forum? What if each youtube channel was a blog hosted on potentially a whole bunch of different hosts? If reddit is so much better than the alternatives what are you doing on HN instead of /r/programming or similar?

The only thing you'd lose is the unified user profile but we have the tools to have distributed identities (oauth and friends). Before the era of social networks having mililon of forums for niche topics was common. Now you just create a subreddit instead.

Want to talk about knitting? Search for "knitting discussion online". Here are a few results: https://www.houzz.com/discussions/knitting-and-crocheting https://crochettalk.com/ http://www.knittingparadise.com/active-topic-list

Each site does not contain "everything I want" but each fills a particular niche. The fact that you actually have to search for them to find them can actually be seen as a bonus, you don't have the sort of "cross-contamination" you can observe on reddit when a community is suddenly popular enough to propelled into the frontpage and you have an influx of people who overrun your community and destroy its "culture".

Should reddit disappear tomorrow I'm sure we'll do just fine. Youtube is more complex because video hosting is much more demanding in terms of resources.