[hombre_fatal]

What almost every comment about Voat here misses though is that when you start a competitor clone to an incumbent like Voat did, there’s literally zero reason for most people to join. The only people who have an incentive are people banned from the incumbent.

You see this all the time. As a kid I posted on a forum Opa-Ages that was just weirdos banned from Gaming-Ages (NeoGAF).

This isn’t so much about free speech and moderation. You also need to answer the question of how to compete with Reddit with these facts in mind.

The only people who ever had reason to use Voat were those with unsavory opinions. Ok, you’ve banned all of your users. Now what?

So, all the times you’ve said this before, did you ever pitch a solution?

[andrewflnr]

There's no "solution", just like there's no "solution" to "politics". Everyone just has to keep trying really hard all the time so we don't drown in shit. That's it, until the lights go out for good.

As for the next step, it looks less like starting a reddit competitor and more like building individual, independent communities that can stand or (more likely) fall apart from any others.

[hombre_fatal]

Yeah, it's hard for me to envision what the next iteration on Reddit could be. Maybe there isn't one and instead we're seeing a resurgence of forum silos again that's winning back the mainstream.

For example, I was pleasantly surprised to see Discourse have so much success and high profile roll outs (like Boing Boing and Blizzard). It turns out that everyone was ready for a modern revitalization of the forum experience, not that forums were doomed.

I think I'd liken it to the explosion of Slack/Discord popularity. It would have been a mistake to look at the slow death of IRC and conclude "I guess people don't like chatting anymore."

[corobo]

> hard for me to envision what the next iteration on Reddit could be

You mention it in your post. It's Discord. We're looping back to IRC. Give forums another 5 years or so

[mrguyorama]

"Discourse" and "Discord" are two different products. One a slack like chat app for gaming, the other is a forum software produced by that guy from stack overflow

[corobo]

Aye, the parent mentioned both. I don't think discourse looks much like IRC but to confirm I did mean to type discord, the voice chatty one.

Forums (Discourse) are probably next up when we remember forums have great SEO benefits and discord none

[Joseph-Stalin]

discord and twitter, everything is just a messy ocean of piss imo, discord is not an iteration on reddit, maybe some people prefer discord to reddit but it is far from a replacement. It's a big JS-heavy chatroom (almost like new reddit...).

[andrewflnr]

Hmm. Ok, if we're agreed on that, maybe don't use "did you ever pitch a solution?" as a putdown.

[mariusor]

> So, all the times you’ve said this before, did you ever pitch a solution?

The solution is to attract small communities off reddit. There are countless decent communities on reddit that have issues with the vast majority of the website outside their niche interest. If each of these small communities will have their own little place to discuss and share ideas without having the Damocles sword of the larger reddit assholery and bad design over their heads, I feel like there's a chance they'll move to a different platform.

I am planning such an alternative to reddit that targets these small communities. I hope it will actually be useful to people.

[Vinnl]

> The only people who have an incentive are people banned from the incumbent.

Other groups might be people who feel harassed by people who aren't banned from the incumbent. For example, I think Mastodon saw early large influxes of LGBT users who were getting tired of Twitter's lack of moderation.

(Though of course, Mastodon has seen other influxes as well that might have helped it get over a specific niche - IIRC many Japanese who had different ideas about what is tolerable than Western platforms, and of course techies enthusiastic about federation.)

[tootie]

Not necessarily. Reddit was riding the coattails of Digg for a long time until Digg actively alienated it's user base with a redesign. Also, MySpace losing to Facebook.